Editor’s note: His final three words became the battle cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. This year, July 16 is the eleventh anniversary of Eric Garner’s murder. It would take more than five years after his murder until Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City Police Department officer who suffocated him to death in a chokehold, was fired. Columnist Solomon Jones depicts the following scene of Garner’s lynching in detail in Ten Lives, Ten Demands: Life-and-Death Stories, and a Black Activist’s Blueprint for Racial Justice. Despite all the evidence stacked against Pantaleo and his history of abusing his authority, the police force protected him.
***
In the early afternoon of July 17, 2014, New York Police lieutenant Christopher Bannon was driving to a meeting when he spotted a group of men at Bay Street and Victory Boulevard on Staten Island. They appeared to be selling individual cigarettes—commonly known as loosies. Such activity was not unusual there.
However, the community was starting to gentrify, and authorities in New York were focusing on quality-of-life issues—a strategy often referred to as “broken windows” policing. Bannon, who is white, didn’t have time to stop himself, so he called back to the 120th precinct and told the desk sergeant to send officers to clear the corner. The police viewed the men selling loosies along Bay Street as negative “conditions” that needed to be dealt with. Eric Garner was one of those men.
Standing six feet two and weighing over 350 pounds, Eric was hard to miss, and the police rarely did. The Black father of six had already been arrested or harassed numerous times for selling loosies on Staten Island. In his most recent encounter, which occurred earlier that month, Eric was approached by police and flailed his arms and complained of harassment until they let him go with a warning. This time would be different, though. With their commanders pressuring them to do something about the corner, the officers couldn’t come back empty-handed.
As the lieutenant’s edict made its way to the two officers who would eventually arrive on Bay Street, Eric went about his day, oblivious to what was coming.
After eating lunch with his friend Ramsey Orta, who is Latino and twenty years younger than Eric, he saw two men get into a heated argument. A witness named Taisha Allen told the New York Times that one of the men was a father. The other was a man who was known on the block as Twin. The father accused Twin of saying something disrespectful to his daughter. Then he punched Twin in the face, prompting Eric Garner to jump between them and hold them apart.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Eric said, according to Allen’s recollection. “There are kids out here.”
The role of peacemaker was a familiar one for Eric, who was described by friends as a gentle giant. His interest in stopping fights was not entirely altruistic, though. Eric, a devoted husband and father, supported his family by selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on Bay Street. Fights attracted police, and police were bad for business.
In fact, the denizens of Bay Street thought the two white plainclothes officers who showed up a few minutes later were there about the fight. However, when the officers got out of the car after circling the block twice, they didn’t try to find the fighters. They instead made a beeline for the big man in the gray T-shirt and cargo shorts—the man who had made the fighters move on.
Eric immediately recognized one of the cops. His name was John D’Amico, and he was the 120th precinct’s “quality of life coordinator.” D’Amico had stopped Eric two weeks earlier for allegedly selling loose cigarettes and let him go with a warning. The other officer, Daniel Pantaleo, normally worked in a unit that handled violent street crime. Both were veterans of the force—D’Amico had approximately four years of experience, and Pantaleo had about eight.
When they approached Eric, there was some back-and-forth between Eric and the officers before Ramsey Orta raised his phone and started filming. Taisha Allen, who is Black, also recorded parts of the encounter and its aftermath. Police transcripts compiled from several videos and reviewed by the New York Times say Eric was exasperated when D’Amico approached him.
“What are you talking about?” Eric asked D’Amico. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t sell anything. I didn’t sell nothing. I didn’t do shit. . . . Minding my business, a fight breaks out. I stopped it. . . . The people that’s fighting, you just let them walk away? Are you serious?”
As Ramsey Orta continued to film the interaction, D’Amico told Orta, whose bike was nearby, to “take a ride down the block.”
“I live here,” Orta said.
Then, as a Black woman stepped into the frame to ask for Officer D’Amico’s name, which he gave her, Eric continued to protest his innocence.
“I didn’t do nothing,” Eric said. “What did I do?”
D’Amico asked Eric for identification, and Eric told him he didn’t have it. Then, when D’Amico said they were going to take him in, Eric questioned him again.
“Take me back for what?” he said. “I didn’t sell anything. I did nothing. We sitting here the whole time, minding our business.”
D’Amico told Eric that he saw him sell cigarettes.
Eric asked, “Who did I sell a cigarette to? To who?”
D’Amico pointed up the street and referenced someone wearing a red shirt. Eric Garner grew more upset. Ramsey Orta complained loudly that Eric was being harassed for breaking up a fight. Observers gathered around them, and Eric became more agitated.
The exchange continued for a few seconds more, and D’Amico gave an ultimatum. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said.
“Easy way or the hard way for what?” Eric said. “Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. This stops today. No. What you bothering me for? Everybody standing here they’ll tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing.”
D’Amico asked Eric a question that was difficult to hear in the video, but Eric’s answer was clear.
“Because every time you see me, you want to harass me,” he said. “You want to stop me talkin’ about I’m selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer. I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone.”
Pantaleo, who had called for backup during the exchange, positioned himself behind Eric Garner and told him to put his hands behind his back.
“Please, please don’t touch me,” Eric said. “Do not touch me.”
That’s when Pantaleo put one of his arms under Eric’s arm and the other around his neck. As Pantaleo employed the chokehold, the two men tumbled against the glass window of a beauty supply store. Then, as Pantaleo held on, they fell to the ground with Pantaleo’s arm still fastened tightly around Eric Garner’s neck.
Three other officers, including D’Amico, moved in to hold Eric down as Pantaleo pressed Eric’s head against the pavement.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” Eric said, begging for air as the officers violently restrained him.
While Eric struggled for his next breath, a Black uniformed patrol sergeant named Kizzy Adonis stepped into the frame of Orta’s video. Two witnesses, including beauty store manager Rodney Lee, told the New York Times that Sergeant Adonis told the officers to “let up” on Eric, since he’d already been subdued.
The officers did not appear to obey that order, and as the struggle ended with Eric Garner lying motionless on the ground, the sergeant who’d sent the officers to Bay Street showed up at the scene.
“What’s going on?” precinct sergeant Dhanan Saminath asked Pantaleo, according to the Washington Post. “How did this happen?”
After Pantaleo offered his version of events, Saminath, who is Asian, told the officers to search the dying man. They did so, and allegedly found four packs of Newports in the pockets of Eric’s cargo shorts. Sergeant Saminath also asked if an ambulance had been called. He was told that it was on the way.
When the ambulance arrived from Richmond University Medical Center at 3:36 p.m., Emergency Medical Technician Nicole Palmieri, who is white, checked for a pulse.
“Sir. It’s EMS,” Palmieri said to Eric. “C’mon. We’re here to help, all right. We’re here to help you. We’re getting the stretcher. All right?”
Eric was unresponsive, but Palmieri did not render any assistance to him—a move that befuddled bystanders who repeatedly asked why no one was trying to resuscitate Eric.
While Palmieri checked for a pulse, another EMT, Stephanie Greenberg, walked back to the ambulance for the stretcher. An EMT trainee followed Greenberg, walking away from Eric with the oxygen equipment he needed.
As bystanders continued to ask why no one was trying to render medical aid, they were told by a police officer that Eric was breathing. Of the five medical workers who responded to the scene, none of them gave him oxygen as he lay on the ground.
According to hospital records, by the time they got Eric onto the stretcher, he went into cardiac arrest. Sergeant Saminath told D’Amico and Pantaleo to escort the ambulance to the hospital. Then, at 4:11 p.m., Saminath sent a text message to Lt. Chris Bannon, whose earlier call to the precinct had set the day’s events in motion.
“Danny and Justin went to collar Eric Garner and he resisted,” Saminath wrote in the text message. “When they took him down he went into cardiac arrest and is unconscious. Might be DOA.”
“For the smokes?” Bannon replied.
“Yeah, they observed him selling,” Saminath answered, adding that an ambulance had been called. “Danny tried to grab him and they both fell down. He’s most likely DOA. . . . He has no pulse.”
Christopher Bannon wrote a four-word response while Eric Garner lay dying as the result of one of his officer’s actions.
“Not a big deal,” Bannon wrote via text message.
By 4:15, emergency room doctors could not detect Eric’s pulse, and at 4:34, they declared him dead.
~~~
The fight for justice in the death of Eric Garner seemed to have everything necessary to succeed. There was the viral video, which clearly showed that Officer Daniel Pantaleo had employed a chokehold—a move banned by the New York Police Department (NYPD) since the 1990s. There was police chief William Bratton admitting that Pantaleo appeared to use a chokehold. There were Eric Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” which served as a potent rallying cry. There were protesters of every stripe who were angered by what they saw. But in spite of all that, the fight for justice in Eric Garner’s death was no match for the system set up to fight against it.
Officer Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold immediately became the focus of the fight, was shielded by a police department and a police union. Both quickly closed ranks to protect him.
Just hours after Eric died, a report known as a 49 was prepared for police commanders. That five-page internal report made no mention of the chokehold. In fact, it made no mention of any officer making contact with Eric’s neck.
The report also quoted a witness named Taisha Allen as saying that “the two officers each took Mr. Garner by the arms and put him on the ground.”
Taisha Allen told the New York Times that the statement the police claimed she made was inaccurate. Video of the incident backed her claim and made it plain that Pantaleo had indeed used a chokehold to bring down Eric Garner.
It was the video, in fact, that aided in medical examiner Floriana Persechino’s determination of the cause of death. Persechino, who at the time was a twenty-year veteran of the medical examiner’s office, watched the footage of Eric’s last moments, and after performing her autopsy, determined “compression of the neck, chokehold,” as the cause of death. She listed chest compression, asthma, and hypertension as contributing factors.
She determined that the manner of death was homicide.
But even as the medical examiner made it clear that Eric Garner’s life was taken on that fateful day in Staten Island, the criminal justice system was lining up to protect the man who was responsible for that violent act.
~~~
The Demand: Make all police disciplinary and dismissal records public so that dangerous officers who are fired by one department cannot be hired by another, and create a federal database of former officers that departments can use to conduct thorough and mandatory background checks on all applicants.
About the Author
Solomon Jones is an award-winning columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and morning host for WURD radio in Philadelphia. He is also a host for Classix 107.9 and a blogger for NPR affiliate WHYY. Jones is an Essence best-selling author who has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, Nightline, and CNN. In 2019, Jones formed the Rally for Justice Coalition with a multitude of civil rights organizations. The coalition’s efforts resulted in the firing of over a dozen Philadelphia police officers who espoused racist rhetoric online. Connect with him at solomonjones.com.
Beacon Broadside 
Leave a comment