Those questions intensified Monday night when a 39-second video that she recorded on her cellphone surfaced publicly for the first time, in an investigative report broadcast on the Dallas television station WFAA. The video shows part of her encounter with the state trooper who pulled her over.
The WFAA report included interviews with Bland’s family and supporters, who accused officials of concealing information that they say should have been made public early in the investigation of her death.
Who was Sandra Bland?
Bland had been visiting family in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, over the Fourth of July holiday in 2015. Bland was one of five sisters.
She was planning to begin a job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M;, a historically black state university located in a largely rural part of southeast Texas, when she was pulled over near the campus on July 10, 2015, after a state trooper said she failed to signal a lane change.
What happened at the traffic stop?
The trooper, Brian T. Encinia, approached Bland’s car, took her information and returned to his vehicle to write out a citation. The newly surfaced video begins when the trooper walks back to her car with the ticket.
Encinia asked if Bland was OK and told her she seemed “very irritated.” She said she was, because she was being written up simply for moving out of the trooper’s way.
The trooper then asked her to put out the cigarette she was holding, and she refused. The encounter quickly escalated from there.
The trooper ordered Bland out of the car, but she refused. He shouted that he would “yank you out” and tried to do so, but she resisted. He pulled out a stun gun and yelled, “I will light you up.”
At that point, Bland got out of the car. The newly released video ends there, but the encounter remained heated; before long, Bland was shouting insults and profanities and the trooper had her in handcuffs.
What happened in jail?
Bland was booked and placed in a housing area for women in the one-story Waller County Jail. Three days later, on July 13, a guard making rounds found her hanging in her 15-by-20-foot cell.
Waller County officials said she was found in a “semi-standing position,” with a plastic trash-can liner roped around her neck and affixed to a U-shaped metal hook overhead. Bland was pronounced dead at 9:16 a.m. The authorities ruled her death a suicide.
What happened to the state trooper?
Encinia was indicted on a charge of perjury, the only criminal charge arising from the case. Grand jurors accused him of making a false statement when he claimed that his purpose in ordering Bland out of her car was to more safely conduct a traffic investigation.
That charge was dismissed at the request of prosecutors, in exchange for the trooper’s promise that he would never again work in law enforcement.
Why has this case resonated for years?
Bland was a vocal civil rights advocate. Two months before her death, she posted a video on Facebook in which she discussed police brutality. “Black lives matter,” Bland said to the camera. “They matter.”
“In the news that we’ve seen as of late, you could stand there, surrender to the cops, and still be killed,” she continued.
Social media attracted worldwide attention to her death, as it had after the deaths of several unarmed black men at the hands of the police. Three months earlier, Freddie Gray, an unarmed 25-year-old African American in Baltimore, had died from injuries suffered while being transported in a police van.
Social media users adopted the hashtags #SandraBland and #SayHerName in the days after her death and created an online petition calling for the Justice Department to investigate. The case was considered a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement, intensifying outrage over incidents of mistreatment of black people by white officers.
The case also led Texas to enact a law in 2017 called the Sandra Bland Act, which requires all police officers to undergo training in de-escalation techniques; establishes protections for people in custody who have mental health or substance abuse issues; and requires that all jail deaths be investigated by independent law enforcement agencies.
An HBO documentary about the case, “Say Her Name,” was released two weeks ago, using nearly three dozen of Bland’s video blog posts to tell a richly personal story.
What will happen now?
The newly released video returns the public spotlight to the roadside confrontation between Bland and Encinia. Millions of online viewers had already seen the encounter from the officer’s dashcam video and in video shot by a bystander; now it can be seen from Bland’s perspective, directly facing Encinia at her car window.
Bland’s family members, who agreed to a reported $1.9 million settlement in a wrongful-death civil suit, are calling for a renewed investigation into her arrest and death nearly four years ago.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.