Beautiful 22-year-old mom Symone Marshall dies in police custody
A beautiful 22-year-old mother of a 3-year-old-daughter died in police custody on Tuesday, May 10, and nobody's talking. Not the police. Not the jail. Not the medical examiner. Not the local press.
Nobody.
If you Google her name, it's as if she never existed.
Symone Nicole Marshall, according to her family, was in a brutal car accident on April 26 in which her car flipped over several times before landing in a ditch.
Symone Nicole Marshall leaves behind a 3-year-old daughter.
(Courtesy Marshall Family)
Instead of being taken to the hospital, though, she was taken to the Walker County Jail in Huntsville, Tex., about an hour north of Houston.
Speaking to her sister, Honey, Symone said from jail that someone ran her off the road.
"My sister Symone moved to Texas for a fresh start in life a few months ago. She was doing good down there, had a job and was about to buy a house. She's a beautiful person, never been in trouble before and didn't deserve this," said Honey Marshall.
"When I talked to her from jail, she complained that her head was hurting and she kept blacking out," said her sister.
"I called the jail several times and requested for them to take her to a real hospital and they wouldn't do so. If they would have this, her death could have been prevented and my sister would still be here. My heart hurts so bad. She was my best friend. I am so angry that they did this to her."
Police and jail officials declined to comment or release information about the accident to the Daily News. Marshall's family also said they have not been able to get information from officials.
With all of the focus on police brutality on America's streets, another place full of injustice exists beyond the reach of cellphone cameras or accessible eyewitnesses — America's jails and prisons. They are chewing people up and spitting them out.
While 1,207 people were killed by American police in 2015, most estimates are that a number two or three times that size represent in-custody deaths. Nobody has a definitive answer.
And that's the problem — answers and facts are hard to come by when someone dies in police custody.
Marshall died after two weeks in the Walker County Jail without proper medical attention, her sister said.
(Courtesy Marshall Family)
Barring police coming out and saying, "You know what? We're going to shoot straight with you here. We killed your loved one. We're killers. It's what we do," it's almost impossible to understand exactly what happened here.
This much I do know:
Young black girls and women like Gynnya McMillen, Sandra Bland, and Natasha McKenna are going to local jails alive and leaving on stretchers and in body bags — never to be seen again.
wtf
How the fukk do you arrest the victim that was on the bad end result of a crash??? How do you not even call an ambulance that was clearly flipped over multiple times? So many questions to the stupidity of these police actions. Sounds like the person who ran her off might be one of their own and trying to cover up... 