by Matt Taibbi
“I think she was testing us, to see if we’d take them,” says Stevie.
But they didn’t. “They knew I would give them money if they asked,” Gwen says.
Gwen Carr had already lived through tragedy. In 2013, her brother’s son Joe, whom she’d raised and called Little Joe, was killed in a shootout in Newark, New Jersey. Joe was straitlaced and hardworking and had built up his own deli in New Jersey, as well as a contracting business called Flagg World that cleaned up vacant lots in and around Newark. Joe had made it a point to hire ex-convicts. Over the years, he’d hired hundreds of young men in an effort to get them back on their feet.
On October 27, 2013, Joe hadn’t planned on going to work but wanted to help out with crowds coming to and from a local football game. Just after 1:00 P.M., three teenagers came in, robbed him, and shot him to death.
It was around that same time that Eric came home to live with his mother, after Jewel’s house burned down. Gwen disapproved of Eric’s cigarette business, but she also loved him and believed strongly that what he was doing wasn’t a serious crime. Still, she was baffled by the amount of police attention he seemed to be attracting. She remembers having to bail him out many times, as she would frequently be his first phone call.
“He’d say, ‘Ma, I got locked up,’ ” she recalls. “ ‘Will you come bring me home?’ ” And just as he had with his wife, Eric would tell his mother to go find money he’d hidden away somewhere, to help with the bail.
“He’d say, ‘Well, I got some money in my shoe, in my sneaker,’ ” she remembers. “I would go and I would get him, and I would tell him, ‘Stop selling those cigarettes up there, because you keep getting locked up.’ ”
On the afternoon of July 17, 2014, Miss Gwen was doing her normal job, driving a subway car. “I operated trains from Coney Island to Astoria,” she says. “I’d do two round trips a day. That was my job for that particular day, to do two round trips on the N train.” Subway operators aren’t allowed to have cellphones on while they drive, so she made the first leg of her trip, from Coney Island to Astoria, not knowing that terrible news awaited her.
“I have a thirty-five-minute break when I get up to Astoria. I usually sat on the bench, because it was summertime,” she says. “I’d usually sit out there on the bench, and I would see who called me. That day, the phone started ringing soon as I turned the phone on. The two people who I answered first, nobody had firsthand information.
“They just told me they’d heard something. They’d heard Eric had a confrontation with the cops. Then the next person called me and said, ‘Miss Gwen, I don’t know, Eric, they told me that the cops made Eric have a heart attack.’ Stuff just started racing in. I said, ‘I got to get over there and see what’s going on.’ ”
She wanted to leave work right away (for subway operators it’s called “booking off”), but she realized she had a serious logistical problem. She was all the way in Astoria, far away from Staten Island. If she left work now, there was no way she could get home quickly, absent a helicopter ride. So she made the extraordinary decision to complete her first round trip.
She hopped back in the N train and drove a normal route back to Coney Island, her mind racing a thousand miles an hour the whole way.
When she got to Coney Island, her bosses wanted to know how she intended to classify her departure from work that day. Was it a sick day?
“They wanted to know what code,” she says. “I said, ‘I don’t care what code you put me down for, I got to go!’ And they says, ‘All right, all right, call us back,’ just like that.”
Her husband, Ben, was waiting for her at Coney Island.
“We went. My husband already knew, but I didn’t know yet. He already knew. I don’t want to know the answer until I got to Staten Island, because I want to go and see what’s going on. I kept on asking Ben, I said, ‘Did you hear anything?’ ”
“No, no, we’re going to go see what’s going on right now,” he said.
“But did you hear? People are calling me, I know they called you,” she implored. “Finally he just broke down and started crying, and he told me,” she remembers. “When I heard, I lost my mind. I said, ‘This cannot be happening.’
“For the next forty-eight hours, I was in a daze. I don’t remember a thing.”
—
Esaw was on the phone with her daughter, Emerald, when it started blowing up.
“I got a message: ‘Get down on Bay Street, your husband isn’t breathing,’ ” she recalls.
She looked around the apartment in a panic. Her son Emery had just run outside to go to the store. “He asked me if he could hold twenty dollars,” she said. “I’d said, ‘Okay, get my bag.’ But then he came running back in and said, ‘Mom, I just heard outside that the cops choked Daddy!’ ”
Esaw’s mind was everywhere at once. A surge of fear shot through her. “I remember I just threw on anything. Gray shirt, gray sweatpants. No bra, no underwear…”
Outside, she hailed a cab. “There were messages on my phone, ‘Pinky, you need to go down to Bay Street.’ ”
Instead, she went to the Richmond University Medical Center, where Eric was due to be taken. “When I got to the hospital, I knew right away something was up,” she says. “They led me all the way around the back way, away from the front where they meet people. And into a back room with just a phone and a chair.”
Pinky waited in the bleak little room for just a few minutes.
“Finally the doctor came in and said, ‘I’m sorry, we tried everything. But there was nothing we could do.’ ”
She pauses.
“They told me I could look at him one more time,” she says, crying a little. “I looked in. It looked like he was sleeping.”
—
Jewel had actually been at Tompkinsville Park earlier that day. Ironically, she had gone to the Medicaid office with Legacy, to clear up something involving her insurance. It was the place where she and Eric had met. She didn’t stay long. Legacy was still tiny and frail.
“I didn’t want to stay on Bay Street. It’s dirty, you know?” she says. “I didn’t want her outside.”
She saw Eric from a distance that morning but didn’t talk to him.
She got home at around twelve or twelve thirty. Legacy fell asleep, giving Jewel a little time. Her father had come over as well. “I said, ‘I’m gonna fry me some chicken,’ ” she remembers.
When the food was ready, she sat down and ate quietly. No TV, she was just zoning out. And suddenly the phone rang. It was a friend of hers named Mink. “I didn’t even know what she was saying at first. I’m like, ‘What? Eric who? Not my Eric!’ ” She thought to herself, “Who would be crazy enough to choke Eric?”
She called Eric’s sister, Ellisha, and the two women started crying on the phone. After several more calls, Jewel stepped outside and stared blankly out at the street.
“It was no more,” she says. “I couldn’t feel him. I couldn’t feel him anymore.”
—
A police union official would later tell a story about a form Staten Island authorities apparently filled out that night, around the time the family was learning of Garner’s death. Called a UF-49 or just a 49, an “unusual occurrence report” is written up after events of particular significance. “Cases with profile,” is how the official put it.
The UF-49 apparently makes no mention of any use of a chokehold. As The New York Times would later report, it only cites the testimony of Taisha Allen, who is quoted as saying, “the two officers each took Mr. Garner by the arms and put him on the ground.” Even this statement wasn’t correct; Allen would later try to tell a grand jury that Pantaleo did in fact use a chokehold.
Absent the cellphone videos, in other words, nobody would likely have heard how Eric Garner really died. This would have been written up as an unhealthy man with asthma and diabetes who had a heart attack after a routine arrest on a minor charge.
—
A ph
otographer for the Daily News named Ken Murray was driving through Staten Island on another assignment that day when he heard chatter over a police radio about a mobilization of police on the north side of the island. He called back to the paper’s news desk and got the okay from his editor, Kevin McDonald, to check it out.
Once he reached Bay Street, he asked around and heard about a kid who’d captured the whole thing on film. Before long he was talking to Ramsey Orta, who gave him the video for nothing. “It was unusual,” Murray said. “I guess he was just so outraged, he wanted it out there.”
Within a few hours, the video was up and going viral around the world. Staten Island, the redheaded stepchild of New York boroughs, was suddenly at the center of the universe.
That night, Orta couldn’t sleep.
“I was up at four o’clock in the morning,” he says. “I was actually playing a video game, Black Ops. And I turned off the game, and I’m about to lay down. Suddenly this big spotlight lights up the room.”
He ran to the window, looked outside, and saw a police cruiser drifting past his place. The little hand-guided spotlight near the driver’s-side mirror was being aimed up and at his window.
Orta stood staring down at the street, light filling his bedroom for a moment.
The car drove away.
—
John McCrae had a nightmare that night. He would go on to have it on a regular basis.
He’d been at home when he got word that Eric had been attacked and rushed to the scene, but it was too late by then. Eric was gone.
In his dream, Eric would appear next to McCrae and urge him to come see something around the corner.
“He was telling me, ‘Come on, come on, man, come on, man. I got a new Cadillac! Come on, man, just get in, John.’
“And I was like, ‘No, fuck that, I’m not getting in your fucking car.’
“He just kept telling me to come on and get in. And I’m like, ‘Fuck, man, I’m not getting in!’ ”
Months later, he would still have the dream.
“Bitch is always in my head,” he’d say.
* * *
* Emphasis mine.
NINE ERICA
Erica Garner was born with a striking physical resemblance to her father. She had the same deep, brooding, intense eyes, the same broad cheekbones, and, as she grew up, the same commanding voice and upright posture. Adults who knew Eric sometimes did a double take when they saw his little girl, so close was the resemblance.
Erica always wanted to be her father’s favorite. As a child she worked at staying close to him. She remembers as a little girl going on family car rides and fighting with her sister Emerald to see who got to sit next to her father in the front seat of the family Cadillac.
“I always won. Always wanted to be next to Dad,” she says.
She remembers the good things about him. He tried throughout his life to take care of all of the kids financially. They never went to school in September looking disheveled. “We were always in brand name,” Erica says.
Erica’s resemblance to her father was a big part of her identity throughout her life. At times, it was a negative, as other members of the family made her the proxy for complaints they might have had about Eric. Erica’s older half sister, Esaw’s oldest child, resented Eric from the time she found out he wasn’t her real father. But she went after Erica because she looked like Eric, but unlike Eric, she was around.
As Erica herself grew older, she began to be more like her father in character. Some of this was natural—she was just born that way—but some of it was taught.
One day, when she was about nine or ten years old, Erica got into it with some girls at school. It was a nothing dispute, something that started in the cafeteria. “They were Mean Girls types, basically,” she remembers. “They were giving me a hard time about where to sit. And I said something about fighting them after school.”
When school ended, though, it was three girls against Erica.
“They wanted to jump me. So I ran home to my mother and father,” she remembers.
This was back when the family was living on Mother Gaston Boulevard, in Brownsville.
Eric, furious, took his daughter by the hand and went back downstairs.
“Erica, come on,” he said.
Erica thought Daddy was going to protect her. It went another way.
The imposing Eric Garner confronted the three little girls.
“I’m out here. Nobody is gonna jump my daughter. But if y’all wanna shoot the fair, then Erica, get down here.”
In other words, if you want to fight one-on-one, my daughter will step up. Erica was mortified and chickened out. She ran back upstairs.
Eric was upset. And when he told Esaw what happened, she was upset with her daughter, too.
“You know, Erica,” Esaw said, “you play Big Billy Badass with your brothers and sisters here at home, but when someone tries to fight you, you back down. It’s not right.”
From that point forward, Erica remembers, she never backed down from anyone. Her father added some advice.
“If a group of people want to fight you,” he told her, “pick the biggest one out of them and fight that one. And the rest will run away.”
As she grew up, Erica began, slowly, to take on her father’s signature characteristic, the tendency toward never giving in in an argument. This wasn’t about imposing physical dominance; it was about showing backbone. Father and daughter alike couldn’t be argued off the spot in a dispute. On the street in Eric’s last years as a cigarette salesman, it was something people joked about. But it was no joke: Eric and his first child’s stubbornness were rooted deep inside them.
“We believe that we are right,” Erica says. “And once we find out that we are right, you can’t tell us that we’re wrong. We’ll research. We’ll argue down to the core. We’re not going to stop until you see our point of view.”
—
Erica speaks in weirdly even, nonjudgmental tones about the troubled childhood years she spent as the daughter of an often absent father in a home environment fraught with drugs and violence. Some of the stories she tells are horrifying, but she doesn’t describe them that way.
“I hear all these stories about people being on crack and the struggles that they go through, like being raped by their stepfather or something like that, or prostituted out or sold to a drug dealer,” she says flatly. “I have no experience with anything like that.”
But she did spend a lot of time and energy warring with her mother, with whom she had a turbulent relationship her whole life, particularly whenever her father was away in jail. Erica wrestled constantly with anger and mistrust. She reached her teens rebellious and spoiling for a fight.
Things came to a head when Erica was about fourteen. During one of her many arguments with her mother, Erica knocked over a TV stand not far from where her mother was. Esaw believed at that moment that she could no longer take care of Erica and started proceedings to put her daughter into voluntary foster care.
This is an arrangement where parents, without being forced to do so, essentially swear to the court that they are unable to take care of their child.
On the day Erica was meant to leave, city workers came and she was asked to pack up a bag and go. Her mother was sitting in the apartment weeping.
“I don’t want to sign you away,” Esaw said.
“If you want me to go, I’ll go,” Erica said.
For all of her tears, Esaw saw this as a necessity, a last-resort move to deal with an unruly daughter at a time when she was having trouble holding her own life together. For Erica it was devastating, an event that would haunt her for her whole life.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to make it through this,’ ” Erica recalls. She moved in with a family in Far Rockaway, Queens. Her new caretakers were a deacon and his wife who had kids of their own, as well as other foster kids. This new family was a godsend for Erica, an angry and directionless child whose life began to
turn around very quickly.
“I had my own room,” she remembers. “They would ask me to come down and help cook and be part of things. They took me on family trips. Family vacations! There were fourteen of us, piling in a plane to go to Universal Studios. I had never known what this was like. I loved them like they were my own parents, still do.”
In fact, Erica’s new family offered to adopt her. Erica considered it. She went to her mother with the idea. That didn’t go over well. The adoption never happened.
But she remained close her whole life with her new family, who helped usher her into adulthood. It was none too soon, as Erica became a single mother very early in life. Her daughter, Alyssa, was born in 2010, just around the time Eric Garner was coming back from jail and remaking himself as a cigarette dealer.
With her foster family’s help, along with her father’s counsel and support, she managed to stay out of trouble at that time and dedicate her life to her daughter. She was on the right path.
On the afternoon of July 17, 2014, just minutes before Daniel Pantaleo approached her father on the streets of Staten Island, Erica Garner called her mother for the first time in ages.
“It was hard, but I wanted to make up with her,” Erica remembers.
Repairing long-broken family connections had also been a preoccupation of her father’s in those months. Father and daughter were so close, they often moved and thought in sync.
In his later years, Eric had been deeply troubled by the rift between Esaw and Erica and had subtly lobbied both to patch things up. By late July 2014, Erica was only just summoning the determination to reach out. Dialing the phone was not easy that day, but she did it, extending an olive branch over her daughter’s coming birthday. That she did so at this exact moment was one of the odder coincidences of this whole sad story.