CHICAGO — The mother of Sandra Bland, the Illinois woman who died in a Texas jail cell last month, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday that faulted the state trooper who arrested Bland and the Waller County jail guards who were supposed to keep watch over her.
Trooper Brian Encinia, who made the arrest, “demonstrated a deliberate indifference to and conscious disregard for the constitutional rights and safety of Sandra Bland,” according to the lawsuit filed by Geneva Reed-Veal, Bland’s mother, in U.S. District Court in Houston.
The 18-count lawsuit, which seeks damages, also named two jail guards, the Texas Department of Public Safety and Waller County as defendants.
Encinia pulled over Bland on July 10 for failing to signal a lane change, and dashboard camera video shows that the incident started as an ordinary traffic stop. But the encounter intensified when Encinia asked Bland to extinguish her cigarette, and Bland questioned the request. The trooper eventually ordered Bland out of the car, threatened her with a Taser and arrested her on a charge of assaulting a public servant.
Bland, a 28-year-old college graduate, was jailed over that weekend in Waller County, a rural area northwest of Houston. On July 13, according to Texas authorities, she was found hanging in her cell from a trash can liner. Officials said an autopsy found her injuries consistent with suicide, a finding her friends and relatives have questioned.