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by Scott Creighton

The tragic story of Sandra Bland is getting stranger by the minute.

Yesterday I wrote about the dash-cam video of her arrest and I concluded that had she remained calm, she would have simply received a warning and been on her way. Clearly the trooper involved didn’t have to order her out of the car, but that’s where the conflict went and unfortunately, escalated from there.

That aside, I also made it clear I didn’t think this young woman would take her own life over a simple Assault on a Public Servant charge.

Discussing this later with folks on Twitter people all seem to come down to one of two camps: murder or suicide. White or black. No grey area to be found.

It was during that discussion that it occurred to me that she may have been behaving like she did during the arrest and someone decided to put her in a restraint chair and leave her unsupervised in her cell till she calmed down. This is a typical practice used by deputies when inmates get out of control.

Unfortunately, a number of deaths have occurred due to the way the restraint chair works and those deaths are almost always due to suffocation.

Death from physical restraint can result from asphyxiation, aspiration, cardiac arrest and other reasons. Restraint chairs are often used in combination with spit masks or pepper spray that can impede breathing. For all these reasons it is important to be vigilant for health problems when using physical restraints. Corrections One

A review of deaths at county jails around the country found more than three dozen restraint chair deaths since the chairs were introduced in the late ’90s. Restraint Chair Jail Deaths

I therefore put forward the theory that perhaps this is what happened to her and because of her connection with Black Lives Matter coupled with the fact that they knew she was an epileptic, someone at the jail decided to attempt to cover-up her manner of death.

A lot of folks jumped on me for even suggesting such a thing. They cited the M.E. report and the sheriff’s release of the information that claims she admitted to having attempted suicide earlier this year.

I reminded them that M.E. reports can be 1. wrong and 2. deliberately falsified.

I also reminded folks that just because a sheriff says something is true, doesn’t mean it is.

I have noted a few problems with the official story of how Sandra Bland was supposed to have died while in police custody.

1. Serious contradictions in booking report documents

The report by which that claim of an attempted suicide stems, is full of contradictions. As is the way they handled her afterward, were she really to have made that claim.

Take a look below. These are floating around the interwebs, supposedly her booking report. Notice the inconsistencies regarding the questions about suicide.

At one point she answers the question about having thoughts about killing herself in the last year with “no” then just two questions later she supposedly admits to an attempt to kill herself in 2015 no more than 7 months ago. In another section the “attempted suicide” question is answered with a “no”

Notice, the person processing this document says she doesn’t seem depressed or sad and the arresting officer doesn’t think she is at risk either.

Is it possible the booking officer simply failed to notice these inconsistencies while doing the report? Is it possible that someone came along afterwards in a rush and changed them after an accident with the restraining chair?

2. Hung herself with her feet on the floor?

According to the official story, when Sandra was found hanging from a metal divider in her cell, her feet were on the floor.

Cantrell said Bland’s “feet were on the ground” and she had appeared to use a plastic bag that had been put in the cell’s trash can as a liner to hang herself. ABC

Though that scenario isn’t impossible, it certainly is odd. Death by strangulation is extremely painful and traumatic and I have a hard time believing the woman I saw lose control in the arrest video would have been disciplined enough to resist the overwhelming instinct to relieve the weight on her neck by simply standing up and taking the bag off her neck.

The actual privacy wall itself is fairly short, like one in a public bathroom. Here’s a photo showing it.

3. Needed help with a phone call?

This is an important piece of the puzzle.

7:55am

Bland used the intercom in her cell to contact the jail’s main control room. She asked how to make a phone call from the phone on the wall of her cell.

She was told to use the four-digit PIN that she had been assigned during her booking process. The jail has no record of her ever making a call on the phone, however, officials said. ABC

This is important because, for the official story it does two things: 1. implies she had full range of motion (was not in the chair) and 2. isn’t verifiable.

Because this communication was on the intercom, there is no way to know if it happened or not. I doubt there is a recording of all intercom communications. What would be verifiable would be a phone call she attempted to make from the cell on that phone, but alas, there was none attempted. Why would she ask about how to make a call and then not make one?

Here’s another important piece of info: Sandra was booked on July 10th. Her death didn’t occur until early on July 13th and she had made a couple of calls in the meantime, the last one being a voice mail she left for her roommate. If she left a voice mail, that means she made the call. If she made at least one call from that phone prior to that morning, why would she need to ask someone over the intercom how to make a call?

The last known message of Sandra Bland before she was found dead in a jail cell on July 13 has surfaced.

In a voicemail to the friend she was staying with in Texas Bland said she was being held on a $5,000 bond after appearing before a judge and still in disbelief that she was in jail.

‘I’m still at a loss of words, honestly about this whole process,’ said Bland.

‘How did switching lanes with no signal turn into all of this, I don’t even know. But I’m still here, so, I guess call me back when you can.’ Daily Mail

4. Edited jailhouse video

The video of her arrest is not the only video out there. Another, showing deputies reacting to finding her unconscious (dead) has also been released. In the video you see a female guard checking on her and reacting with concern, informing others that something is wrong in Sandra’s cell. It’s about an hour after Sandra was supposed to have used the intercom to ask how to make a phone call.

About 8:55 a.m.

About an hour later, a female jailer went to Bland to see whether she wanted to go to the facility’s recreational hall, but that is when the female jailer saw that something was wrong.

“The jailer looked through the window and observed Miss Bland hanging from her privacy partition in her cell,” Cantrell said Monday. ABC

But here’s the thing, the video is edited and it’s edited at a key juncture. Watch it.

Notice what happens? From the time they first discover her in distress in the cell to the time when the EMTs arrive, the video is edited, presumably for time constraints. However, a lot could have happened during that time frame, most importantly, a restraint chair could have been removed from the cell.

There is another video, a video of someone videoing a video, which shows more of the time between her discovery and the arrival of the EMTs, but it starts with guards already milling about well after Sandra had been discovered. So again, the lapse of missing time could be to cover the removal of a restraint chair.

There is no time stamp on either videos, so the amount of missing footage is impossible to determine. I have yet to find a full video from start to finish of that scene. From the discovery of her (if it was really the first time they discovered her) till the time when the EMTs arrived.

5. $500?

Sandra’s bond was set at $5,000 which means all her family and friends had to come up with was $500 to get her out. That’s it. Are we supposed to believe she killed herself over a charge that required as little as $500 bail?

Conclusion

I can’t draw any conclusions at this point other than to say a good number of the facts surrounding the death of Sandra Bland do not add up. I will continue to look into it. It’s possible she took her own life out of desperation due to the fact that her arrest might mean she lost her job at the college.

However, I think its more likely that the staff decided to put her in a restraint chair at some point and she panicked struggling against the restraints or had an epileptic seizure which resulted in her tragic death.

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