‘I can’t breathe’: 10th anniversary of Eric Garner’s chokehold death

Ten years after Eric Garner’s death at the hands of New York City police officers made “I can’t breathe” a rallying cry, loved ones remembered his life and legacy.

“I want people to remember him and remember that he was the one that helped get laws changed, that helped implement laws, who was the sacrificial lamb and that, because of him, others have benefited,” said Gwen Carr, Garner's mother, at the start of a march Wednesday on Staten Island, the borough where her son died.

A few dozen Garner family members, friends, and activist supporters marched to a park that sits between the sidewalk where he was killed and a street that now bears his name — Eric Garner Way. As thousands of protesters have done over the past decade, they repeated some of his last words: “I can't breathe.”

Bystander video showed Garner gasping the phrase on July 17, 2014, while locked in a police chokehold. The recording spurred Black Lives Matter protests in New York and across the country. More demonstrations followed weeks later when Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

Six years later, George Floyd was recorded uttering the exact same words as he begged for air while a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, killing him and sparking a new wave of mass protests.

Carr noted that since her son’s death, there has been an increase in the use of video cameras by police. In 2020, New York lawmakers passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which removed legal ambiguities in official police conduct by creating a felony crime of strangulation by peace officers that causes injury or death. Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who restrained Garner, was fired in 2019, but never charged with a crime.

A decade after Garner’s death, Carr remembers his love of Christmas, regrets times she’d yelled at him, and said she has days when she can’t find the strength to get out of bed. At the park on Wednesday, Carr and her family — including some of Garner’s children — enjoyed a cookout as people from around the neighbourhood gathered in a blocked-off street where a basketball hoop was set up by a nonprofit with the help of NYPD officers from the agency’s community affairs unit.

Garner died after the 2014 confrontation with Pantaleo and other officers who suspected that he was selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on the street.

Video showed Pantaleo, who is white, wrapping an arm around the neck of Garner, who was Black, as they struggled and fell to the sidewalk. “I can't breathe,” Garner gasped repeatedly, before losing consciousness. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Authorities in New York determined that Pantaleo had used a chokehold banned by the New York Police Department in the 1990s, and the city medical examiner’s office ruled Garner’s death a homicide, but neither state nor federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Pantaleo or any of the other officers who were present.

“Even if we could prove that Officer Pantaleo’s hold of Mr. Garner constituted unreasonable force, we would still have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Pantaleo acted willfully in violation of the law,” Richard Donoghue, then the US attorney in Brooklyn, said in announcing in 2019 that no federal civil rights charges would be brought.

Garner’s family settled a lawsuit against New York City for $5.9 million but continued to seek justice in the form of a judicial inquiry into Garner’s death in 2021.

The judicial proceeding, which took place virtually because of the pandemic, was held under a provision of the city’s charter that lets citizens petition the court for a public inquiry into “any alleged violation or neglect of duty in relation to the property, government or affairs of the city.”

The purpose of the inquiry was to establish a record of the case rather than to find anyone guilty or innocent.

One of the attorneys representing Garner’s family was civil rights lawyer Alvin Bragg, who was then campaigning for Manhattan district attorney, a post he won in November of that year.

Bragg, who prosecuted former President Donald Trump for hush money payments to an adult movie actress this year, praised Carr and other members of Garner’s family on Tuesday.

“While I am still deeply pained by the loss of Eric Garner, I am in awe of his family’s strength and moved by their commitment to use his legacy as a force for change,” Bragg said. “Their courage continues to inspire me as district attorney, and I pledge to always honour Mr. Garner’s memory by working towards a safer, fairer and more equal city.”

Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, said during a news conference Tuesday that he remembered Garner’s death “like yesterday.”

Adams, who was serving as Brooklyn borough president when Garner died, said he prays that there will never be another “Eric Garner situation” again.

Carr is still calling for the firing of other officers involved in her son’s death.

“We know that the police have a tough job, but when there’s wrongdoing, when we have those bad apples in the police department, we have to get rid of them,” Carr said.