Nevela Williams
Credit: Valerie Smith.
By Colin Wolf and Valerie Smith
The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement announced today that it is investigating a local death as a homicide.
Syriah Henderson, a 29-year-old Black woman and mother of three, was found hanging from a tree behind a St. Petersburg Dollar Tree on July 1, 2026.
The St. Petersburg Police Department and medical examiner said the death was a suicide, stating there were no injuries inconsistent with suicide or signs of a struggle.
The Uhuru Movement—a socialist Black nationalist group that has been headquartered in St. Petersburg since 1972—said it is suspicious of the police department’s findings.
Henderson’s mother, Nevela Williams, said she wasn’t satisfied with the results of the investigation at a press conference at the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg this morning.
Williams said she did some investigating of her own.
“I even questioned the people that work at the churches across there,” she told the media. “They said they have a camera. Why didn’t the detectives go over and get that camera? Why didn’t they go to the neighbors’ houses, knock on the door for footage? We’re in the 2000s now, we all have some kind of surveillance somewhere.”
The St. Petersburg branch of the NAACP made a social media post in July saying the police department had taken appropriate investigative actions and warned of spreading misinformation.
The police department told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that Henderson had a history of mental health issues involving self-harm. They said they showed Williams the case photos and the site of the incident to walk her through the findings.
Still, Chimurenga Waller with the Uhuru Movement said he’ll be leading an investigation, starting with what he thinks the police department missed:
“This is very baffling to us. It’s very baffling that the police would immediately say it’s suicide. Then, five days later, they send a detective and say, ‘Now go find out if it was actually a suicide.’ That doesn’t make any sense. They should have been investigating it as a homicide from the beginning.”
Waller said he’ll track down witnesses—including someone he said left the scene on bike after alerting employees to Henderson’s body—review additional surveillance footage, and ask for DNA testing.
He said he’s still waiting on the autopsy report.
Williams remembered her daughter as a happy person who was homeless “by choice” and had worked to overcome her struggles.
“She did some bad things, turned it around, and she even got herself to a drug program and all of that,” Williams said. “She wanted everything focused on [her daughter] because it was her first time ever being a real mom, and that’s all she wanted. And she didn’t get a chance to do that.”
Three members of the Uhuru Movement were convicted of conspiracy in 2024 after initially being charged with being unregistered foreign agents of Russia. Prosecutors said they were interfering with elections on behalf of a foreign government.
The three got no jail time.