Cigarette sparked dispute with trooper in Sandra Bland traffic stop
theGRIO REPORT - According to the lawyer representing Sandra Bland's family, a Texas state trooper grew irritated because Sandra Bland wouldn't put her cigarette out...
According to the lawyer representing Sandra Bland’s family, the encounter between Bland and a Texas state trooper escalated because she wouldn’t put her cigarette out.
Cannon Lambert describes his version of the dashcam footage of the traffic stop to NBC News. The details seem seem routine:
- Bland was pulled over by a Texas state trooper
- Trooper approaches her vehicle on the passenger side and asks for her license/insurance
- Bland complies and gives information to trooper
- Trooper returns to Bland’s vehicle with her
But then Lambert says the trooper asked Bland to put out her cigarette. And that’s when things took a different turn.
“‘Why do I have to put out a cigarette when I’m in my own car?'” Lambert said of Bland’s response to the officer. “And that seemed to irritate him to the point where he said, ‘Get out of the car.'”
Lambert said there was “no clear understanding why she had to get out of the car in the first place. It is a routine traffic stop.”
It appeared that Bland “wasn’t comfortable getting out of the car,” and that the trooper “looked to force her to get out of the car by way of opening the door and started demanding that she do.”
Bland’s family has requested an independent autopsy be conducted.
“There are concerns regarding the findings already, that we’ve communicated previously, so we are doing our own due diligence,” Lambert said. “We want to understand what happened, we want to know what happened and we want to know why.”
