PORT GIBSON — Federal investigators hope a team of behavioral analysts from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., will be able to provide information that may help agents determine what happened to Otis James Byrd.

Lucas said FBI agents were in the county Sunday and returned Monday to collect further evidence in the case. He said a planned peaceful protest for justice failed to materialize Monday after only a few people showed up for the event at the Claiborne County Courthouse, stayed a short period and then left.

“I don’t see what they had to be protesting about,” he said. “The autopsy report has not been released, so we still don’t know if his death was a suicide or a homicide. Whatever the decision, someone ain’t going to be happy.”

He said no date had been set for the autopsy report’s release, but speculated it could be Wednesday or Thursday. He said, however, he had not seen any signs that showed Byrd’s death was the result of a hate crime. “The autopsy will tell us,” he said.

“What we have is a man who is dead, and his death is being investigated,” he said. “We don’t have racial problems in Claiborne County. The black and white communities get along. This isn’t 1965, this is 2015.”

FBI Special Agent in Charge Donald Alway said Saturday the analysts, commonly known as “profilers,” would be talking with Byrd’s family about him.

“We’re trying to learn who Mr. Byrd was,” Claiborne County Sheriff Marvin Lucas said.

“This is a man who spent 26 years in prison,” he said, referring to Byrd’s capital murder conviction in 1980. He was paroled in 2006.

“Spending 26 years in prison will change you as a person,” he said. “Times change, and you change. He was not the same person when he got out that his family knew before he went to prison. When he came out in 2006, he was a different man. We need to know what he was doing, where he went, who his friends were; where did he like to go.”

Byrd, 54, of Port Gibson, was found Thursday by Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks agents hanging by a bed sheet from a tree limb behind the home he rented on Rodney Road. He had been reported missing since early March. Authorities have not determined whether the death was suicide or a homicide.

His body will be cremated and a memorial service will be Friday.

State NAACP officials have called for a federal probe into Byrd’s death, and the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the United States Attorney’s office, as well as the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, are investigating the hanging.

“Our biggest interest in Mississippi, anytime we find anyone hanging from a tree is to determine that it is not a result of a racial hate crime. So we are pleased that the federal authorities are here working with local authorities to determine a true cause of death,” Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson said Friday.

Byrd was last seen March 8, when a friend dropped him off at Riverwalk Casino, Vicksburg Police Chief Walter Armstrong said.