On August 29, 2014, at age 17, he was found dead, hanging from the frame of a swing set in the center of a mobile home community.
[1] The death was initially declared a suicide by North Carolina's Chief Medical Examiner, but Lacy's family believed that he had been lynched.
[1] In June 2016, the conclusion of the FBI investigation was announced, having found "no evidence to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges".
[3] The death of Lacy is the central event in a documentary on lynching in America, Always in Season, shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2019, where it won the special jury award for moral urgency.
Ed Pilkington wrote in The Guardian that the film "is both a homage to Lennon Lacy and a critique of America’s rotten racial core, weaving the two together through an exploration of blurred memory, denial, obfuscation, betrayal and loss.