Georgia cops who arrested Brianna Grier, a 28-year-old Black woman, failed to secure her with a seatbelt or even close the passenger-side rear door at all before she fell to her death from a patrol car, according to an update issued by state investigators this week.
The Hancock County Sheriff’s office initially told the family that Grier, who was experiencing a mental-health crisis, had kicked open the door herself when she first was arrested on July 15, according to Brianna’s father, Marvin Grier.
For their part, the officer driving the vehicle said, “As I turned to see what Brianna Grier was doing, I hear the passenger-side rear door open,” according to sheriff’s office documents obtained by 13WMAZ, a local CBS affiliate.
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But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s newest findings, which were released Wednesday, painted a different picture of the incident.
As The Daily Beast reported last week, Grier had been experiencing increasingly troublesome symptoms of her schizophrenia and her family worried she had stopped taking her medication.
Normally, the young woman loved to dance and sing to rap and hip hop—“anything with a good beat,” her father told The Daily Beast. She also loved a cookout, as well as being with her twin 3-year-old daughters.
But when her parents could not calm her down during a mental health episode, family had called 911.
“I told the babies that the police had to take their mama away and she needed some help,” Marvin Grier told The Daily Beast.
Instead, deputies smelled alcohol on her breath, family recalled, and decided to arrest her first—handcuffing her and putting her in the car.
The latest release by GBI detailed some of the final moments of struggle prior to her fatal fall.
“Grier was on the ground refusing to get in the patrol car,” read the bureau’s release. “Grier made a statement that she was going to harm herself.”
<p><strong><em>Know something we should about cops or injustice? Reach out to Eileen Grench at Eileen.Grench@TheDailyBeast.com or securely at eileen.grench@protonmail.com.</strong></em></p>
After putting her into the back seat of the vehicle, and failing to secure her with a seatbelt, a deputy believed they closed the passenger-side door but in fact did not, according to GBI. After driving “a short distance, body-camera footage reveals the deputies had no other contact with Grier from the time she was placed in the car until she fell out of the moving car,” the agency said.
Grier was hospitalized after the fall, and died several days later, on July 21. The Hancock County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new GBI findings this week.
When reached again for comment on Thursday, Marvin Grier said the family had retained high-powered civil rights attorney Ben Crump, and declined further comment. Crump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
