2 Jailers Moved Into Policing Jobs After Bland's Death [View all]

Source: Associated Press

2 Jailers Moved Into Policing Jobs After Bland's Death

By nomaan merchant, associated press

DALLAS — Aug 6, 2016, 10:43 AM ET

Less than two months after the death of Sandra Bland, a black woman who was jailed in Texas after a routine traffic stop, two of her jailers quietly moved to other jobs.

Rafael Zuniga and Michael Serges left the Waller County sheriff's office in September 2015 for the Waller Police Department, a smaller agency with less responsibility, according to state records obtained by The Associated Press. They started work on the same day.

They have kept those jobs even after admitting under oath their roles in falsifying a jail monitoring log that indicated guards checked on Bland an hour before she was found hanging in her cell in July 2015, according to an attorney for the Bland family, which has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the county and several employees, including the two former jailers. Local authorities ruled Bland's death a suicide.

Attorney Tom Rhodes told the AP this week that Zuniga acknowledged in a deposition that the log was filled out in advance with times that he supposedly conducted cell checks. Serges acknowledged that he signed the bottom of the log sheet at the beginning of the shift before any actual checks, according to Rhodes, who described the depositions but did not provide transcripts to the AP.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/jailers-moved-policing-jobs-blands-death-41164850