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Associated PressThe judge says there is no evidence a Belle Glade black man found hanging from a tree was murdered.
BELLE GLADE - A judge ruled Tuesday that a black man found hanging by the neck from a tree committed suicide. But skeptics remain in this rural community who say they can't believe Feraris "Ray" Golden hanged himself on a rainy May night.
Circuit Judge Harold Cohen ruled Tuesday after a public inquest that the 32-year-old Golden could not have been lynched, as has been rumored. He said police and medical examiner reports showed no signs of a struggle or a crime before Golden's death.
"No fantasy or stretching the facts in the case as they now exist can change that. Depression killed Mr. Golden," said Cohen, who could have ordered an investigation had he felt the death was suspicious.
The ruling didn't break the divide in this largely segregated town of 15,000, where about half the residents are black.
Although some family members said they now see suicide as "possible," other relatives, friends and community leaders insisted they still have questions, including whether Golden's hands were tied, whether he was unconscious before his death and whether police officers tainted evidence when they drove onto the lawn and ran across it to cut Golden's body from a noose.
"There's nothing to change my mind, nothing to lead me to believe that he would do this to himself," said Jamila Smith, Golden's former sister-in-law, echoing comments of others streaming out of the packed courtroom.
Smith and others said they didn't trust the state's evidence presented during the two-day hearing. Not the pictures of Golden's body, clean of blood and bruises except for a large purple one around his neck. Not the videotape showing a police cruiser turning onto Golden's street and into his yard to reveal his body dangling from a noose - his arms clearly hanging at his sides. Not the testimony of experts who said Golden was likely depressed, or the statement by a police officer that Golden's grandmother initially said Golden told her, "Nobody loves me. I'm going to kill myself."
Smith and others believe in a conspiracy or a coverup - a belief that appears to come more from a decades-long mistrust of police and authority than from the facts in the case.
"From what I see, there really isn't any evidence" to support anything but suicide, Smith said after the ruling. "But everybody's very emotional over this. Everybody's just so upset. And my heart tells me that it was not suicide."
NAACP leaders, who called for the inquest, likened the proceedings to a charade, aimed only at bolstering the police conclusion that Golden took his own life and failing to examine rumors that he was lynched, possibly because he was dating a white police officer's daughter.
"Did we have an inquest or did we have what was comparable to a criminal trial and the defendant was the decedent?" Dan Paige, an attorney representing the family and the NAACP, asked the judge moments before his decision. "It shouldn't be a question of whether it was a suicide or a lynching. It should have been whether there's enough questions here to do a murder investigation."
Assistant State Attorney Doug Fulton defended the state's conclusion that Golden committed suicide, supported by the tape of the 911 call placed by Golden's stepfather, Henry Drummer.
"It seems like somebody hung himself in the tree," Drummer said on the tape.
The most significant revelation in the coroner's inquest came Monday from Golden's aunt, who said she recognized that the noose was made from a bedsheet taken from the home she shared with Golden and his grandmother.
"That means he got it out of his room and used it," Drummer told reporters Monday.
After Tuesday's ruling, Drummer said he now considered suicide as "possible" and believed the proceedings were "pretty much fair."
But civil rights leaders insisted all the evidence was not presented - despite Cohen's call to a packed courtroom to bring forth any testimony or evidence not yet presented.
Evidence presented on Monday by police, the medical examiner and mental health experts was left unchallenged.
That evidence showed Golden to be a troubled, divorced, unemployed father of four, who was behind in his child support payments and frequently joked that he would take his own life.
He was a habitual drinker, and when he died, he had traces of cocaine in his system and a blood alcohol level of 0.334 percent.
Despite the signs of a racial divide in opinions, Cohen said the case also shows progress in the community, pointing to the work done by an assistant state attorney, medical examiner, police officers and a psychologist - all of whom are black.
"A generation ago most of all of this would have been unthinkable almost anywhere in Florida," Cohen said.