North Carolina authorities are investigating the death of a 34-year-old Black woman who died while being held at the Durham County jail on Tuesday.

Four days after being booked into the jail, Brittany Kittrell was taken to the hospital for medical treatment for an undisclosed injury or illness, the sheriff’s office said, according to The News & Observer.

On Jan. 15, she was arrested and charged with breaking and entering to terrorize or injure, robbery with a dangerous weapon, among other serious and drug-related charges.

Brittany Kittrell was being held on $5,000 bail when she died in police custody nearly two years after Durham County judges were instructed to consider other options besides secured bonds.https://t.co/kUYDCuTG6O
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— NewsOne (@newsone) January 28, 2021

Kittrell had been placed in the jail’s classification area due to quarantine policy and would have stayed there for a total of two weeks had she not died, AnnMarie Breen, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, told The News & Observer. The sheriff’s office also revealed that Kittrell's official cause of death is still being determined by the state medical examiner.

The county has only told her family that Kittrell collapsed while going into a pod at the detention center, The Indy Week reports. After being rushed to a nearby hospital, she went into cardiac arrest, where doctors spent two hours trying to resuscitate her.

Kittrell’s family is outraged by the lack of information regarding her mysterious death.

“How did she die?” Terraye Morris, Kittrell's sister, asked. “We just want an autopsy. She died in jail. Anything could have happened. No one is telling us the cause.”

One week before her death, Kittrell spoke with her family on a video call, according to The Indy.

“She really didn’t talk. She just stared at us. She always stared at us. But this was a different kind of stare,” Morris said.

The family was told they would have to “wait until her case is over because she was in jail, and we have to wait until her blood [tests] come back,” Morris, 28, said.

The Indy reports that the family has reached out to the state medical examiner’s office, but the office in Raleigh hasn’t returned their calls.

Morris revealed that before Kittrell's body was transported to Raleigh, it was inspected by a contracted Durham examiner with the state medical examiner’s office.

“The lady said she had very serious concerns about not knowing the reason why Brittany died,” Morris began. “The unusual thing was [Brittany] had internal bleeding. She sent the body to Raleigh, but first took blood and sent it over.”

The local examiner refused to comment on the case, and deferred any question to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

In an email shared with The Indy, Kelly Haight Connor said that “every death investigation conducted by the [Office of the Chief Medical Examiner] has its own unique set of facts and circumstances, and the length of time to complete a case can vary based on a number of factors.”

Kittrell, who's survived by three young children, studied nursing in New York before moving to Durham, North Carolina, and working for IBM. She later struggled with substance abuse disorder and often denied her family’s help in seeking treatment.

Morris said despite Kittrell distancing herself from the family recently, they are more concerned with the cause of her death and why it happened.

“The main thing we want to know now is how she died,” Morris said.

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