I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  Garner was gloomy after the bust. “He was getting locked up more and more,” Jewel says.

  —

  The news wasn’t all bad that spring.

  Garner’s sons were out of care, back home, and doing well. The now six-foot-eight Eric Jr. was getting attention as a budding basketball star. On the streets, Garner talked about his son constantly. He bragged up and down Tompkinsville about his exploits, said he was a better athlete than his favorite football player from the Giants, Plaxico Burress.

  The dream started to become a reality in the second week of April 2014. Eric and his son went to Newark for a few days to visit Essex County College, which was considering offering a scholarship to Eric Jr. He left for that trip in an excellent mood.

  Then on April 12, 2014, Jewel woke up feeling unwell. She had moved back to Staten Island by then, having gotten out of the Help 1 shelter in Brooklyn. She brought her four children into a small, single-family, Section 8–subsidized home not far from Tompkinsville. It had plain pine floors and there were a few cracks in the walls, but it was her own space, finally, and her mood was lifting again. But then on that April morning, everything changed.

  All of Jewel’s other children had been born at term. “They were all eight pounds,” she says. It never occurred to her, when she awoke that morning and found herself in discomfort, that she might be in labor.

  “I was at twenty-seven weeks,” she says. “ ‘Scared’ is not even the right word. I was traumatized.” At about eight thirty in the morning, she got into an ambulance with her son Cassius and her sister Tanisha, aka Pebbles.

  She was calling Eric’s cellphone frantically, but it kept going to voice mail. By the time they reached the hospital, Jewel was obviously in labor. Finally Eric called back and Jewel explained that she was in the hospital.

  “For what?” he asked. The due date for the baby was July 12, three whole months from then.

  Garner wasn’t ready for this news. “Oh, God,” he said. He told Jewel to call his mother and explained that he would get to her when he could.

  At the hospital, the news was bad. Doctors huddled up and explained that they would have to do an emergency C-section. “We don’t want to risk you straining or her turning; she’s too little,” they told Jewel. “We have to go get her.”

  Nearly a full day after admission, Jewel had the C-section. Legacy Garner was born on April 13. She weighed two pounds, one ounce. Pictures of her show an almost impossibly small child who had to be intubated and given regular transfusions to stay alive. She had her father’s face, but she also had his asthma.

  When she was born, her father wasn’t there. He was still away with Eric Jr. and didn’t get back until well after the birth.

  When Eric finally did arrive, the mood in the hospital wasn’t exactly celebratory. “It was just no words. Neither one of us really had words as we stood there,” Jewel recalls. Still in recovery, she was angry. “I was like, ‘You missed the birth,’ ” she says. She was also in a state about Legacy’s health. Eric kept talking to the doctors for her, but she wasn’t hearing it.

  “I was just like, ‘I’m over all of these people,’ ” she says. “These doctors, they keep saying she’s fine, and I’m not seeing anything fine about any of this.”

  Jewel was under no illusions. She knew things were probably beyond repair between her and Eric. “The trust was gone,” she says. So the scene at the hospital was melancholy.

  Legacy Garner was destined to stay in the hospital for nearly two months before coming home. She was so tiny that touching her was dangerous. Jewel’s father remembers that even months after her birth, he was afraid of breaking her bones just by holding her.

  As Jewel now sees it, there was a benefit to her premature birth. Eric Garner got to meet his daughter. Legacy’s due date was July 12, which turned out to be the last week of Eric Garner’s life.

  “I could have had her the nineteenth, I could have had her the twenty-fifth, you know?” Jewel says. “I’m just thankful that she had those three months with him.”

  —

  Eric and his oldest daughter, Erica, stayed close throughout the years, but it was a complicated relationship. This was particularly true in the last year of his life, when Eric went back to Esaw.

  “He was with her and I was fighting with her,” she remembers. “So it was awkward.”

  Erica saw Staten Island as a kind of sanctuary. By 2014, she was a young single mother who was struggling with money and trying to make some kind of living working at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Long Island City. At the time, she was living in Far Rockaway, a good distance from Staten Island.

  Still, every now and then, she would take a bus to Staten Island to go see her father. “Even if it was just for twenty dollars and a cigarette, it was a break,” she remembers. “And he used to talk to me.”

  She remembers particularly one meeting they had in early spring 2014. “It had to be April or May, because it was still a little cold,” she remembers. She came to Staten Island and sat in the front seat of his SUV, talking. Erica was despondent. She was stressed about money, angry that her opportunities seemed so limited. She was glad for the job at Dunkin’ Donuts, but was that all there was? How was she expected to live, and with a daughter?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should just go out and sell drugs. It’s easy money, isn’t it? You did it, right?”

  Garner stared at her.

  “Listen,” he said. “What I did, back then, I did because I had to stand up as a man and take care of my family. I didn’t have choices. But you do. You have people who will love you and help you. Don’t go down that road.”

  Erica asked her father how he was. She could see that he wasn’t well, that he had gained an enormous amount of weight, and that his diabetes had worsened.

  “Me? I’m fine,” he said.

  But she could see it wasn’t true. She thinks back on that moment now. “The thing about that last year is that he really was in pain.” She pauses. “My father suffered,” she says.

  But for all the problems he was having with police and with his health, and with getting stuck up on the streets, it wasn’t all bad for Eric. The pride over his son’s possible entrance into college had him beaming. His children were all out of care. There were disruptions, but some semblance of normalcy, too, was returning to his life. It wasn’t perfect, but at least his relationships with his kids were getting better.

  On Father’s Day, June 15, Eric met all of his older children out at Sternberg Park in Brooklyn. While the other family members hung out and ate barbecue, Garner pushed his two granddaughters—Erica’s daughter, Alyssa, and Emerald’s daughter, Kaylee—on a swing inside the park.

  At one point, Erica noticed that her father had been gone so long, he hadn’t spent any time with anyone else. She looked and saw him pushing the two girls, one after the other, lost in thought.

  She walked over to the swing set.

  “Dad, do you want a break?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “What? No, I’m good,” he said, and kept pushing, and pushing.

  —

  Thursday, July 10, 2014, was a day of mixed emotions.

  Garner had just found out that his son had been accepted for a scholarship. He had a picture on his phone of his son signing papers for Essex County College and was showing it around Bay Street. “He couldn’t stop talking about Eric Junior,” says McCrae, whose own son was a budding football star. “Went on and on about that shit. I must have seen that picture a hundred times.”

  Because of this, maybe, Garner was particularly impatient when police stopped him later that day.

  The NYPD has not confirmed that this incident took place. Still, the city’s police union would later say that Garner had been “warned” to stop selling cigarettes a week before his death, a likely reference to this incident.

  In any case, many on Bay Street say Garner was in that same check-cashing storefront on the corner of Bay and Victory when pol
ice tried, again, to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes.

  This time he didn’t even have six packs in his pockets. He had maybe a pack or two at the time he was stopped.

  “What, I can’t have a pack of cigarettes?” he snapped.

  Police argued with him. Garner recoiled, stood up to his full height, and said flatly that he wasn’t going to jail that day. Not on this particular day, not when the news was so good.

  “Fuck this shit, it’s too hot,” he said to the police. “I ain’t going.”

  James remembers that day. “He told them, ‘You’re not taking me nowhere,’ ” he says.

  There was a brief standoff, but ultimately police let it go.

  —

  Ramsey Orta was like Eric Garner in the sense that he didn’t come to Tompkinsville Park to hang out but to make money. Lean, wiry, and light skinned, the twenty-two-year-old sold pills and dope. Despite his slight frame, some in the park found him intimidating and unpredictable. He’d even tried to take Eric Garner for a pack of cigarettes once, which didn’t go over well, although they later became friends of a sort, despite the fact that Garner was much older.

  On the street, Ramsey was known to have a temper, and there was one thing he wasn’t shy about: he hated cops.

  He had his reasons. When Orta was still in his preteens, he pulled a knife in a fight at school and ended up getting sent away to a youth reform facility in the Bronx called Spofford.

  This notorious dungeon-like youth prison would eventually be closed down in 2011 amid complaints of guard abuse and unsanitary conditions. Ramsey had the bad luck to be there in its last days. He says the guards were too lazy to do their jobs and used to get the kids to do the dirty work.

  “[The guards] used to pay other inmates to try to keep the house in check,” he says. “I was actually one of the kids that was offered food from the outside to beat up other kids.”

  The way Orta tells it, the guards gave special privileges to their junior goon squads. “I used to get food from the street. I used to get longer phone calls. More visits. I used to get to do whatever I wanted in the house that I was in,” he says.

  “It was more like the cops would rather sit there and babysit than do they jobs, so they let us do their jobs.

  “And us doing their jobs was violent. Beating each other up.”

  At Spofford, Ramsey says he was asked to target any kid who’d done anything to incur the wrath of authorities.

  “It was like, ‘He makes the house hot, he’s gotta go.’ Or, ‘He’s always breaking things, he’s gotta go.’ Or, ‘He’s a thief, he’s gotta go,’ ” he says.

  After Spofford, he started getting in trouble almost right away. “It was a string of…getting high, getting trouble, little bullshit robberies here and there,” he says. From there it escalated. He had cases for menacing with a gun, assault, and drug dealing. There was a sex-assault case that was dismissed. Each time, Orta kept getting out with relatively thin penalties, a fact he now points to as more evidence of how crazy the system is.

  “I have over twenty-seven arrests, and fucking violent arrests and felonies and all that, why haven’t I done real jail time?” he says. “Why is that, if I’m such a criminal?”

  In May 2014, Orta got busted again, this time with a fifty-one-year-old man named Michael Price. In this bizarre case, Ramsey seemingly got arrested for ripping off a customer. The indictment describes how he received ten dollars from a man in return for an “undisclosed item,” and that instead of delivering, he told the man, “Fuck you, you’re beat.”

  That case was still open when Orta’s problems really began a few months later. This also happened to be the day that started Ramsey Orta down the road to being famous.

  The date was July 12, 2014. It was a Saturday afternoon. Orta watched as a figure named Jeff Thomas, who went by the nickname Blacko, was approached by police.

  Thomas had some things in common with men like Garner, John McCrae, and James Knight. He was past forty, African American, originally hailed from Brooklyn, had a record for drug dealing, had done time, and now called the quieter Staten Island his home. By all accounts he was long since out of the drug game, but he liked to come to the park, drink, and hang out.

  “Blacko liked to get his drink on, but he’s a good dude,” is how McCrae puts it.

  Two other facts about Thomas: he liked chess, and he had false teeth.

  “We was playing chess, listening to music, shit like that,” Orta recalls. “He was playing with the false teeth in his mouth. And the cops supposedly thought it was crack.”

  Thomas was pondering a chess move and playing with his dentures when suddenly he looked up and saw that he was surrounded by police.

  “Open your mouth,” they said.

  Police questioned him about what was in his mouth, apparently thinking he had drugs stashed in there and was trying to swallow contraband.

  Thomas explained: I just have false teeth.

  Police knocked him off his chair and tossed him to the ground. In an instant the usual arrest ritual was under way. He had two cops, a Hispanic man named Geovani Sanchez and a female officer described in court papers as a Jane Doe, on top of him. They were pushing Thomas face downward into the sidewalk.

  A third officer, tall and red faced with a close-cropped head, stood behind Thomas and pulled out his nightstick.

  Orta took out his cellphone and started filming.

  The police version of the story is that an officer on the scene spotted an open container of alcohol near Thomas and that Thomas refused to produce ID at police insistence. But he was never charged with an open container violation.

  However it got started, the way it finished is that Thomas took a beating in broad daylight. The red-faced John Doe officer behind Thomas started whacking his shins with the stick, while the other two police restrained and cuffed him.

  If this was over an open container of alcohol, why the hell was this necessary?

  Orta by then was filming, and the rest of the incident was captured.

  “Stop it!” a woman shouted. “Leave him alone!”

  But the police repeatedly slammed his legs. Orta started shouting at the policeman swinging the stick.

  “You fuckin’ big pussy!” he shouted. “Yo, he’s beating him up! Why y’all doing that?”

  When Orta got too close, the officer turned and raised his club in Orta’s direction. The idea of whacking the kid with the camera seemed to flash through his head, then he seemed to think better of it.

  “I wish you would swing that shit at me!” Orta yelled. “Yeah, swing that shit at me, g’head! G’head, tough guy!”

  The officer turned around.

  —

  There is a strange phenomenon in some of these police videos. It’s clear that in some cases, police are not only aware they’re being filmed, they also start acting, to affect the interpretation of the scene.

  In this case, someone among the officers began shouting at Thomas, who was already on the ground: “Stop resisting!”

  But Thomas didn’t look like he was in much shape to resist. He was already facedown and handcuffed. They kept hitting him on the legs anyway.

  “Look at his legs,” Orta shouted. “You got a lawsuit, Blacko!”

  Police started telling Orta to back up.

  “Step back,” said one.

  “You can tell me as many times as you want, I know my rights,” Orta snapped.

  “Back the fuck up. Record that shit over here.”

  “Y’all tough as hell beating on niggers,” Orta yelled. “Y’all tough as hell with them sticks!”

  Police hauled Thomas away.

  —

  Thomas reportedly tested negative when they checked his system for drugs. He couldn’t have swallowed anything. And if he never had an open container, then basically it was just one more stop gone wrong, a beating in broad daylight over nothing.

  But the police didn’t fold their hand. They followed the usual playboo
k and charged Thomas with obstructing government administration and resisting arrest.

  “The police are like a gang,” Thomas said at the time.

  Later on, the city quietly ended up dropping all charges against Thomas, all but admitting there was no real reason for the original arrest. Thomas himself vanished from Staten Island a few weeks later, not wanting to be in police crosshairs. The word on Bay Street was that he went to Brooklyn somewhere. He would later hire a lawyer and file a federal lawsuit against the Staten Island police.

  It was a textbook case of what police and lawyers both call “test-a-lying.” A police officer will come into court at a probable cause hearing, for instance, and a judge will ask him why he pulled over so-and-so’s car.

  The officer will respond in a deadpan: “I saw drugs lying on the center console of his vehicle.” Defense lawyers laugh about the omnipresent “center console” detail in arrest warrants.

  The drugs in reality will turn out to have been found in a jacket pocket, or under the seat, after an illegal fishing expedition. But the police will tell it in court another way. Particularly in misdemeanors and drug cases, cases without profile, judges routinely buy these dubious bits of testimony and let dirty cases move through the system.

  Judges rarely throw out police testimony, and even when they do, actual charges of perjury against a police officer are rare. That doesn’t mean that all or even most police are dirty. It just means that in places like Staten Island there’s little downside for police to cutting corners on arrest warrants and searches. If instead of waiting to see an actual crime committed, you want to just grab a guy off the street and shake him to see what comes out of his pockets, there’s a very good chance that it won’t stop your case from moving forward.

  Eric Garner’s court-appointed attorney that summer was Legal Aid’s Joe Doyle. At around the same time that Jeff Thomas was getting busted, Doyle had a client who came in facing weed charges. He’d been arrested after police claimed they smelled weed from inside their cruiser, one hundred feet away from the suspect. And they told that story in court. And it flew.