Death of Eric Garner, 10 years later: A community gathers to remember

TOMPKINSVILLE, Staten Island (PIX11) — Protesters gathered in Tompkinsville Park Wednesday morning to remember Eric Garner, a black man who was killed by a police officer 10 years ago.

Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, led the march in his memory. The event began at 11 a.m. at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and ended in the park directly across from where Garner took his last breath.

Protesters around the world repeated the words “I can’t breathe” after a widely shared video showed then-NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in a chokehold on the sidewalk. The video shows Garner thrashing on the ground and saying he couldn’t breathe at least eight times before losing consciousness in Pantaleo’s chokehold. He remained on the ground for seven minutes until he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

In the months following Garner’s death, “I can’t breathe” became the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement, with protests across the country calling for police reform following a series of similar incidents in which white police officers killed black civilians, including Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

Pantaleo was fired from the NYPD in 2019, but he was never criminally charged in connection with his role in Garner’s death. Authorities determined that Pantaleo used a chokehold, which was banned by the New York Police Department in the 1990s, and the city’s medical examiner’s office ruled Garner’s death a homicide. However, then-US Attorney Richard Donoghue stated, “Even if we could prove that Officer Pantaleo’s hold on Mr. Garner constituted unreasonable force, we would still have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Pantaleo willfully violated the law.”

Garner, 43, left behind six children. His family continues to seek justice and launched a judicial investigation in 2021.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.