'Violations' found in Naperville woman Texas arrest
As authorities continue to investigate the death of a 28-year-old Naperville woman in a Texas jail cell — with the officer involved in her arrest now placed on administrative leave — members of her church are preparing to celebrate Sanda Bland's life this weekend.
The Rev. James Miller said Lisle's DuPage African Methodist Episcopal Church will pay “tribute to the vibrant young person Sandy was as a member of DuPage AME Church for 18 years” with a Prayer Walk at 10 a.m. Sunday around the church grounds at 4300 Yackley Ave.
Miller said the walk will be a “public expression of unity and a desire for justice in (Bland's) case along with so many others.”
Participants also may sign a petition urging a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death.
Bland was arrested Friday in Waller County on a charge of assaulting a public servant after she was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
She was found dead Monday morning hanging by a plastic bag in a jail cell in Waller County, about 60 miles from Houston. Texas authorities who performed an autopsy on Tuesday classified her death as suicide by hanging, said Elton Mathis, Waller County district attorney.
Bland's family and attorney said they have doubts about the official version of events and want to meet face-to-face with those investigating her death.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday the state trooper who stopped Bland violated traffic stop procedures and the department's courtesy policy. How the trooper violated procedures is “still being determined,” according to agency spokesman Tom Vinger.
The trooper is on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation.
Friend and mentor LaVaughn Mosley, 57, said she has talked to witnesses who say an officer dragged Bland out of the car's window and slammed her head into the ground, and Bland is heard on a YouTube video (warning: video contains profanity) saying that her head had been slammed.
“We have identified violations of the department's procedures regarding traffic stops and the department's courtesy policy,” the department said in a statement.
The Bland family attorney, Cannon Lambert, also a member of their church, did not immediately return a message left for him Friday.
But in a Facebook post Thursday night, the Rev. Theresa Dear, a pastoral support minister at the church, said she had been on a conference call with Lambert, civil rights leaders, attorneys and politicians in Texas to discuss a strategy in response to Bland's death.
“Many things will happen between now and Tuesday,” she wrote, “including the following:
“1. Collecting data and facts via private investigators;
“2. Obtaining copies of reports and videos;
“3. Requesting the Department of Justice involvement.”
On Friday, about 100 protesters marched from the jail to the courthouse in Hempstead, where several other friends of Bland expressed disbelief. Bland's death comes amid increased national scrutiny of police after a series of high-profile cases in which blacks have been killed by officers.
The Houston Chronicle, meanwhile, reported Friday that the agency that regulates county jails in Texas has found the Waller County jail out of compliance with minimum jail standards for observation of inmates and staff training.
The Associated Press reported that a prosecutor said no cameras were in Bland's jail cell.
Mathis said late Friday at a news conference there may be privacy issues that kept authorities from continuous video monitoring of Bland at the jail. He believes she was the only female prisoner in the jail at the time.
Known in her family as Sandy B, she was the fourth of five sisters. She was active in her family's church and was the only one of her sisters to go to college out of state. She studied at the College of Agriculture at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black school 40 miles northwest of Houston.
It was there in her freshman year that she met Mosley, who recruited her for a job as a 4-H camp counselor. For three summers, Bland shepherded kids between horseback riding, fishing, campfires and other activities at the camp in Huntsville, Texas.
She was a member of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, played trombone in the marching band and volunteered with a senior citizens advocacy organization that Mosley runs, he said.
She also witnessed racial hostility and injustices against blacks in Texas' Waller County, Mosley said, describing the area as “very segregated.”
Sometime after graduating in 2009 Bland returned to Illinois, aching to be closer to family but bouncing between temp jobs.
In January, Bland began posting a series of cellphone videos to her Facebook page under the title “Sandy Speaks” in which she groused about everything from inattentive parents and police mistreatment of blacks to what she called the “generation of heads down” — all of us with our heads buried in our smartphones.
She described the videos — many of them rambling and off the cuff and shot in her bedroom or on lunch breaks in her car — as a calling from God and urged people to share them on social media, saying she believed she was “here to change history.”
Around halfway through the series, on March 1, she began a video by apologizing for a two-week absence.
“I am suffering from something that some of you all may be dealing with right now,” she says into the camera. “It's a little bit of depression as well as PTSD. I've been real stressed out over these past couple of weeks.” She does not go into detail.
On Thursday, her sisters told reporters nothing in Bland's background pointed to a troubled mental state. Mosley believes Bland was just venting after a bad day and the “self-diagnosis” should be “taken with a grain of salt.”
In a phone call Bland made to Mosley after her arrest, Mosley says she sounded upbeat despite the ordeal.
“It just makes no sense,” he said. “Sandy was a soldier; she wasn't fazed about it.”
A former classmate of Bland refuses to believe she killed herself in a Texas jail cell.
Lanitra Dean of Houston shared a spot in the school band with Bland at Prairie View A&M University. She said that while she had not seen Bland for more than five years, they had kept in touch through social media.
Dean was among about 100 people who on Friday marched from the Waller County jail in Hempstead to the county courthouse about a half a mile away.
Dean said Bland would not kill herself because she was about to be released from jail on bail.
Dean said she's speaking out because Bland would do that for her.
• The Associated Press contributed to this report.