I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  “The judge was like, ‘Okay,’ ” Doyle says, shaking his head. “What can you do?”

  Sometimes these half-legal or even plainly illegal arrests and searches turn up bags of weed or knives or other contraband. But sometimes the busts come up snake eyes, and all you end up with is a guy with false teeth and bruises all over his body. Or worse.

  —

  Eric Garner spent all summer telling those close to him that he was exhausted being out on the street. “He was really tired of it, he really was,” says Esaw.

  He was only forty-three, but he felt much older. He would talk sometimes about somehow getting away from the streets and spending his later years watching his grandchildren. Garner had good memories of visiting his grandmother’s apartment in the Coney Island Houses as a child and wanted to re-create that experience.

  He told Esaw, “I’m ready to sit on the porch and sip mint julep and watch the kids run around in the front yard.”

  “That was his dream,” his wife says. “His dream was for us to get a house and to have the grandkids running around and him just sitting there sipping his mint julep, as he called it.” She laughs. “He was ready to settle down and stop hustling and just be at home.”

  His daughter Erica also remembers her father talking about just wanting a little space to himself.

  “All he really wanted was a house,” she says.

  —

  Throughout that summer, Garner remained in contact with Jewel, who brought Legacy home in June. Garner would come by to see the little girl. He would talk with Jewel, too, about getting off the streets. She also noticed that his health seemed to be worsening. Sometimes, when he came over after a day out on Bay Street, his feet would be so swollen he would have difficulty getting his sneakers off. But he refused to go to a doctor.

  When Garner talked to Jewel, his fantasies were even more modest. He didn’t even need a house. He just wanted to get off his feet.

  Jewel had long talked of a plan to get out of Staten Island and move south, to someplace like Georgia. Her idea was that he could get a little smoke shop there.

  Eric for the most part didn’t go for the plan. He didn’t like the idea of being away from his kids and grandkids.

  But one detail about the Georgia idea appealed to him. The fantasy smoke shop would have a stool.

  “That was the idea,” says Jewel. “To sit down.”

  —

  On the night of July 16, 2014, Garner was walking through Tompkinsville with a friend when he saw a commotion on the street. It was a young relative of Diana’s and McCrae’s, whom we’ll call Chuckie. He had a rep for always being high on something and not being able to get his life in order. Garner later said he saw the boy robbing a man of his wallet.

  Still stinging from being robbed a few months before, Garner watched as the young man snatched the cash and then ran right past Garner toward Victory Boulevard.

  Garner walked up to the man who’d been robbed and advised him to call the police. Word quickly circulated on the street that Garner had given information to the cops about the robbery. It was bad. Police were the enemy: historically, practically, in every way. Garner, whose rep on the streets was impeccable, was being talked about in the wrong way—as a possible snitch, no less—for the first time.

  That night, Garner did not sleep well. “He was really sick,” Esaw says. “He wasn’t sleeping.”

  She and Eric had also been fighting all week. She had been telling him to get off the street. “The cops know who you are,” she said. “They’re going to keep picking on you.”

  Garner answered, “I can’t make money staying at the house.”

  On the morning of July 17, they rehashed the same argument. Garner suggested he could get his work in early, before the police showed up. “I’ll go in earlier,” he said. “And if I see the police, I’ll go home.”

  Esaw protested, but Garner didn’t want to hear it. “The rent was due, the cable was due,” she says now.

  On the way out, he asked her what she was making for dinner.

  “Pork chops, fat boy,” she said.

  “You ain’t so slim yourself,” he answered, and left.

  —

  When Garner arrived at Bay Street that morning, the park crowd wanted to know what had happened the night before with Chuckie. Diana was the first to approach him. She remembers being struck by how bad he looked physically, worse than usual. He looked haggard and tired and agitated. “This is awful to say, but I remember thinking, ‘Damn, this man ain’t gonna live a long time,’ ” she remembers. She wondered if maybe the agitation came in part because he knew people on the street were “bad-talking” him about the incident the night before.

  “He was hearing it from people,” she says. “And I stopped him right on the corner and asked him about it. He said it wasn’t true, that he hadn’t been snitching. And that’s okay, I wasn’t on [Chuckie’s] bandwagon anyway, I knew what he was like. So I let it go. I talked to him about it a few more times throughout the day, but I let it go.”

  It was different with McCrae, with whom Garner had a loud argument on the street that morning, at about ten. McCrae angrily confronted him. Garner shouted right back, recounting the story of McCrae’s young relative zooming past him with a handful of cash.

  “I didn’t know [Chuckie] was no track star,” snapped Garner.

  “I didn’t know you was no snitch,” shouted McCrae.

  The two men almost came to blows. Then they separated, the argument unresolved. McCrae left the park and would never see Garner alive again. He would spend a lot of time thinking about that moment. Years later, when asked why he thought Garner told the cops about the boy, McCrae would shake his head.

  “I don’t know, man,” he’d say. “Fucking Eric, he probably thought he was helping him. I don’t know.”

  Shortly after the exchange with McCrae, Eric’s mother, Gwen, called. They hadn’t spoken for a few days, which was unusual; Eric talked to his mother most every day. She was calling to remind him, among other things, that she had a family reunion planned for that weekend.

  “I said, ‘Don’t forget,’ ” she recalls.

  “I didn’t forget,” he said. “What do you want me to bring?”

  “Bring water and soda,” she said. “We got the rest.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you Saturday, Eric.”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  “Love you, Eric.”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  —

  James Knight’s normal routine was to volunteer at Project Hospitality in the morning, then come up to Bay Street in the afternoons to hang out. There was a small group of people with whom he passed the time, Eric Garner being one of them. He and Garner frequently passed whole afternoons sitting or standing next to each other.

  When he arrived at Bay Street on the afternoon of July 17, Knight was worried about his friend. He’d heard the rumors about the cops the night before and didn’t believe them. He also knew the talk alone could do damage enough. Up close, he noticed that Garner didn’t look well.

  “Man, are you okay?” he asked.

  Garner shook his head and stood up.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  Garner walked down the street. He tried the Spanish restaurant on the corner of Bay and Victory, but there was no toilet in there. He ducked into the bodega across Victory: same thing. So he ended up crossing the street and going to the Medicare office.

  James remembers noticing how long Garner was gone. Finally, at a little after two, Garner came back, looking distressed.

  “Man,” he said, “my stomach is in bad shape. I’ve been diarrhea-ing and constipating at the same time.”

  “You don’t look so good,” James said.

  “I’ll be all right,” Garner insisted.

  A few minutes passed. Garner at one point looked down at his phone and texted his wife.

  I’m okay, babe. I’ll be in soon. />
  Shortly after that, James noticed a commotion starting on the street. A park regular, a black man nicknamed Twin, and an older Puerto Rican man were squaring off to fight.

  Twin’s name came from the fact that he has an identical twin. No one knows why Twin has the nickname and not his brother, but that’s the way it goes. Twin is easy to spot around Bay Street. He often carries a boom box around, like the Radio Raheem character from Do the Right Thing. He drinks a bit and has something to say to almost everyone. On this day, he apparently said something to a young woman, and the girl ran and told her father, who came to the park to confront him.

  The crowd inside the park rushed over to watch the action. A man named Twan Scarlett, aka Pure, a well-known character in the park who’d caught his own beating from police six months earlier, was one of the first to sound the alarm. He was so excited to see some action he tore his shirt off and ran toward the commotion.

  “It’s a fight!” he shouted.

  Hearing the commotion, Garner sighed, stood up, and went to break it up.

  James remembers the moment when Garner stood up, because he looked down the street and saw, parked at the corner, a black unmarked police vehicle with a pair of detectives sitting in it.

  “They were already here,” he says. “I remember that for sure.”

  Though the two officers got out of the car, they didn’t bother to break up the fight. There are multiple explanations for why the detectives were there that afternoon, but the one that comes closest to being the official version was relayed by the head of the police lieutenants’ union, Lou Turco. Turco later told reporters that a lieutenant from the 120th Precinct had passed by Bay Street that morning. The lieutenant had seen some questionable street characters he’d gotten calls about in the past and arranged to have two detectives sent there to clear the street.

  This was later confirmed by Bill Bratton himself, who would say a day later that “police officers assigned to the 120th Precinct in Staten Island and assigned to the Plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit were directed by a superior officer to address specific conditions in the vicinity of Tompkinsville Park.”

  Eric Garner must have been the “specific conditions” the lieutenant had been upset about.

  A police officer explains that this situation is far from unusual. “You’ll have a precinct where a senior officer sees a homeless guy on a highway on the way to work, or a panhandler on some spot where he’s not supposed to be,” the officer says. “And when he gets to the precinct, he orders a sergeant or someone to remove the guy. A few hours later, they’ll send someone to pick him up.”

  The officer explains a key detail here. “They’re going to want an arrest number, to show you did something. It’s not enough just to ask the guy to move. They need a case. It’s all about the numbers. But if the guy you’re talking about is not breaking the law, you have to get creative.”

  The difference between an arrest and a simple request to move was, in the case of Garner, the whole difference.

  The two detectives got out of the car and moved toward the crowd.

  A wizened older gentleman named Fred Winship, another Tompkinsville regular who at the time was living in the Richmond hotel/flophouse up the street, was in the park that day.

  He also picked himself up and ambled over toward the fight. He could see that Twin was mixing it up with a Puerto Rican man, but the fight never turned into a serious melee. Right from the start, Garner got between them and settled them down. “He let the Puerto Rican guy go first,” Winship says.

  During the fight, Winship remembers standing next to a white man wearing a green T-shirt that read “99” on the back. He had no idea the man was a policeman. “I thought he was an observer just like me,” he remembers.

  Word started to filter through the crowd that the cops were there. The fighters, now separated, seemed puzzled as to why the police weren’t coming for them. Twin stood for a moment, not sure of whether or not to run.

  “He was like a deer in the headlights,” Knight explains.

  Convinced finally that the police were not interested in him, Twin crossed the street quickly and got the hell out of there, following in the same direction as the other man, toward Victory Boulevard.

  Once the fight was over, Winship watched as the two men ran down the street. When he saw police cars arriving, he was sure it was about the fight. “I was kind of baffled,” he says. “The guys ran right past the police.”

  —

  The two officers in the crowd instead made a beeline for Eric Garner, who by then had made his way back to his spot along the wall on Bay Street.

  Winship was standing close enough that he heard Garner talking to the two cops. He was patting his pockets. “I got nothing,” he said. “I got nothing.”

  Knight was standing off to the side.

  Ramsey Orta, on a low-slung blue bicycle, lazily rode back and forth along the block, keeping a close eye on the situation.

  All the witnesses there agree that Garner was approached more or less immediately after the fight ended. There was no possibility that he could have sold a cigarette in that time. Knight remembers absolutely that Garner did not sell anything in those frenzied seconds. Garner was still catching his breath after the excitement.

  In fact, Knight says, he was certain Garner had not sold a cigarette that whole afternoon, at least not since he’d returned from the bathroom.

  Even the official police explanation later on hinted at this. Bill Bratton, when he talked about it, hedged his language, saying only that two officers “approached a forty-three-year old male, later identified as Eric Garner…concerning the sale of illegal cigarettes.”* Bratton hinted that what more likely took place is that a “superior officer” may have seen him selling while driving by earlier that day, then sent two detectives to scoop Garner up.

  Selling loose cigarettes, Bratton told reporters later, was “apparently the action that the officers were asked to address at this location.”

  Again, this would explain why the police ignored the fight. They were likely more worried about following the orders of a lieutenant than they were about anything else that may have been going on in or around the park. Being “addressed” by a superior to deal with the situation probably also prevented the plainclothes cops from just letting the situation slide.

  In any case, no official has ever said that Garner was actually selling cigarettes at that moment, except for the two police in the video, who at one point try lamely to argue that they saw Garner selling a cigarette—to Twin, who was in the middle of a fight the entire time.

  In the end, none of it mattered.

  —

  The two officers who swooped in were a matched set of buffed-up little white dudes in plain clothes. Though he didn’t know his name, Knight thought he recognized Daniel Pantaleo, who wore a green T-shirt with the number “99” on the back, khaki shorts, and a baseball hat.

  This same officer, he believed, had stopped him and his son on the street earlier in the year. Knight and his son, James Jr., had walked into a grocery store in a different Staten Island neighborhood, passing a group of kids selling weed out front. As they walked in the store, a police car passed, and the weed dealers yelled out to the cops, “Go fuck yourself!”

  The car doubled back, and by the time they reached the spot again, James and his son were back on the street. A short Italian-looking cop demanded to see IDs.

  James Knight Jr. is the spitting image of his father, tall and barrel-chested. He took offense to being stopped without reason.

  “What the fuck are you stopping me for?” he’d shouted.

  The elder Knight apologized for his son and urged him to comply. He didn’t want trouble. And the young cop looked a little off to him, like he wasn’t all there. Knight had developed a sense for these things over the years and he could feel this was not a police officer worth riling up.

  That incident passed without further problems.

  Months later, Knight now fel
t sure he recognized this same officer approaching Garner.

  Pantaleo’s partner, Justin Damico, was in a blue shirt, a blue baseball hat, glasses, and gray shorts. Damico’s forearms were covered in a swirly tribal tattoo.

  They looked like two guys you might see chatting up girls in an Applebee’s. They did not look like hard-core investigators.

  Nonetheless, they immediately got tough with Garner, telling him it was time to go. He was being arrested.

  James backed up, as did everyone else on the street.

  Orta took out his phone and started filming what became an internationally infamous exchange.

  “Let’s go,” Damico said.

  “For what?” Garner snapped. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “For selling cigarettes.”

  “I didn’t do shit,” Garner snapped.

  He began to plead his case.

  “I was minding my business,” he said. “There was a fight, and I stopped it, and you come after me? You leave those fighters to walk away? Are you serious?”

  One of the two officers turned to Orta.

  “Take a ride down the block,” he said.

  “I live here,” snapped a defiant Orta.

  “You can’t stand here,” the officer replied, incorrectly.

  Orta didn’t budge and kept filming.

  Meanwhile, Garner’s anger and confusion were building. He seemed not to be able to process the idea that even when he didn’t sell cigarettes, he could be arrested.

  He asked Pantaleo and Damico, again, what he was being arrested for. They said selling cigarettes.

  “To who?” Garner shouted.

  Damico pointed down the street in the direction of Victory Boulevard, where Twin had run away.

  “That’s who was in the fight!” shouted Orta.

  “Are you serious?” Garner asked.

  “Yo, boss, that’s who had the fight!” Orta repeated.

  The two police hovered in and out, alternately approaching and retreating from Garner. Knight remembers Pantaleo calling for backup. “He was getting on the radio, calling for more,” he says.