News of hangings reopens family’s old wound

After he disappeared in 1993, New London man’s remains were found in 1995 near a noose in a tree

New London — Recent reports of Black men found hanging from trees in six states have reopened old wounds for the family of Jerry Lee, a 30-year-old father of four who disappeared from his sister’s house on Ridgeview Circle on March 1, 1993.

Despite police assurances they were conducting an extensive search, including a helicopter sweep of the area, door-to-door questioning of neighborhood residents and deployment of dogs to track Lee’s scent, it was a hiker who found what was left of his body more than two years later.

His skeletal remains, and his clothing, were discovered in April 1995, less than a half-mile from his sister’s home, in a wooded ravine about 250 feet off Hawthorne Drive, according to reports published in

The Day at the time. A noose hung from a nearby tree. The image of a noose evokes the horror of decades of lynchings of Black people in America as a tool of oppression and terror.

But suicide by hanging is tragically common among African American males, and in 1993, when Lee was living with his sister while struggling with a number of problems, suffocation, which includes asphyxiation, which occurs when a person dies by hanging, was the second leading cause of suicidal deaths among Black men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled Lee’s death a suicide. His surviving sisters, Tina Lee of Westbrook and Bonnie Pinnock of Colchester, said this week that they eventually accepted the ruling

so they could be at peace with his loss. But during interviews this past week, they both admitted that the possibility of foul play still haunts them.

On the day Lee went missing, Tina Lee’s daughter had come home to evidence that “somebody was cut really bad,” the sister said in a phone interview Thursday. The state had taken custody of Lee’s children and he was scheduled to appear in court that afternoon. He hadn’t been getting along with the new boyfriend of his children’s mother, according to Tina Lee.

Blood was splattered in a shower stall and tracked down two flights of stairs, to the basement, where a bloody blanket from the daughter’s room was found in the washing machine.

For two years, the family waited for word of Lee’s whereabouts, pressing New London police to continue searching for him and investigating themselves when receiving a tip that Lee had been spotted somewhere. Police administrators told The Day during that time that the investigation remained open and they were following up on every lead.

“I never seen a dog, never heard a helicopter, none of the stuff they said they were doing,” Tina Lee said during a phone interview Thursday.

Their brother Keith Lee, now deceased, told The Day at the time that police did not feel compelled to search for an unemployed Black man who recently had been arrested for violating a restraining order that prohibited him from contacting the mother of his children.

The Day reported on March 11, 1993, that police flew over the area in a grid pattern — north to south, and east to west — at an altitude of 400 feet in the Eagle 1 search and rescue helicopter. Pilot Richard Nigosanti speculated that if Lee was in the area’s remote ravines, he would have to be “covered over,” but it didn’t seem likely Lee would have walked that far, especially if he was injured.

Tina Lee said it was a 10-minute walk, along a stream, from her back door to the area where her brother was found. She would have liked to see the remains, the rope and the tree, but was not allowed near the scene.

“I was responsible for him, and when I went to the scene they shooed me away like I was nobody,” she remembered. “I needed to see him. I need some closure.”

Lee was found with the clothes his sister had bought him for the missed court appearance, and when police returned them, the key to her house and a picture of Lee’s children fell out of a pocket, Tina Lee said. In a 1994 interview, she said testing on the blood found in her house confirmed it was her brother’s.

Jerry Lee had been abused by his mother, a drug addict and alcoholic, according to Tina Lee, and police had been to the family home many times. According to a story in The Day archive, the mother, Eleanor Marie Lee, was charged with stabbing Lee, then 21, in the stomach during a family quarrel in April 1984.

The children hadn’t asked to be born into that family, Tina Lee said. Their father was Black, and their mother a Narragansett Indian. Tina Lee said she eventually returned to the scene of her brother’s death with a Narragansett chief to conduct a burial ceremony.

Now 62 years old and retired, with four grown children and 13 grandkids, Lee said she was upset for a long time about her brother’s tragic end. Born and raised in New London, she felt she had to move away.

“I just didn’t want to be there no more,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t get treated right. I couldn’t do more for my brother and I felt like as a sister I let him down.”

Recently, having heard of the discovery of nooses and of Black men hanging from trees in different parts of the country, she’s gone over and over her brother’s death again. She said race relations have only gotten worse, and she worries about what would happen to her own son, now 41, in an encounter with police. He tells her he would do what they told him to do, but she doesn’t think that would matter.

Jerry Lee’s oldest sister, Bonnie Pinnock, had left home at 16 and has long since resided in Colchester. She pulled out her brother’s death certificate this week, and read from it the medical examiner’s ruling that Jerry Lee died of asphyxia due to hanging, the conclusion that he “hung himself.”

“I think I’ve come to resolve it as he committed suicide,” Pinnock said. “That may not have been the case, but in order to give myself peace, that’s the way I feel about it.”

She said around the time her brother disappeared, a white man also went missing, and the case was handled differently than her brother’s case, though she didn’t remember all the details.

As for the new cases, “There needs to be an investigation done to find the truth,” she said. “Because we’ve experienced it. Is it suicide, or is it somebody that did that? I want to be sure the facts come out.”

Pinnock said she’s hesitant, but willing to be optimistic about the Black Lives Matter movement. She said young people recently organized a well-attended protest in her town, and that her 19-year-old daughter, who is headed to Fordham University in the fall, has strong feelings about the issue of race.