Security camera footage the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office sent to the state jail commission lacks the three minutes immediately preceding the medical emergency that resulted in the death of a woman in the county jail last year.

Chasity Bonner died in the Tarrant County jail on May 27, 2024. The medical examiner ruled her death the result of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, or hardened arteries, possibly due to a hereditary disorder. Bonner was 35 years old.

The Star-Telegram obtained the footage through an open records request to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, the state agency that conducts administrative reviews of jail death investigations.

Among the footage are videos from two cameras mounted in the pod in which Bonner was housed. This footage is broken into two periods of time.

The first period runs from 10:59 p.m. the night of May 26, 2024, to 10:55 a.m. the next morning. The next period then begins one second before 10:58 a.m.

Five seconds into the footage, Bonner’s cellmate can be seen leaving the cell and walking to the guard station. A jailer returns to the cell with her, then orders the other incarcerated women to go to their cells as she calls for emergency services.

The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Brandon Wood, executive director of the jail commission, said on Friday that he was unaware of the missing footage and would have a commission staffer review the video in the case file.

“I don’t know what the situation is regarding these three minutes,” he said in an interview. “That requires additional questions.”

He offered possibilities of timestamps being off or videos overlapping, likening the footage to a VCR’s clock not being set properly.

Many of the women in the footage are in different areas of the pod in the first frame of the second segment from where they are in the last frame of the first period, showing that some of the footage is missing.

“I’m not going to assume anything at this point in time,” Wood said on Friday. “But we will ask, we will find out and determine exactly what course of action is necessary.”

Wood said Monday that the commission had not yet reviewed the footage in light of the Star-Telegram’s findings.

“I have spoken with the Sheriff’s Office to confirm that we had released all of the footage in our possession and until my staff member that handles deaths in custody has had a chance to review, I would not know if there was a gap or possible issue,” he said.

Three minutes ‘critical’ to knowing what happened in Tarrant County jail death

The missing minutes in the footage are essential for outside investigators to get a complete understanding of what happened in Bonner’s case, according to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin.

“In order to have a full appreciation of the circumstances surrounding a death in custody, it is critical to know everything that happened in the minutes leading up to that death,” she said in an email exchange. “For example, did anyone have physical contact with the person who died? Was she calling out for assistance? Did anyone pass by her cell and see her in distress?”

Deitch served as an expert consultant to one of the key authors of the 2017 Sandra Bland Act, which requires the jail commission to appoint outside law enforcement agencies to conduct independent investigations into deaths in county jails.

The commission began making these appointments in March after a Star-Telegram investigation from February found that the commission had not complied with the law since it went into effect.

“Any investigation that does not have access to that kind of information is incomplete and would not provide a full picture of what happened or indicate how such deaths could be prevented in the future,” Deitch said.

Law enforcement investigations expert Tim Dimoff agreed that the investigation could turn on those missing minutes.

“Those three minutes are important,” he said in an interview.

Dimoff is a former narcotics and SWAT officer who does consulting work for law enforcement agencies and other high-risk workplaces.

“If they don’t have the three minutes, then the question is, why don’t you?” he said. “The why becomes very important now, because those three minutes are probably going to reveal, potentially, why she died. … Three minutes is a very long gap that precedes any kind of death.”

Fort Worth police did not watch video as part of jail death investigation review

Bonner’s was one of over two dozen deaths in the Tarrant County jail that were not independently investigated by an outside law enforcement agency between October 2021 and July 2024. Instead, the Sheriff’s Office’s internal investigations into those deaths were reviewed by the Fort Worth Police Department.

But the detective who signed off on the review of the Sheriff’s Office’s investigation into Bonner’s death did not watch the videos in the case file, according to a department spokesperson.

The Police Department and the jail commission initially told the Star-Telegram they had not received the mounted camera footage from the Sheriff’s Office. Both called the Star-Telegram to change those statements after publication of an article featuring them last week.

The Star-Telegram asked the Police Department why the footage was not viewed by the reviewing officer and if the department would take another look at the investigation in light of the missing footage. The police spokesperson assigned to media requests regarding Bonner’s case said he was out of the office Monday and would respond on Tuesday.

Jail death investigation documents do not mention missing footage

The Star-Telegram first learned of the footage from a report filed by a crime scene investigator with the Sheriff’s Office. The report does not mention the missing footage.

The report covers Bonner’s first medical episode earlier the same morning, which aligns with the footage and the Sheriff’s Office’s communications regarding her death.

Bonner can be seen approaching the guard station around 9:08 a.m. She slumps over, and other incarcerated women are sent to their cells as a medical emergency is called. Bonner is taken to the medical floor in a wheelchair. She returns to the pod on her own volition at 10:04 a.m. and enters her cell.

“Approximately one hour later, an officer and the decedent’s cellmate open the cell door,” the investigator’s report states. “Medical personnel arrive to the cell and begin lifesaving medical procedures.”

The investigator’s report mentions footage with file names corresponding to a second batch of videos the jail commission sent to the Star-Telegram. The jail commission sent the footage with the missing three minutes on Wednesday, April 23. It sent the second batch on Friday, April 25.

The videos sent in the second batch are more heavily edited than the first the commission sent.

Wood was unable to say when the commission received the videos from the Sheriff’s Office.

Read more: Our coverage of Tarrant County Jail

Tarrant County sheriff offers explanation about missing video in jail death

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