WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — The family of a black Texas woman who was found dead in her jail cell after being arrested during a routine traffic stop filed a lawsuit yesterday against the police.

The family of Sandra Bland, 28, who authorities say hanged herself on July 13, question the official account of her death and say the lawsuit is needed to get answers.

“The reason that we filed a lawsuit today was because, candidly, we’ve been unable to get many of the answers that we’ve been asking for, for weeks,” attorney Cannon Lambert told a news conference in Houston.

The lawsuit names state trooper Brian Encinia, who pulled Bland over for not signalling before a lane change.

It also targets the Texas Department of Public Safety, Waller County Sheriff’s Office and two jailers in the Hempstead prison in which Bland was held for three days.

It seeks unspecified damages.

Lambert said the suit seeks to force the county and individuals involved to take responsibility.

“This family is frustrated because we don’t feel that has happened,” Lambert said.

“Mr Encinia is still employed, and it just doesn’t make sense that taxpayers will be paying for the type of service that he offered on July 10.”

Encinia is on administrative leave.

Regardless of whether Bland’s death was a suicide, they believe Encinia and others involved should be held accountable.

“She should not have been [in jail] in the first place,” Bland’s sister Sharon Cooper said.

“We are three weeks out from Sandra’s death, we are a week out from burying here, and we still don’t know what happened to her.”

Lambert also urged the US Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the “inconsistencies” surrounding Bland’s death.

These, he said, require “a fresh set of eyes, an unbiased set of eyes, a set of eyes that will find what actually happened to Sandra Bland.”

He said the family also wanted to pursue the suit because “they don’t want to see this sort thing happen to another family.”

The suit comes nearly a year after a police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off a ferocious national debate about how US police treat black suspects.