Yesterday we broke the story on the police “lynching” of Sandra Bland. Law enforcement sources are naturally playing stupid about the mysterious death of this civil rights activist, but a growing number of people realize that the police claims about her mysterious death just don’t add up.
Now, we have found out that the Texas Sheriff and the prosecutor who have been charged with investigating this suspicious death have been accused of racism, in separate incidences.
Just last year the prosecutor was accused of sending threatening messages to an African American pastor. That pastor had criticized the prosecutor for bias in how he handled cases involving minorities.
Now, he is in charge of determining if any criminal charges will be filed in the strange death of Sandra Bland, an outspoken critic of police violence against African Americans.
Bland was recently found dead in her jail cell Monday. This was all over the course of a relatively short time behind bars, waiting for her family to get there to bail her out.
The arrest came after a traffic stop for a mere lane change violation, while she was on her way to her new job near Houston.
Watch video of Sandra Bland’s arrest in the video below:
“She was smoking when he pulled her over, [and officers] told her to put her cigarette out, she had an exchange of words and it just went downhill,” LaVaughn Mosely, a friend, said. Mosely had talked with Bland shortly after the arrest. “She said he snatched her out of the window and slammed her on her face.”
The medical examiner has ruled the bizarre death a “suicide” and the prosecutor has voiced unequivocal support for this determination.
“It appears she had used a trash bag to hang herself from a partition in the ceiling, which was used to give inmates privacy,” Elton Mathis, district attorney of Waller County claimed.
Mathis, the prosecutor supposedly “investigating” this case, has a very disturbing history of racial bias, according to Daily Kos blogger, Shaun King.
Rev. Walter Pendleton requested documentation on the prosecution rates of non-whites in Waller County. But Mathis refused, saying “my hounds ain’t even started yet dumb ass. Keep talking. When I talk people will listen. Keep talking and I will sue your ass for slander. It works both ways. ‘Dr.’ Take your fake Dr. Ass and jump off a high cliff.”
Pendleton, the pastor of Pendleton Chapel Baptist Church, said this was an obvious threat.
“What do hounds do? They hunt,” Pendleton explained.
Mathis admits he said all of this.
“Those statements were made by me in anger, but I stand behind them,” Mathis responded.
But Mathis is not the only one involved in this “investigation” who has a history of clear-cut racial bias.
Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith was suspended back in 2007, from his former job in Hempstead, Texas. That termination came after he and four other Caucasian officers were found to have humiliated and mistreated a group of young African American men. The officers strip searched the young men, claiming they were “looking for drugs”… but that search didn’t turn up anything at all. It was clear harassment.
In spite of this history (and perhaps because of it), Smith won election as sheriff in 2008.
The FBI and Texas Rangers now say they have opened independent investigations into Bland’s death, after these reports of racial bias arose.
Watch the local video report from KHOU-TV below: