THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The death of Kindra Darnell Chapman while in police custody seems like your basic jailhouse suicide. Until you start looking at the facts of the case.

Nine days after Kindra Darnell Chapman, an 18-year-old black woman, was found dead in a police holding cell in Homewood, Alabama, the district attorney’s office released preliminary findings that the death was a suicide. Despite that development, activists and Chapman’s family continued Thursday to question the circumstances of her death.

At 6:22 p.m. on July 14, Chapman was arrested in Homewood, an affluent suburb of Birmingham, for allegedly stealing a cellphone. She was charged with first-degree robbery, a felony offense, and placed in a holding cell by Homewood police officers. According to local news site AL.com, the police last saw her alive at 6:30 p.m.

According to AL.com, police said she was found unresponsive, hanging by a bedsheet in a holding cell, at 7:50 p.m. Officers took her to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

OK, bedsheet, hour and twenty minutes between cell checks, it seems to fit.

According to the press release, his office has received reports from Homewood police officers and video from the night of Chapman’s death and has interviewed someone who was in custody at the jail when she died. He said there is no evidence on any of the videos that she was injured as she was transported or booked into the jail. He said video of her in the jail cell appears to show her agitated and attempting to “damage the contents of the cell.” According to him, the video later showed her taking her own life.

Nobody monitoring the video seems a bit disturbing, but this is in Alabama. But there is more.

On Tuesday, Black Lives Matter staged a protest with about a dozen people outside the jail. Local activist and group member Mercutio Southall Sr. and five other activists were arrested and briefly detained. He said the holding cell where he was detained — one of two that he saw in the jail — had two cameras trained on it and was less than 5 feet from the processing office and along a heavily trafficked hallway leading to the department’s back door.

“We were never in there for three minutes without an officer passing by,” he said.

According to him, another activist in the cell, Mark Myles, was using his cellphone, and officers immediately showed up and took it away. While Southall was waiting in the holding cell, he said he could hear protesters in the processing office shouting “no justice, no peace.”

“We heard them. How could the officers not have heard [Chapman]? So how could they not hear the girl hanging herself, but we heard them? How could they not see the girl hanging herself?” he said.

According to Falls’ statement, Chapman was left alone in her cell while officers transported inmates from the jail to the Homewood Municipal Court for hearings.

Southall also questioned why — and even if — there was a sheet in her holding cell.

“The holding cell in Homewood — I am speaking from experience — it’s a cage with a metal bench. There’s no sheets. There’s no nothing.”

How curious is it that Alabama police would be so solicitous of a black woman that they would give her a sheet in the holding cell?