Four years later, Bland’s death casts shadow in Prairie View
As town seeks to move forward, evidence surfaces, opening fresh wounds in case
PRAIRIE VIEW — The makeshift Sandra Bland memorial on the street named after her is now tattered and faded. Old stuffed animals are bunched together on the ground.
On a June day, when Prairie View Mayor David Allen stops in front of the memorial, he notes how Bland’s photo has come apart. He calls someone to come and get it fixed.
Wednesday marks the fourth anniversary of the day when Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American woman, was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change and then arrested following a heated exchange with a Texas state trooper. Three days later, she was found hanging in a Waller County jail cell, a death that was ruled a suicide. Her death thrust Prairie View into the center of the Black Lives Matter debate.
The trooper, Brian Encinia, who is white, was fired and indicted for lying in his report about the incident, but the misdemeanor charge was dropped after he agreed never to work again in law enforcement.
Today, Bland’s arrest and death are still being talked about and having an impact in Prairie View, a small city of 6,400 that she had returned to in 2015 to work for her alma mater, Prairie View A&M.
As a new generation of leaders influenced by Bland’s death seeks to move Prairie View forward, evidence continues to surface, including a cellphone video recorded by Bland of an enraged Encinia pulling out a Taser and threatening her after she questioned his order to put out her cigarette. The video raised additional questions about the ex-trooper’s claims that he felt threatened and whether authorities properly disclosed the video to attorneys, prompting some calls to reopen the investigation.
Cannon Lambert, an attorney for the Bland family, has told reporters that he had never seen the newly released video. He said he obtained the maximum settlement from Waller County and the Texas Department of Public Safety, $1.9 million, for the incident.
“It didn’t impact my case, what it did do is confirm that the special prosecutors should’ve been more comfortable in prosecuting,” Lambert said. “They claim they didn’t do it because they felt it was going to be a difficult case to prove, and that video belies that. You can’t
look at that video and come away feeling like the officer is at risk.”
Special prosecutor Phoebe Smith said that she would not reopen the criminal case based on the new video.
Meanwhile, city officials are working to install an historical marker in her honor and plan for a memorial. They don’t want others to forget the moment that changed Prairie View and helped shape the national discourse about race and law enforcement.
“Some people would say Prairie View didn’t have anything to do with it because it wasn’t a Prairie View cop. I’d like to say that Prairie View will forever have something to do with it just because it was in our community and she was here to work for Prairie View A&M university,” said City Councilman Kendric Jones, 23, who was a student at the university when Bland died, an event that inspired him to enter local politics.
‘This is reality’
Allen, the mayor, was walking out a nearby barbershop on July 10, 2015, when he saw Bland being questioned, but he didn’t know then who she was.
“Sometimes, I ask God, ‘Why did you have me across the street at that moment?’” said Allen, 63, who was elected mayor in May 2016.
He wonders now if he should have intervened. Would the situation have turned out differently?
Upon arriving in Los Angeles for a gathering of Prairie View alumni, he realized that the woman he had seen pulled over in Waller County was Sandra Bland, whose death was now the subject of national news reports. He remembers crying at his friend’s house.
He would eventually reach out to Bland’s family attorney to make them aware of what he saw, and also provide a statement to the Texas Rangers, which investigated the matter. He later noticed his silver Jeep drive by the arrest scene during a dashcam video that was widely viewed on the web.
Still, he had questions. One of the videos that surfaced from the arrest showed Bland on the ground.
When he drove off that day, he said, Bland was in handcuffs, and Allen didn’t expect the situation to escalate. He also didn’t see Bland kick Encinia, as the trooper alleged in filing charges against her. Video recorded by a bystander showed Bland complain of being unable to hear after being “slammed to the ground,” though a witness couldn’t say whether she fell or was thrown down.
“How did she get on the ground? She was handcuffed. She was a slim thing. Not some big threat where you gotta tackle,” said Allen. “That was the part that bothered me the most.”
That fall, Jones and Xante Wallace, 22, who were then students at Prairie View A&M University, were among those on campus talking about what had happened on University Drive months earlier.
Wallace was in high school when a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, George Zimmerman, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, during an altercation on the night of Feb. 26, 2012. But that was more than a thousand miles away. The harsh treatment of Bland on a roadside took place a short distance away.
“Trayvon, was all the way in Florida. Now Sandra, is where I go study and what not,” Wallace said. “At that point in time, I was like, ‘So what do I do now?’”
Wallace started learning more about community organizing. He eventually ran for vice president of the Student Government Association at the traditionally black university, and then was elected to the Prairie View City Council in May 2018.
Jones became more politically active and ascended to SGA president before winning election to the city council in 2017.
“When you see situations happen, it’s like, ‘Oh it’s never going to really affect me,’” said Jones. But the Bland incident illustrated to him that “this is reality, this is real, this happens.”
Sheriff cites progress
After an autopsy found that Bland had hanged herself with a plastic trash bag at the Waller County jail, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards said the facility did not comply with state standards regarding staff training and observations. Some relatives didn’t believe she would have killed herself. County officials noted at the time that she had discussed suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress on her Facebook page, and had a handful of run-ins with the law for minor traffic violations and misdemeanor drug charges.
An initial toxicology report showed she had marijuana in her system. Protesters held a monthlong vigil outside the sheriff’s office and county jail, and Sheriff R. Glenn Smith was captured on video telling one Methodist pastor to “go back to the church of Satan that you run.”
Smith said concrete changes have been made to the jail recently. Waller County voters passed a $39.5 million dollar bond in November 2017 to pay for a new jail that backers said will improve inmate and employee safety. Smith said officials are making sure that inmates are checked more frequently, a new jail investigator has been hired, and jailers are in constant communication with the mental health facility Texana.
“The Sandra Bland incident will never go away,” said Smith, who was easily reelected in 2016. “I realize that and I acknowledge that. There are some things about it (that) shouldn’t go away — how we conduct ourselves at a traffic stop, how we interview people when they come in and then how we observe them while they’re in our jail. I don’t think we should ever forget that.”
Still, the jail continued to face scrutiny after an accused murderer, Evan Lyndell Parker, died after hanging himself in the jail last January. A state inspection in December 2018 revealed that jailers didn't meet certain standards for frequency of observing prisoners.
Smith blamed some of the failed checks of inmates on computer glitches but also acknowledged that his staff missed some. He denied that he or his staff treat blacks any differently than those from other races.
“We do not have staff here, nor me, that’s sitting around intentionally putting a black person’s life in jeopardy,” said Smith. “I have never felt like, nor do I ‘till this day, (feel) that there is any racism shown back there or differential of treating people back there.”
He noted that the two jailers who were on duty during the last 12 to 18 hours of Bland’s life were both black.
After the incident, Smith said, some staffers quit. On the anniversary, they usually get anonymous calls saying, “Y’all killed Sandra Bland.”
Smith said nothing nefarious happened. He noted that during the first week after Bland’s death, there were nearly 300 people in and out of the jail including inmates, sheriff ’s office staff and those from other agencies that were investigating the death.
“There’s no way we could’ve covered up a murder of Sandra Bland with 300 people coming through here,” Smith said.
Prairie View history
In three years as mayor, Allen has worked to bring new commercial development to Prairie View, which sits about 50 miles northwest of downtown Houston. Allen, who is African American, is proud of a new privately built cricket complex t in the city.
New student housing is also in the pipeline, and Allen hopes to see more hotels and restaurants there.
Allen is protective of the image of the college town that he’s come back and forth to since graduating from Prairie View A&M in the late ’70s.
“There are two words that bother me the most when they come in a negative connotation — that’s Prairie and View,” said Allen. “Those are my sensitivities. It’s almost akin to talking about my family.”
Allen, Wallace and Jones say the city is making positive strides. The council members want to see a memorial park that will cover the history of Prairie View, with a section devoted to Bland. whose life and death were also the subject of a recent HBO documentary.
“There’s a lot of history that spanned before Sandra and that’s coming after, but Sandra is still part of that history and we need to recognize that history and not (shoo) it away, but embrace it,” Wallace said.
It’s unclear what the release of Bland’s cellphone recording will mean for the case.
One lawmaker looking into the video and what can be done is state Rep. Garnet Coleman, who successfully pushed for a law after Bland’s death that requires county jails to divert people with mental health and substance abuse issues into treatment, makes it easier for defendants with mental illness to make bond and requires independent investigations of jail deaths.
The video showed the trooper wielding his Taser and telling Bland, “I will light you up!”
“The point of view shows that Sandra Bland committed no action that the response ‘I’m going to light you up,’ was the appropriate response to,” said Coleman. “You can see that based on the way she has the phone in her hand, she didn’t make any sudden moves.”
Sandra Bland’s sister, Shante Needham, wants more investigation.
“Open up the case. Period,” Needham told Dallasbased WFAA, which broke the story about the video’s existence earlier this year. “We know they have an extremely, extremely good cover-up system.”
Her mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, told the Houston Chronicle last year that she is still not at peace about the way her daughter died. She viewed a museum exhibit that opened in February 2018 at the Houston Museum of African-American Culture in her daughter’s honor, but it didn’t bring comfort.