Belle Glade, Fla. ? A black man who was found hanging from a tree by a bed sheet committed suicide, a judge ruled Tuesday after a rare public inquest prompted by rumors that the death was a lynching.

Circuit Judge Harold Cohen said police and medical examiner reports showed no signs of a struggle or a crime before the May death of Feraris “Ray” Golden, 32.

“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 if he felt the death was suspicious.

Although some family members admit they now see suicide as “possible,” the ruling failed to quell suspicions among blacks in this rural, largely segregated town of 15,000, where about half of the residents are black and many are poor.

“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 the comments of others streaming out of the packed courtroom.

Smith and others say they do not trust the state’s evidence presented during the two-day hearing, including wall-size pictures of Golden’s dead body and police videotape footage revealing the body dangling from a noose, his arms swaying at his sides.

Experts testified Golden was likely depressed and a police officer’s statement indicated his grandmother initially said Golden told her, “Nobody loves me. I’m going to kill myself.”

Golden was an alcoholic, and when he died, he had traces of cocaine in his system and a blood-alcohol level of 0.334 percent.

NAACP leaders, who called for the inquest, likened the proceedings to a charade aimed only at proving police conclusions that Golden took his own life, rather than examining the rampant rumors that he was lynched, possibly because he was dating a white policeman’s daughter.

Bernice Golden, right, the mother of Feraris Ray Golden, awaits the outcome of an inquest into her son's death alongside her common-law husband, Henry Drummer, at the West County Courthouse in Belle Glade, Fla. Feraris Golden, who was found hanging from a tree, committed suicide, Circuit Judge Harold Cohen ruled Tuesday after a rare public inquest.

But Assistant State Atty. Doug Fulton defended the state’s conclusion that Golden committed suicide, replaying the tape of the 911 call placed by Golden’s stepfather, Henry Drummer.

“It seems like somebody hung himself in the tree,” Drummer said in the tape.

Lynchings reached their peak in the United States from the end of the Civil War until 1902, numbering more than 100 each year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. No lynching deaths have been documented for more than two decades, the center said.