SANDRA BLAND CRIES FOR JUSTICE FROM THE GRAVE:
THE MEDIA HAS FORGOTTEN.
Following a simple Traffic stop, Sandra Bland (young BLACK woman from Chicago) was found hanging Dead July 13, 2015, in a Waller County, Texas jail cell.
Texas Jail employees claimed Sandra was "SUICIDAL" and had Marijuana in her system.
An Autopsy was performed on her body and a Federal investigation has been conducted.
However five months later her Murder remains a Mystery and no one has been held Accountable or Prosecuted for her Death.
Will Sandra's Murder be used as a POLITICAL Weapon just as Laquan McDonald's Murder is being used, to help DEMOCRATS win another general election via angry BLACK voters??
Five months after Sandra Bland was found hanging in a Texas jail cell, her family still searches for resolution. An intimate look at a life interrupted.
The stretch of boulevard just outside the campus of Prairie View A&M University in Texas lay lonely and quiet one early morning this past November when a woman emerged from her rental car and stepped toward a towering tree, her form shrouded in gray drizzle. She was dressed somberly, in heels and a black-and-white-striped skirt, a string of pearls dangling from her neck. In her left hand, she clutched an umbrella; in her right, a cellophane-wrapped spray of yellow tea roses that she’d bought at a nearby supermarket that morning.
Sharon Cooper had passed this site before. She’d certainly seen enough of it on the jerky cell phone video that circulated on the Internet: the haunting, murky silhouette of a state trooper hovering over her sister as she lay face-down, arms handcuffed behind her.
He had pulled her over here for failing to signal a lane change. But things escalated.
He arrested her.
Three days later, Sandra Bland would be found hanging in her jail cell.
Such was the media frenzy in the immediate aftermath—as speculation swirled about foul play in the 28-year-old Chicago native’s death—that there had been no time for Sharon, her three surviving sisters, or their mother to steal away to simply, quietly reflect at the spot where everything had gone awry.
Merely coming to town—to retrieve Bland’s body, to pick up her personal effects, to address legal matters—had been a trial for the family each time they made the trip from Chicago. “There is a seismic shift in every individual’s demeanor when we land in Texas,” Sharon says. “And the seismic shift is just a ripping of the Band-Aid.”
There are too many memories. Like of the first time Sharon saw her sister’s lifeless body at the funeral home in nearby Hempstead. “My heart stopped. Time froze,” Sharon recalls. “She was on a table and they had a sheet on her. It was all the way up to her neck. I could not see the [ligature] mark, though I knew it was there from pictures I had seen. They hadn’t put any makeup on her or anything, but she still looked good, which is what gave me some solace.
She looked like herself.”
There were no news cameras on this day, as Sharon stepped gingerly off the sidewalk onto the wet grass, where a makeshift memorial had sprung up. She stooped to place the roses. Then she began playing one of her sister’s favorite songs, Tye Tribbett’s “What Can I Do,” on her phone and tidying up the collection of stuffed animals, candles, T-shirts, and ribbons as the gray rain fell.
The national press has largely moved on from the Sandra Bland story, but a family’s grief remains.
Fully understanding the depth of their pain—and of the tragedy itself—requires far more than digesting a few sound bites on CNN. It requires a nuanced look at the real woman behind the headlines and at how a heartbreaking combination of factors years in the making—racial, cultural, intimately personal—collided devastatingly in the waning light of a late afternoon on what was once an unremarkable stretch of road in Texas.
Credits: NBC News, Chicago mag, YouTube
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