African American woman, 28, died in custody three days after Texas traffic stop in which supporters say dashcam images show trooper was agitated

Texas police have released video taken from inside the county jail during the last minutes of Sandra Bland’s life as activists claimed that the traffic stop that led to her imprisonment escalated into a confrontation because a trooper was angry that she was smoking.

The footage is three hours long but does not provide a clear view of cell 95 at the Waller county jail, where officials say the 28-year-old was found hanged on 13 July, three days after she was arrested for alleged assault on a public servant.

The camera is motion-activated and stops recording after 15 seconds without detectable movement, according to authorities, meaning there is more than nine minutes of time unrecorded. The inside of cell 95, at the end of a hallway and in the top right corner of the picture, is not visible. Officials said that the tape showed there was no movement down the hallway to Bland’s cell for the 90 minutes prior to her body being discovered.

Brian Cantrell of the Waller county sheriff’s office said that at 7.05am Bland was “in good health” and told the jailer “I’m fine”. At 7.55am, he said, she contacted a controller via a phone in the cell to ask if she could make a phone call.



At 8.58am, he said, an officer went to the cell to ask if she wanted to go to the recreation hall. She was found partially hanging from the privacy partition, next to the toilet, “in a semi-standing position with the ligature around her neck” and her feet on the ground. Officers then placed her on the floor, performed CPR and sought emergency medical help, Cantrell said. Several are shown hurriedly walking to and from the cell.

Cantrell said the cause of death was “self-inflicted asphyxiation” with an ordinary plastic trash bag. He said that in the wake of Bland’s death all trash bags had been removed from the jail’s cells.

“The death of Miss Bland was a tragic incident, not one of criminal intent or a criminal act,” he said.

The angle was the best available, Waller county district attorney Elton Mathis said. He added that the video had not been edited but was yet to be analysed by the FBI. Bland’s family and activists have questioned the official account, saying it is entirely implausible that she would have taken her own life.

“This investigation is still being treated just as it would a murder investigation, there are too many questions that need to be resolved,” Mathis said. “Miss Bland’s family does make valid points that she seemed to have a lot of things going on in her life that were good.”

Earlier in the day the focus was on the traffic stop that led to her arrest. Mathis said that “Sandra Bland had been very combative. It was not a model traffic stop and it was not a model person that was stopped.”

Mathis said she had not been “compliant” and reports that she was dragged out of a car window were “an absolute lie. She was not pulled out of the window. She stepped out of the car.”

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He said dashcam video from one car was expected to be released on Tuesday but footage from another car was not available because the memory on the officer’s camera had been full.

Mathis said evidence from the investigations would be presented to a grand jury but given the county’s small size – it has about 45,000 residents – that would be in August at the earliest.

Her death has sparked national outrage and protests. At a news conference outside the county jail on Monday, Jamal Bryant, a pastor from Baltimore who was flanked by other activists and protesters, said that dashcam images from a state trooper’s car showed the officer becoming agitated as Bland smoked in her car and started to film the encounter.

“He became outraged and unnerved because he’s handling a black woman who is not ignorant, who knows her rights,” he said. Bryant claimed that her death was not suicide but “murder, a homicide”.

He linked her death with other fatal encounters between African Americans and police across the country, which have prompted widespread demonstrations and energized the Black Lives Matter movement.

Waller County, near Houston, has a history of racism, while the sheriff, Glenn Smith, was fired from his previous job after allegations of racist behaviour, which he has denied.

The Texas department of public safety, which is leading the investigation, said in a statement on Friday that the officer who stopped Bland, identified in media reports as 30-year-old Brian Encinia, had been reassigned to desk duties for “violations of the department’s procedures regarding traffic stops and the department’s courtesy policy”.

The agency had previously said that Bland “became argumentative and unco-operative” after being stopped for failing to signal a lane change. It has asked the FBI to analyse videos related to the incident and has pledged to release footage to the public.

The Bland family’s Chicago-based lawyer, Cannon Lambert, told NBC Newsthat she asked the officer: “Why do I have to put out a cigarette when I’m in my own car? And that seemed to irritate him to the point where he said ‘Get out of the car.’” Lambert said that the trooper “looked to force her to get out of the car by way of opening the door and started demanding that she do”.

After Bland’s death the Texas jail standards commission said it had found the Waller county jail to be in non-compliance with minimum standards for failing to check on inmates in person at least once an hour and for inadequate staff training on how to handle potentially suicidal inmates. The sheriff’s office said in a statement that it would be “working on improvements”.

Family members have travelled to Texas and are awaiting the results of an independent autopsy performed at their request, which should be released within the next two days. Activists on Monday called for an investigation by the US justice department.

An FBI spokeswoman, Shauna Dunlap, said: “We are monitoring the ongoing local investigation. Once the local process takes its course the FBI will review all of the evidence to determine if any federal criminal laws may have been violated.”

Bland, a racial justice activist, had newly arrived in Texas from Chicago for a job interview at Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater, where a vigil was held in her memory on Sunday.

She got the job. Family and friends have said she had no reason to end her life, though she talked about feeling depressed in a Facebook post several months earlier. Bryant said she “turned the corner … just got a job opportunity and was excited about life”.