Waller County, Texas, District Attorney Elton Mathis said in a news conference Monday that the case would be treated “just as it would be in a murder investigation”.
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“The jailer looked through the window and observed Miss Bland hanging from her privacy partition in her cell”, said Capt Brian Cantrell of the Waller County Sheriff’s Office.
A Texas Rangers investigation into her death is being supervised by the FBI, Mathis told a news conference.
The death of a woman in a Texas jail cell, apparently by suicide, is being investigated as if it were murder.
“This investigation is still being treated just as it would be in a murder investigation”. But local church pastors say they and Bland’s relatives believe the case should be investigated by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Department of Justice.
“There are too many questions that still need to be resolved”, Mathis added. A video from a camera monitoring the hall outside her cell shows no one entered or left it between the time she last spoke with deputies through an intercom system, asking about making a phone call, and when her body was discovered about an hour later. Though she had posted a video to Facebook weeks before the arrest revealing that she was combating “a little bit of depression as well as PTSD”, her family says suicide wouldn’t make sense since she recently got a job at Prairie View A&M University.
Family members and friends insist Bland was looking forward to a new job at her former school and that she gave no indication she was in such an emotional state that she would kill herself.
Jail staff found Bland on July 13, three days after she was arrested for assaulting an officer during a traffic stop in Waller County, which is about 50 miles west of Houston. Following Bland’s death, he was placed on desk duty after officials found “violations of the department’s procedures regarding traffic stops” and the department’s “courtesy policy”, according to a statement. The woman is heard saying that she can’t “feel my arm” and that the trooper “slammed my f– head to the ground”.
Ms. Bland had proven herself as being dedicated to strengthening her community through protecting the rights of all people. Protesters prayer at rally outside the Waller County Courthouse after a march from the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, Friday July 17, 2015, to protest the death of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in…
A cellphone video posted online purporting to show part of Bland’s arrest shows an officer pinning a woman to the ground with one knee.
That police may have been involved in her death.
An initial autopsy report appeared to support sheriff’s officials’ account of what happened, but the family’s attorney has said they intend to have an expert perform a second autopsy. If the state trooper would’ve simply handed the young woman her ticket or warning and went about his day, there would have been no altercation, no arrest and Bland would very likely still be alive right now.
Mathis, the prosecutor, said: “Ms. Bland’s family does make valid points that she did have a lot of things going on in her life that were good”.
Mathis said the dashcam video is consistent with information the officer has provided about the traffic stop in Prairie View, Texas, though he said it shows only restricted views of the encounter.
At 9:07 a.m., Bland is found hanging.
The close timing of the two deaths under similar circumstances struck a chord with some social media users, who took to Twitter to share directives for what to do “if I die in police custody”.
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“We have not gotten all the answers we want”, Lambert said. We don’t know that there was.
