“When I walked in that jail, it was chills that shot all through my body,” Ta’Neasha Chappell’s mother, Lavita McClain, told WAVE 3 News.
Chappell’s family said Ta’Neasha warned them something was going to happen to her in there when she would call from the jail.
“You’re supposed to be safe and come out alive,” Chappell’s sister, Ronesha Murrell, said.
Jackson County’s population is 44,000, according to the latest U.S. Census. That’s where Chappell landed after a multi-county car chase and a shoplifting charge.
“That’s what she would always say,” her mother recalled. “I did the crime. I gotta do the time.”
But her stay ended up costing her family a lifetime of pain.
“This could have happened to anybody,” McClain said.
Chappell died July 16, but her family still doesn’t know how. The autopsy and toxicology reports will take a few more weeks, their attorneys, Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker, said. But one thing the attorneys do believe is that she suffered at the jail for more than 12 hours.