by Matt Taibbi
“I asked if she wanted to help plan Alyssa’s birthday party,” Erica remembers.
The call came as a surprise to Esaw, who cried and told her daughter she was glad she’d called.
“Your father is gonna be happy,” she told Erica. Eric, Esaw explained, had been asking about Erica every day when he came home. “Did she call yet?” he’d say.
The two women talked for a short while and made plans for the party. Erica hung up, pleased and full of warm emotions.
Just minutes later, her sister Emerald called in a panic.
Something had happened on Bay Street. All her sister could tell her was that their father had stopped breathing.
“I thought, ‘It’s hot, he has asthma, maybe he’s sick,’ ” Erica remembers. She was working at the time at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Long Island City. Immediately, she asked out of work and rushed toward Staten Island.
Before she even crossed the bay, she got a call from her aunt Ellisha, Eric’s sister.
“She told me he was gone, that the cops had killed him,” she says.
She reached her grandmother’s apartment in Staten Island and gathered with the rest of the family for a time. Then at about ten at night, she felt a strange urge to walk outside by herself. Without thinking about it, she drifted in a particular direction.
“I don’t know why, but I went to the spot where he was killed,” she says. “I remember I just stood there for a long time, almost in a daze.”
Erica was not known on Bay Street, but she looked so much like Eric Garner, standing there on the spot he’d occupied for so many years, that some of the people from the neighborhood began to gather around her, drawn to her like moths to a lamp.
“They were like, ‘You must be Erica,’ ” she remembers. “They said to me, ‘Your father talked about you all the time.’ ”
“Like seeing a ghost,” is how one of the Bay Street residents remembers it.
She stood on the spot for a long time, well into the night.
—
With her father gone, she was deprived of an important confidant. In place of him now rested a gnawing need for answers.
Why had this happened? Was there something wrong with the officer who’d killed her father? Did he have a violent past, and if so, why had he been on the streets? Why had her father been stopped in the first place? Why didn’t the other officers intervene?
These questions ate at her and wouldn’t go away. The passage of time didn’t quiet them down, either. Viewing everything through the prism of these questions threw the entire world into relief. There were only people who helped and people who didn’t. She would see who was who. The dominant concern was to see that the officer who’d killed her father be brought to justice. She was unable to accept the idea that there might be no punishment for the offense.
—
Erica wasn’t experienced in politics or government. She was from the streets and hadn’t been able to see much of the outside world from behind the counter of a Dunkin’ Donuts.
But after her father’s death, when her family was suddenly thrust into a hurricane of international attention, she had to take a crash course in how the great forces of the world worked. She had to learn about the media, politics, civil law, and especially the criminal justice system.
Erica had no natural antipathy for police. They were just a fact of life growing up. In her early years she associated police with safety, but as she got older, things got more complicated. One night the police chased her and her brothers and sisters out of a park after hours, and she remembers feeling annoyed and a little frightened. But it wasn’t like she spent a lot of time thinking about them.
Her father had dealt with police at the street level only. He was killed in the end by a small group of line officers, the police equivalent of infantry. It was those men, not the generals above them, who became the villains in the headlines about Eric Garner’s death. In police brutality cases the bad guy is always the individual cop, never the system behind him.
Erica Garner was about to inherit her father’s lifelong tangle with the authorities, but her battle would take a very different and more frustrating form—she’d be fighting the system that Eric never saw.
Police brutality cases always begin with unplanned spasms of rage or bad judgment, usually an individual police officer losing it on the streets. But before the bodies even cool, the crime moves up the chain.
From the first knock on the door, family members find themselves facing a series of intractable bureaucracies designed to make cases against police officers vanish in blizzards of political excuses and unintelligible legalese.
These bureaucracies are designed to frustrate and exhaust families bent on getting justice, grinding them down over time until finally they become dispirited and give up. The quest for answers becomes a war of attrition, and the state almost always wins. The families eventually give in and soon everything is forgotten, allowing the process to repeat itself.
The city of New York went to extraordinary lengths to disappear Eric Garner’s death down this institutional memory hole, into the vast sewer of blood and unpunished murder that raged under its sidewalks. The main obstacle in the way of this process was the family, and within Eric Garner’s family, the one most determined to fight back was his look-alike daughter.
In life, Eric Garner had driven everyone crazy, friends and foes alike, with his stubbornness and refusal to give in in even the smallest argument. He also had the longest of long memories. If you even once tried to beat him for fifty cents, he never forgot it.
These qualities were now reborn in his daughter’s quest for answers and justice following his murder. Erica would need them for the harrowing and frustrating journey she was about to take through the city’s tortuous criminal justice bureaucracy, which is designed to push her to do what she couldn’t do: forget.
—
At first, the whole country was riveted by Eric Garner’s death, as captured on Ramsey Orta’s video. It seized headlines all over the world, sent people demonstrating on the streets, and had black and Latino officials howling for indictments.
“This was a murder,” said State Senator Bill Perkins. “Without even being arrested, he was choked to death.”
“He was left to lie on the ground for eight minutes like a piece of meat. And I say piece of meat because if he was a dog, they probably would have assisted him,” said Councilman Jumaane Williams, a rising black politician loathed by police almost as much as the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was also destined to play a major role in the case.
Newly elected mayor Bill de Blasio played his part, acting the role of the abashed, mortified elected official who pleads for calm and promises action.
“Like so many New Yorkers, I was very troubled by the video,” he said, promising a “full and thorough” investigation.
At the same presser, Commissioner Bill Bratton followed along, appearing subdued. The father of New York’s Broken Windows strategy seemed to grasp that Garner’s death might be viewed as a referendum on his enforcement strategies.
His first remarks inadvertently emphasized that the tragedy had taken place at what may have been the ground zero of Broken Windows arrests in Staten Island.
“The immediate area had been the subject of numerous community complaints by local residents and merchants,” Bratton said. “Year to date at that location, there have been ninety-eight arrests for various offenses, and one hundred cease summonses issued mostly for quality of life offenses.”
Under intense questioning by reporters who asked if Officer Pantaleo’s aggressive response was necessary for such a minor offense, the macho Bratton uncharacteristically demurred. He went on to concede that a banned procedure had been used to take down Garner.
“Yes, as defined in the department’s patrol guide, this would appear to have been a chokehold,” Bratton sighed.
This seemed like a pretty important admission from the city’s police commissioner. But he was careful to
add, immediately afterward, “As to whether in any way, shape, or form [it was] a violation of law, that would be a determination of the District Attorney’s criminal investigation.”
Bratton tossed the hot potato to the next official in line, the district attorney of the borough of Staten Island. It was there, in the office of Dan Donovan, that the case began the time-honored process of disappearing down the rabbit hole.
—
What Erica remembers most about her family’s first meeting with Donovan, Staten Island’s pale, balding district attorney, was the commotion.
“There were just a lot of people,” she says. “It was disorganized. It was weird.”
Donovan would later boast to the press that he’d devoted more resources to the Garner case than any he had handled since taking over the DA’s job in 2004. He said he’d put eight assistant DAs and as many as ten detectives on the case.
During this meeting with the Garner family, which she recalls taking place eleven days after the killing, on July 28, 2014, many of these attorneys and investigators were present. Donovan led an hour-long meeting, during which time he promised mainly to conduct a thorough investigation. He continually stressed that whatever would happen would take a while.
In a thick Staten Island accent, he pleaded for the family’s patience and promised to leave no stone unturned in search of the truth.
Esaw began crying at one point during the meeting. Erica must have been rolling her eyes, because Donovan kept looking her way, perhaps sensing she wasn’t buying what he was selling.
Jewel Miller was there, too, listening closely. It was no small thing that she was being included in family matters like this, though she got the strong sense that the family only reluctantly brought her along.
“They didn’t want me nowhere,” she remembers. “But the lawyers were like, ‘If we don’t have her, if we don’t allow her some room, this could get ugly.’ So they kind of spoon-fed me a little bit.”
Jewel had a bad feeling about Donovan from the start. “He put it on thick,” she remembers. “He said he was really going to make sure things got done. He was really going to be on top of it—turning over every stone to make sure that things got done, and so on. It was almost believable.”
She pauses.
“But I’m born and raised here. I’m listening to him and I’m like, ‘Fuck it, this is Staten Island. If this was Brooklyn or something, Queens, Manhattan, maybe it would be a little more believable. But I know.’ ”
The district attorney was born and raised in Staten Island, too. In fact, Dan Donovan grew up in the very neighborhood of Tompkinsville where all this drama took place. Only he lived there back in the seventies, back when it was more of a white neighborhood.
In a detail he didn’t share with the family at the meeting, he went to the same Catholic all-boys school as the ostensible chief suspect in the case, Daniel Pantaleo, graduating in 1974.
The son of a longshoreman and a garment worker, Donovan then pursued the typical path of smart Catholic boys intent on a career in law enforcement in New York. First he went to St. John’s undergrad, then Fordham law.
After passing the bar, he worked as an ADA in Manhattan under famed prosecutor Robert Morgenthau in the late eighties and early nineties. Then he returned to Staten Island in 1996 to get into politics, serving as the chief of staff to Guy Molinari, the legendary machine-pol borough president who was to Staten Island what Richard Daley was to Chicago or Billy Bulger was to Boston—a patron, fixer, and bare-knuckle fighter in the us-versus-them tribal wars that defined urban politics.
In 2003, longtime Democratic district attorney William Murphy stepped down, and Donovan was put forward as the Republican candidate. He won and quickly made his name on another case involving Tompkinsville: a death penalty verdict for a twenty-one-year-old named Ronell Wilson, who in 2003 had shot two undercover detectives who’d been trying to buy a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol from him on St. Paul’s Avenue and Hannah Street, just two blocks away from Tompkinsville Park. He later successfully prosecuted a famed member of the Wu-Tang Clan, rapper and actor Method Man, for tax evasion. Method Man was a celebrated son of Staten Island, but the wrong Staten Island.
These convictions made good headlines for winning votes south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where Donovan was very popular. But he was a virtual unknown to the rest of the island. It was hard to say what he was all about. Even his face was a mystery.
Apart from a few tufts of thinning hair and broad forehead, Donovan’s features were curiously indistinct, like something drawn in sand. “I met him five times before I remembered him,” says one Staten Island lawyer. “I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a show-up.”
Erica remembers listening to Donovan speaking and feeling alternately encouraged and uneasy. She also noticed something odd.
“A lot of Donovan’s people were dressed wrong,” she remembers. “They didn’t look clean. Their shirts were ruffled. Like they hadn’t prepared for the meeting or something.
“I had this weird feeling they weren’t taking it seriously.”
Erica went home that night feeling puzzled. She had no idea that she was about to start down a long and crooked path. During the course of a years-long effort to keep her father’s case alive, Erica would find out what the families of people like Yusuf Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and so many others had already learned: in police violence cases, the law is a thousand miles high and filled with false peaks. Every time you think you’ve finally taken the hill, there’s another ridge ahead.
In these cases, obscure exceptions and precedents are constantly unearthed to narrow the field of culpability to a vanishing point. Often, in the end, the law says that not only is no one responsible for the death of someone killed by a police officer, no one can be responsible.
Another recurring theme in these stories is that while the cases often begin as unplanned murders and assaults committed in heat-of-the-moment situations by working-class cops, they end as carefully orchestrated cover-ups committed in cold blood, through the more ethereal, polished, institutional racism of politicians, judges, and attorneys.
In other words, one murder might be the fault of a single bad cop. But many murders are almost always the fault of politicians, through the systems they construct to make those murders disappear. As Erica was about to find out, following the trail after the case leaves the streets is the hardest part of all.
TEN DAN
Erica didn’t know much of anything about Mayor Bill de Blasio before her father was killed.
“All I knew was that he had a black son with a Afro,” she says now, laughing.
De Blasio was a bit of a mystery to the rest of New York, too. To the extent that he had a reputation, he was thought of as one of the more openly liberal elected officials in the country. He was also deeply distrusted by the police force even before the Garner affair, in large part because of his relationship with the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was destined to play an important and controversial part in the case.
Sharpton remembers exactly where he was on July 17, 2014, the day of Eric Garner’s death. “I was in Las Vegas, on my way back to the airport, when I got the call,” he recalls. His National Action Network had been involved in a voting drive in Nevada when Cynthia Davis, the head of the Staten Island chapter of NAN, called and told him what had happened just hours before on Bay Street.
Sharpton spoke with Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, on the phone that evening. Before he got on a plane back east, he promised to put her son’s case front and center in his weekly Saturday rally. According to the family, he also arranged to pay for Garner’s funeral.
Two days later, Sharpton gave a speech at his Harlem office, making demands for justice while flanked by Garner’s family members, Erica included.
It was a strange and somewhat subdued address. Erica didn’t know it, but Sharpton was in a curious spot politically. For years now, and especially since the election of President Obama, Sharpton had
become more of an inside player, in contrast to the firebrand activist who’d once shut down the city’s trains and roadways with his remarkable “Days of Outrage” in 1988. In fact, Mayor de Blasio was a personal friend of Sharpton’s. Sharpton had campaigned openly for de Blasio dating back to at least 2009, when he ran for the city’s public advocate job. “I even campaigned for him over a black candidate,” he says now, referring to the later mayoral race of 2013, when Sharpton supported de Blasio over city comptroller Bill Thompson.
But a key reason Sharpton had supported de Blasio was de Blasio’s rhetoric on issues like Stop-and-Frisk. Like many activists, Sharpton had taken some time to understand Stop-and-Frisk as a racial issue. “When I first started hearing about it in the early nineties, under Giuliani, I remember thinking, ‘What is this?’ ” he says. “And when I looked into it, my first thought was that this was going to be a civil liberties issue, not a race issue.”
But over time, and especially following the Amadou Diallo case, Sharpton changed his thinking. When he saw data suggesting that these practices were being used disproportionately in certain neighborhoods and against certain people, he made challenging Stop-and-Frisk a priority.
Ultimately, he supported de Blasio’s political runs precisely because de Blasio used such strong language on the subject. When de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013, he promised to be “the only candidate to end the Stop-and-Frisk era that targets minorities.”
So Sharpton was, to say the least, mystified when de Blasio, after being elected, made an alliance with Bill Bratton, the godfather of Stop-and-Frisk. De Blasio went back in time and once again made a man Sharpton associated with the hated Giuliani regime the city’s police commissioner. It was déjà vu all over again.
That made it tough for Sharpton to know at whom exactly to aim his typically thunderous sermons. He was close to de Blasio, but deeply at odds with his police commissioner. Perhaps because of this, at that first Saturday speech about the Garner case on July 19, Sharpton’s rhetoric seemed robbed of its usual bite. He sounded more like an elected official than an activist.