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LEGAL VIEW WITH ASHLEIGH BANFIELD

FBI: Gunman "Crashed Through The Gate" At Chattanooga Navy Center; Dashcam Video Shows Sandra Bland, Police Altercation; Trooper To Bland: "I Will Light You Up!"; Talk With Colorado Theater Shooting Survivor. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired July 22, 2015 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


[12:30:02] JOEY JACKSON, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Now obviously, any response to his aggressive act of terrorism, you know, would have been justified. He's attacking marines, he's attacking an institution. But at the same time, we want to know where those bullets came from, you know, just to track down the sequence of events, the series of events and exactly how this occurred.

RANDI KAYE, CNN ANCHOR: Tom, does it surprise you that, as we heard for the first time today that not only did he crashed the gate but that he did get into the building?

TOM FUENTES, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Actually, it does surprise me a little bit but, you know, they have the gates out there presumably to keep people from getting that far. So once he gets through the gate forcibly with his vehicle, then he makes it to the front door and gets inside.

So I think once that gate is crashed, you know, really, you don't know what's going to happen from that point. He's dictating it by pursuing his attack, by continuing the attack, by shooting and then entering the building, shooting more and then following people out to the back area, a gated area behind the building. So, you know, he's the one pursuing this attack all the way start to finish.

KAYE: All right, so we'll talk more about this. I'm sure in the coming days Tom Fuentes, Joey Jackson, thank you both.

Almost a week now, after Mohammad Abdulazeez killed those four U.S. Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga and was himself killed as you know in that process. Investigators are still trying to find out everything they can about his motive and his contacts and whether anybody else might have played a part in this.

My colleague Drew Griffin is joining me now from Atlanta. He has much more on that.

Drew nice to see you, what have you been able to find?

DREW GRIFFIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, we've been talking mostly to the friends, close friends of this dead suspect who are so surprised by all of this. Many of them have been contacted by the FBI, by this investigation, some of them have had their apartments and homes even searched by the FBI. They are quite frankly, Randi, perplexed by all of this. And one of them shared text messages that their group had as they were finding out what was unfolding in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is a group which Mohammad Abdulazeez belonged to and I want to show you, just as an example of how stunned their friends were. This is right after it happened.

One reads, "It can't be our Abdulazeez. Man." And then there's an expletive. "What is wrong with him?" Sami (ph) just text me that he's dead. Did anyone had any idea? This is crazy. He was just still in our group message. We were talking to us and everything."

These people were texting and I've seen texts before when Abdulazeez was alive. He was more or less the spiritual leader of a very small group that was going through Ramadan and they were talking Quran text and rules back and forth but as the day develops and they do learn, it is their friend, one writes "It was just the other day we had Iftar. I saw him the night before yesterday, he was calm, always calm about everything, normal and then this. Did he ever talk about Jihad any? Anybody talk about Jihad? Dude he just had a new job and everything. This is out of nowhere. May Allah forgive him and all of us. Amen. Brother, there is no forgiveness for taking innocent lives."

That is consistent with what many of the friends have told us, that this was simply out of the blue. I know there's a lot of investigations going on about his writings from more than a year ago, Randi, but just days, days before this shooting, his friends described him as happy, calm, and certainly not mentioning anything about radical Islam or attacking U.S. facilities.

KAYE: Now it says -- sounds like they were just as surprised as the rest of the country. Drew Griffin, thank you very much. Appreciate your reporting.

Up next, dash cam footage that shows a woman arrested in Texas. She's the same woman who would take her own life in jail just three days later. Did this arrest play a part in her death? I'll talk to her family attorney.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:37:35] KAYE: Welcome back. You're about to see a police traffic stop escalate from a low volume routine conversation to a physical confrontation in just a matter of seconds.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN ENCINIA, TEXAS STATE TROOPER: Get out of the car! I will light you up. Get out!

SANDRA BLAND: Wow.

ENCINIA: Now.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KAYE: This is the dash cam recording the arrest of Sandra Bland in Prairie View, Texas. Now, police called Bland's behavior argumentative and uncooperative with the arresting officer.

Three days after this, Sandra Bland would be found dead in a jail cell. Officials say it was suicide but they're investigating her death as they would homicide.

Watch this. There's a bit more of that dash cam recording when Trooper Brian Encinia returned to Sandra Bland's car window.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ENCINIA: Do you mind putting out your cigarette, please? If you don't mind.

BLAND: I am in my car. I don't have to put out my cigarette.

ENCINIA: Well, you can step on out now.

BLAND: I don't like to step out on my car now.

ENCINIA: Step out of the car.

BLAND: No, I'm not.

ENCINIA: Step out of the car.

BLAND: No, you don't have the right -- you do not ...

ENCINIA: Step out of the car.

BLAND: You do not have the right to do that.

ENCINIA: Yeah, I do have the right. Now, step out or I will remove you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAYE: Cannon Lambert is an attorney representing Sandra Bland's family. Cannon, nice to see you.

This video is new to us and to the public but you first saw it just a few days ago. Do you and the family believe that the way she was arrested might have contributed to her death three days later? Are you connecting the arrest to her time in jail?

CANNON LAMBERT, ATTORNEY: Listen. It doesn't start until it starts, right? I mean, if there is no encounter at all then we're not here. So there is no question that they're interconnected.

KAYE: But how so though?

LAMBERT: Well, in the sense that you have an officer that ultimately makes a decision to overstep his authority. And then when that officer goes about pulling her out of the car and the way that -- I shouldn't say pulling her out of the car, but having her come out of the car in a way that he does and then ultimately arrest her. It's hard to believe that when that officer took her to jail that he didn't communicate how he was feeling, we can see that he was in an agitated state. And as a consequence, I'm certain that that was communicated to the individuals that were at the jail.

KAYE: Let me ask you about the tape, because police say they describe it as glitchy. That it was not edited they're saying and that they will be releasing a -- this cleaner version as they call it of the full video.

[12:40:06] They say the problem really was in the posting of it because we do see some repetition and some jumps in the video. What is your take on this video?

LAMBERT: Well, I think that the take is is that it's a wait and see approach because when you do see the types of glitches that we're talking about, it does give you pause. Now, I'm not in a position where I'm prepared to point fingers necessarily but I'm certainly interested in trying to make sure that from a forensic standpoint that we don't have any issues.

KAYE: Would you say just in terms of behavior, I mean, what -- where do you think this officer went wrong and where do you think possibly Sandra Bland went wrong?

LAMBERT: Well, I'll tell you. I think that when you're a peace officer you should be a peace officer. When you go and you look to agitate people when you're stopping them for what you yourself believe to be routine, that's kind of troubling, right?

And so when he asks her a question and she answers the question. The fact that you don't like the answer shouldn't drive you to the next elevated state when you know yourself that you're not in a position to force someone to put out the cigarette, you shouldn't recoil from them that saying they don't want to and then escalate even further and make her. That's just not what I think good policing is all about.

KAYE: What do you expect to find from the family's independent autopsy?

LAMBERT: Well, obviously we're looking to try and determine what the cause of death is and we're trying to determine whether or not there are some things that will help us to understand specifically how it is that we lost Sandy, you know, it's one of those things where it's an ongoing investigation, there's so much information and there's so much information that we're wanting to get our hands on until you do you don't know what it's going to reveal.

KAYE: Cannon Lambert, I appreciate your time and do keep us up to date on what you're finding thank you.

LAMBERT: And Randi, I do want to -- Randi if I may, if I can, I just wanted to extend our heartfelt condolences to the DuBose family. The Bland family wanted to very much extend their condolences to them.

KAYE: All right, thank you very much, appreciate that.

All right, so let's talk more about this with Joey Jackson who is back with us HLN's legal analyst and Harry Houck is here as well, CNN law enforcement analyst.

All right Harry, I want to start with you on this because you've sit there you've been where this officer was -- cooperative. How does a trooper handle that? How are they supposed to handle that.

HARRY HOUCK, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, it depends on the situation. In a situation like this, it appears that the officer might got little agitated because she wouldn't put the cigarette out.

The fact is, I can't read the officer's mind, I don't know if that's the reason why he pulled her out of the car although it does appear that way on the video. The fact is maybe the officer felt that, you know, that he might have been in danger, had to bring her out of the car, may be as a result of her agitation and the way she was talking towards the officer he decided OK, now I'm going to issue a summons, because in the end of the video it indicates that he was not going to initially give her a summons at all.

KAYE: Right. I was going to bring that up because he actually said I was going to give you a warning.

HOUCK: Right.

KAYE: Then now with this behavior all of a sudden he's arresting her and she says that she's in her car and he has no right to tell her to put out her cigarette or get out of her car, is that right?

JOEY JACKSON, HLN LEGAL ANALYST: As a former prosecutor, I'm troubled by what the officer did and certainly as a defense attorney I am for a variety of reasons. The first of which and I certainly get and understand that officer safety is paramount Randi, you want to be safe and you want to maintain certainly the situation and control of it, but it would seem to me that asking someone to get out of a car would escalate a matter and with further represent a danger to your safety than having them in that contained environment.

Furthermore, it didn't appear to me that while she said that she didn't want to put out her cigarette, it didn't appear to me that she was otherwise rude and disrespectful to him personally or represented a danger to him personally. And so he says it's a lawful order and in my view, a lawful order is one that has, you know, underlying lawful authority and so if I'm smoking a cigarette in my car, I don't know how that necessarily gets an officer to tell me to stop, you know, I look and I scanned the statutes of Texas and there's no statute pertaining to smoking in front of a police officer. And so that's problematic to him.

KAYE: I mean, she was basically saying I don't even have to give you my name or my I.D. I don't have to get out of the car.

HOUCK: Well while she did say something about giving her I.D., but the fact is once I think the officer had decided that time it was going to place her under arrest for the motor vehicle violation, that's why he decided to tell her to get out of the vehicle.

And of course he told her like at least 11 times to get out of the vehicle, she wouldn't and then when he finally brought out the taser and said I'm going to light you up, she decided she needed to get out of the car now, because she know she was going to get hit with the taser.

Now when she got out of the car she was even more comparative with the officer, all right it got to the point where she even kicked the officer, I think this was after she was handcuffed though we can't see it in the video, so...

JACKSON: So he says.

[12:45:00] HOUCK: Yeah, exactly. And -- But you see the police officer walking up to him who arrived on the scene, there's a black female officer, walks up to him and says, "Are you OK?" And he goes, "She hit me in the leg," and we actually saw what happened.

But the fact that when see a -- when a police officer tells you to do something -- I mean if he tells you jump off a bridge, you don't jump off a bridge. But if you're being stopped by a police officer, you have to follow all his directions and if you don't this is what could happen.

KAYE: Even if you -- let's look at the arrest...

HOUCK: Well, I'm not saying the smoking was the right thing to do.

KAYE: Right, let's look at the arrest and then well talk a little bit more here.

Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ENCINIA: OK, ma'am. You OK?

BLAND: I'm waiting on you. This is your job. I'm waiting on you running...

ENCINIA: Oh you seemed very irritated?

BLAND: I am, I really am. But I was getting out of your way, you were speeding up tailing on me. So I move over and you stop me. So, yeah, I am a little irritated but that doesn't stop you from giving me a ticket somehow.

ENCINIA: Are you done?

BLAND: You asked me what was wrong and I told you.

ENCINIA: OK.

BLAND: So now I'm done again.

ENCINIA: You mind putting out your cigarette please if you don't mind.

BLAND: I'm in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?

ENCINIA: Or you can step on out now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAYE: What about the -- OK.

JACKSON: So why is he asking her to step out of the car, because she wouldn't put out of the cigarette? And his report is I have in front of me he says he wanted her out for his safety. So as her putting -- not putting out a cigarette, is that implicate her safety? And how was changing lanes without signaling an arrestable offense.

You know, my dad always used to tell me as a former police officer that he was or as a police officer that he was he use to tell me -- may he rest in peace. That the biggest weapon that he had in his arsenal was his interpersonal communication. And it's important to diffuse a situation before you go to a taser, before you go to a baton, before you go to a gun and it seems to me by even asking her you seem a bit agitated, that seems to me to be escalating something.

I'm never happy to get a ticket, not that I get that many but the reality is we don't want to get a ticket then of course were agitating.

KAYE: But just very quickly because I know she -- and a lot of people talk about this. She was also recording this can she do that? Can she record what was happening?

HOUCK: Of course.

KAYE: She can. But he told her to put the phone down.

HOUCK: Yeah, but he record it, I mean we see that happen a lot, officers shouldn't be telling people things like that. I think she decided she was -- it sounded to me like she said she wanted to make a phone call to somebody instead of recording it.

I didn't really hear that clearly, so the officer didn't want her to make a phone call because that would have been, you know, that would have maybe somehow endangered his life or may be she were trying to make some kind of a move after that, and that's why the officer did that.

KAYE: All right, we will leave it there Harry Houck, Joey Jackson nice to see you guys as always thank you.

Meanwhile last night Sandra Bland's mother spoke about her daughter's death at a vigil at Prairie View and A&M University, her daughters Alma matter, where she was about to start a new job.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GENEVA REED-VEAL, SANDRA BLAND'S MOTHER: Now I know my purpose is, my purpose is to go back to Texas. My purpose, my Lord, is to stop all social injustice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAYE: Up next, he killed 12 people in a movie theater. Now 12 jurors in Colorado will decide if he lives or dies as day one of the penalty phase for James Holmes gets underway. We'll talk to one of the survivors saved by her boyfriend's heroic act.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:51:58] KAYE: A jury of nine women and three men decided the man who shot and killed 12 people at a crowded movie theater in Colorado is a murderer and not insane. Now the penalty phase for James Holmes begins.

Prosecutors are trying to prove several aggravating factors, reasons they say he should be sentenced to death. The alternative is life without parole for him. The story though is about so much more than the killer. It is about the heroes from that night.

Men, who gave their lives shielding their girlfriends from gunfire, like Jonathan Blunk, a 26-year-old, father of two who served five years in the Navy and put himself in harm's way to save his girlfriend.

Jansen Young, survived that night and she's here with us because of her boyfriend Jonathan. She joins us from Denver to share a bit more about her story.

Jansen, I'm sure still even after all this time, it's hard to talk about, but tell me what Jonathan did that night to save your life?

JANSEN YOUNG, THEATER SHOOTING SURVIVOR: He just knew immediately. He recognized the sounds I guess and he said "Jansen, get down and stay down." And he pushed me on to the ground on my belly and then pushed me underneath the seat and kind of -- he was boxing me in on my left side and so I was like covered by seats on all other sides and he passed away saving my life. He was a true hero.

KAYE: And you felt him up against you and at one point, you didn't feel any pressure from him, is that right? Is that when you knew something that happened to him?

YOUNG: Well, I was -- I mean; I heard heavy breathing, like three heavy breaths. And they did not sound, you know, like regular breathing. And so I assumed something was wrong but I couldn't imagine that it was Jon even though I felt his hands on my back and he gave me one final push and I don't feel his hands again. But it was still hard to imagine that that was Jon. I kept -- I don't know who else I thought it was but I just kept thinking that that couldn't have been him that was doing of heavy breathing.

KAYE: We spend way too much time talking about the suspect in this case. So talk about Jon. Tell me what his hopes were for the future.

YOUNG: You know, he really wanted to join the military again. He was talking to a recruiter all the time. He was just mostly preparing for that. He works really hard. He had two jobs. He was just really trying to get stable. And me and him talked about our future together a lot. Yeah, he was just, like, really excited to join the military again and continue to thrive.

KAYE: And tell me what you would like to see happen? I mean, now we are in the sentencing phase beginning today for this suspect, what would you like to see happen at this point to your boyfriend's killer?

YOUNG: Well, it's hard to say -- at first -- I mean, six months after the shooting when the prosecution started asking victims "How do you feel? How do you, you know, want this to proceed?" I continuously said "The death penalty, death penalty, death penalty" because that's what Jon would have wanted.

[12:55:15] And at the time even though I was a little less for the death penalty, I was, like, kind of on defense about it and that's what's Jon would wanted. So I was "OK, I'm doing this."

And it wasn't until the prosecution announced that that's what they were fighting for that I really started to feel guilt. I woke up the next morning after they sent out the e-mail. And I was just, like, "Oh, my gosh, I kind of made a vote on somebody's life and even though he was a -- he's a very bad person, I just didn't feel comfortable with that. And as time has gone on and it's gotten closer to sentencing, I've been weighed down by the guilt.

And so now I'm kind of torn and I don't know like, there's a part of me that knows that that's what Jon would have wanted. And I want that for Jon that there's another part of me that is really feeling guilt about this. And I -- so I don't really know what -- I don't know what you expect what's going to happen during sentencing but I think I can learn to live with either outcome.

KAYE: Well, nobody can blame you for not knowing, certainly a very difficult thing to try and decide for anyone close to that case.

Jansen Young, thank you so much for talking with us today, I appreciate it.

YOUNG: Yeah, thanks.

KAYE: And thank you everyone for watching, I'm Randi Kaye.

Wolf starts right after a very quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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