Georgia Woman Dies After Falling Out Of Patrol Car Despite Requirement For Locked Doors

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into the death of 28-year-old Brianna Marie Grier, who died four days after falling out of a moving police cruiser.

Grier died at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. Her death came after she suffered significant injuries from falling out of a patrol car driven by two deputies with the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office, 13 WMAZ reported.

Grier’s family says between Thursday, July 14, and Friday, July 15, Grier came home and was battling a schizophrenic episode. Her mother called the police for help and two officers arrived between midnight and 1:00 a.m.

But after watching their daughter get handcuffed and placed in the back of the cruiser, Mary and Marvin Grier received a call. Their daughter had been airlifted to the hospital with a head injury.

Brianna Grier had two fractures in her skull and died from her injuries at around 1:00 p.m. Thursday. Police told the grieving parents that Brianna kicked her way out of the police cruiser.

“If I had known it was going to turn out like this, God knows I wouldn’t have called [the police] to come and get her,” Mary Grier said.

Brianna Grier had been in a coma since the encounter, her sister, Lottie Grier, told NBC News. But her ventilator was removed after a doctor told relatives that she was “brain dead.”

“I just broke down and cried because it’s just ridiculous how she laying up there with tubes and pipes everywhere on her for no reason because it didn’t have to be that. It didn’t have to be that,” Mary Grier said.

Now the family has questions about the officers’ claims and wants answers.

“If she got out the car, they had to let her out the car,” Mary Grier said. “That’s my interpretation, because in a police car, you can’t open the door from the inside, it had to be the outside.”

She’s right. Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police training, told NBC News in a text message that patrol cars are “ALWAYS supposed to be locked from the inside.”

The case remains under investigation.