Noose Found Hanging From Tree in Peachtree City Neighborhood

A Peachtree City woman climbed a magnolia tree and cut down what she described as a noose after finding it hanging prominently in the green space of the Centennial neighborhood while walking with her two-year-old daughter September 2.

Nhu Quynh Lee said she encountered the rope during an afternoon walk in the neighborhood where she has lived since 2020.

“It was in the middle of the green space, front and center, under the magnolia tree, and it was not hard to miss,” Lee said.

She had driven her golf cart through the same area that morning and did not notice it then.

“But then in the afternoon, I saw it and was appalled,” Lee said. “And as soon as I saw it, I leaped into action. I was like, I don’t want this to hurt anyone else.”

Lee climbed the tree and initially tried to untangle the rope.

“I tried to like untangle the knots, but they were so hard,” she said.

While Lee was in the tree, another neighbor approached. Lee said the woman told her she had already seen the noose but had been so saddened by it that she walked past it.

When she returned and saw Lee trying to remove it, the neighbor offered to get a box cutter.

“She was like, ‘Do you need a box cutter?’” Lee said. “And then they ran to their house and got it, and we cut it down.”

The neighbor, who is Black, was accompanied by her daughter.

“She came with her daughter, and her daughter just seemed so sad when they saw it too,” Lee said.

Lee gave the removed rope to the woman to dispose of.

“I just felt like it was right because it was a Black woman, and she was so sad by it,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, you throw this away.’”

There is no information at this point about who tied the noose or why.

In an email to The Citizen, Lee said an anonymous neighbor had filed a police report and residents were trying to obtain footage from nearby Ring cameras.

Lee also posted about the incident on the neighborhood Facebook page. She said other residents responded that a rope had been hanging from the tree for approximately a year, but she understood the noose configuration itself to be new.

“I know the rope there was there for about a year after I posted it on the Facebook,” Lee said. “Some people were talking about the rope being there for a year, but the noose was a new thing.”

Lee said children frequently climb the tree, and initially she considered whether the rope might have been connected to that activity.

“We see kids climbing that tree all the time, and at first, I thought innocently too that, oh, they were using it to climb the tree,” Lee said. “But then I looked at the ties, and I was like, these are like nautical ties. Like, what kid knows how to do this?”

In her email, Lee similarly described what she saw as “nautical rope ties” and wrote, “Who ever did it knew exactly what they were doing.”

Lee said the sight of a noose carried a meaning that went far beyond a rope in a tree.

“It represents intimidation, a painful history of racism, and I just couldn’t believe I saw it in present day,” she said.

Lee is Vietnamese and came to the United States as a refugee from Thailand when she was two years old. She grew up in Morrow before later living in Atlanta and moving to Peachtree City in 2020.

“It was super diverse. I was around Black people all the time, so seeing that really just hurt me on a deeper level because I grew up with these people,” Lee said. “It just hurt me so bad to the core to see that.”

Her two-year-old daughter was with her when she found the noose.

“I want her to be raised in the world that Martin Luther King dreamed for us and hoped for us,” Lee said. “Not this.”