AUSTIN, Tex. — [For more about police violence and unrest, go here] Sandra Bland had just driven in from Illinois to start a new job in Texas when a state trooper pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change. As the exchange grew angry and the officer pulled out a stun gun, she recorded a 39-second cellphone video whose public broadcast this week has prompted calls for a renewed investigation into her arrest and death nearly four years ago. Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old African-American from the Chicago area, was taken into custody in southeast Texas following the confrontational 2015 traffic stop and was found hanging in a jail cell three days later in what was officially ruled a suicide. The case, which drew international attention, intensified outrage over the treatment of black people by white police officers and was considered a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement. [The Death of Sandra Bland: Is There Anything Left to Investigate?] The video surfaced for the first time publicly Monday night in an investigative report on the Dallas television station WFAA that included interviews with Ms. Bland’s family and supporters, who accused officials of concealing information that they said should have been made public early in the investigation.<doc-sep>EMBED >More News Videos Sandra Bland's family has a new truth and a renewed call for justice after newly-uncovered cell phone video emerged showing the arrest from her perspective. EMBED >More News Videos Full video from the Sandra Bland traffic stop EMBED >More News Videos Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland, spoke exclusively to Eyewitness News Newly-uncovered cell phone video shows the arrest of Sandra Bland from her perspective. The Chicago area woman was later found dead inside a Texas jail cell.Until now, dashcam video was the only video the public has seen of that 2015 arrest. Now, Bland's family wants the case reopened.Supporters of Sandra Bland say the video shows Texas state police officer Brian Encinia had no reason to believe she posed a threat to his life - the reason he gave for arresting her - and that he violated her rights from the first moments of their encounter.The clip begins at the most dramatic moment of the July 2015 traffic stop near Prairie View A&M University: Encinia has opened Bland's car door and draws his stun gun as she tries to steady her phone's camera. The flashlights on the stun gun flick on and Encinia yells, "Get out of the car! I will light you up. Get out! "Bland exits the car and continues to record Encinia as he orders her onto the sidewalk. The stun gun is still pointed at her and the flashlights remain on. He instructs her to get off the phone, to which Bland replies, "I'm not on the phone. I have a right to record. This is my property. "Now, through the efforts of non-profit investigative reporter Brian Collister, Sandra Bland's family has a new truth and a renewed call for justice. "Open up the case, period. That's how I feel right now," said Shantae Needham, Bland's sister. "This is crucial to everything that he said in his report. "The Texas Department of Public Security searched Bland's cellphone and found the video two months after the traffic stop and her death in jail. But prosecutors cut a deal with the charged officer 9 months later, getting him to give up his career in exchange for them not taking him to court. "It is abundantly clear that the special prosecutors had every opportunity to prosecute Encinia for what he did, the lie that he told, and they had ample evidence to establish that they lied but they chose to cut bait," said Cannon Lambert, Sr., attorney for the Bland family. "This not only shows that he lied but really, that he had no business even stopping her, period. And at the end of the day he needs to go to jail," Needham said. "They promised us they were going to prosecute him to the fullest extent possible," Lambert said. "We told them we would rather you prosecute and lose. "The Bland family won a $1.9 million civil award 13 months after Sandra died in the jail cell. Lambert said the new video doesn't change that, but there are calls to reopen the criminal case from Democratic presidential contenders Julian Castro and Beto O'Rourke, who both come from Texas.<doc-sep>Some Democratic presidential candidates are calling for authorities to re-open an investigation into the death of Sandra Bland, a Texas woman who died while in custody after she was arrested during a traffic stop in 2015, after cell phone video recorded by Bland has surfaced. Julián Castro, former San Antonio mayor, and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who is from El Paso, were the first to call for the investigation to re-open. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Cory Booker both also commented on the video. “The recently released video Sandra Bland took of her own arrest provides the latest example of a police justification for the death of an unarmed black person being revealed as a flat out lie,” Castro tweeted. An interactive guide:Who is running for president in 2020? Bland, an African-American woman, was found dead three days after being taken into police custody in 2015 and held at the Waller Country jail near Houston, Texas. Her death was ruled a suicide. She was 28. The new 39-second video, which was uncovered by WFAA, was recorded from Bland's cell phone and is the first time the public has seen Bland's arrest through her perspective. The initial stop was recorded on a dash cam. In the video, Bland questions why she is being apprehended after she was stopped by Department of Public Safety Trooper Brian Encinia while she was on her way to a grocery store. She was being pulled over for failing to use her turn signal when she changed lanes. "I will drag you out of here," Encinia is heard saying in the video after he opened Bland's car door. Several seconds later, Encinia points a taser at Bland and screams for her to get out of the car. "I will light you up," the trooper yells at Bland. After getting out of the car, Encinia demands that the cell phone to be put down. Bland said it was her private property but eventually put down the phone after the trooper repeatedly asked her to. Encinia at the time said that he felt threatened by Bland. Bland's family has previously filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Waller County and Texas DPS, which was settled in 2016 for $1.9 million. In addition, Encinia, the trooper involved with Bland's arrest, was fired from DPS and indicted by a grand jury for perjury after he claimed in an affidavit that he removed Bland from her car "to further conduct a safe traffic investigation," which the grand jury found to be false. However, the charge was dropped after he pledged to never work as a police officer again and gave up his license to do so. Bland's family said they had never seen the cell phone footage until WFAA showed them the video. More:Fox News: The unlikely new power player in the 2020 Democratic primary O'Rourke called for "full accountability and justice" for Bland, whose death started protests disputing her cause of death and questioning police treatment of black men and women. “Immediately re-open the investigation into Sandra Bland's arrest and death. There must be full accountability and justice," he tweeted. In another tweet, Castro said: “This video is compelling proof that Trooper Encinia lied, that Sandra Bland posed no threat, and that there was no basis for her arrest. This case should be reopened and justice should finally be served.” Buttigieg said the new video adds "new outrage" to Bland's case. "These revelations add new outrage to the case of Sandra Bland. In the name of justice, the investigation into her arrest and death must be reopened," he tweeted. Booker called the video "deeply unsettling." "Not only do we need full transparency when it comes to police-community relations, but the way Ms. Bland was treated is unconscionable. A routine traffic stop should never end this way," Booker tweeted.<doc-sep>In any case, he said, the cellphone video does not represent new evidence, since it was known to investigators and was disclosed to the family in response to the wrongful-death lawsuit they filed in the case. The suit was settled in 2016 for $1.9 million. A number of questions were also raised after Ms. Bland’s death about what happened at the jail, and why a 28-year-old woman on her way to start a new job would take her own life. Most of those questions have already been put to rest: Both her mental health background and the physical evidence in the autopsy report pointed to suicide. The confrontation at the traffic stop led to Ms. Bland being arrested on a charge of assaulting a public servant. She was booked on July 10, 2015, into the Waller County jail in Hempstead, a town of about 6,000 in southeast Texas, and she was placed in a housing area for women. Three days later, on July 13, a guard making the rounds found her hanging in her 15-by-20 foot cell in what officials described as a “semi-standing position,” with a plastic trash-can liner around her neck and affixed to a U-shaped metal hook overhead. She was pronounced dead shortly after 9 a.m. The results of the autopsy, announced by officials on July 23, indicated that her injuries were consistent with suicide, not homicide. The autopsy found that the condition of Ms. Bland’s head, neck and hands lacked any signs of a violent struggle. Markings around her neck were also consistent with suicide, the medical examiners said. Waller County officials later expressed regret that Ms. Bland had not been placed on suicide watch, particularly in light of her disclosure on a jail screening form that she had once tried to kill herself with pills after losing a baby. She also reported at the time she entered the jail that she had battled depression and was feeling depressed at the time.<doc-sep>
Austin, Texas -- Cellphone video recorded by Sandra Bland, a black woman found dead in a Texas jail in 2015 following a confrontational traffic stop, shows for the first time her perspective as a white state trooper draws his stun gun and points it at close range while ordering her out of the car. The 39-second clip revealed by the Investigative Network, a nonprofit news organization in Texas, aired Monday night on Dallas television station WFAA-TV. Bland was found hanging in her jail cell outside Houston three days after her arrest. Her death and dashcam video showing Trooper Brian Encinia trying to pull the 28-year-old Chicago-area woman out of her vehicle galvanized the national Black Lives Matter movement and others protesting police misconduct. The clip begins at the most dramatic moment of the traffic stop near Prairie View A&M University: Encinia has opened Bland's car door and draws his stun gun as she tries to steady her phone's camera. The flashlights on the stun gun flick on and Encinia yells, "Get out of the car! I will light you up. Get out!" An undated photo shows Sandra Bland, 28, who was found dead on Monday, July 13, 2015, in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. KHOU Bland exits the car and continues to record Encinia as he orders her onto the sidewalk. The stun gun is still pointed at her and the flashlights remain on. He instructs her to get off the phone, to which Bland replies, "I'm not on the phone. I have a right to record. This is my property." The video ends seconds later after Encinia tells her to put the phone down. The emergence of the cellphone video raised questions about who had seen it until now. Cannon Lambert, an attorney for the Bland family who settled lawsuits against the state and county jail that totaled nearly $2 million combined, said he never saw the clip until it was recently shared by a reporter. Lambert said he didn't see the video in evidence turned over by investigators, which he said he wanted to believe was just human error. Democratic state Rep. Garnet Coleman, who in 2017 carried the "Sandra Bland Act" that the family criticized for being weakened before signed into law, said Monday night he would look into why Bland's family never saw the footage. "It is troubling that a crucial piece of evidence was withheld from Sandra Bland's family and legal team in their pursuit of justice," Coleman said in a statement. Katherine Cesigner, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the cellphone video was known to all parties at the time and said that two years following the litigation, it was "unclear what arrangements, if any, were made by the plaintiffs to view the video." The department disputed the premise that the video was not provided, saying it was included as part of a large hard drive of evidence from the investigation. It also said Sandra Bland's cellphone video had previously been publicly released in 2017, when it was given to an Austin television station under open records law. Encinia, who was fired after being indicted for perjury over the traffic stop, said he came to fear for his safety after stopping Bland for failing to signal a lane change. "The video makes it abundantly clear there was nothing she was doing in that car that put him at risk at all," Lambert said. The perjury charge was later dropped in exchange for Encinia agreeing to never work in law enforcement again. That Bland was holding up a cellphone is clear in the original dashcam footage. Chip Lewis, Encinia's attorney, said the cellphone footage doesn't illuminate anything beyond what the dashcam video already showed. He said "furtive gestures" made by Bland from inside her car presented a risk and was the impetus for Encinia trying to remove her. "From a law enforcement standpoint, it had nothing to do with her being agitated as you may have seen on her recording," Lewis said. Several of the Democrats running for president 2020 called for the case to the reopened, including the two candidates from Texas, former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. Both O'Rourke and Castro called for the case to be reopened, as well as former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Immediately re-open the investigation into Sandra Bland's arrest and death. There must be full accountability and justice.