Eleven months after Eric Garner's death, his grave is covered by a lush patch of grass in Union County, N.J. His mother, Gwen Carr, is pulling together money for a headstone. Credit Mark Kauzlarich/The New York Times
Beyond the Chokehold:
The Path to Eric
Garner’s Death
Eric Garner was lumbering along a sidewalk on Staten Island on a July day when an unmarked police car pulled up.
The plainclothes officers inside knew Mr. Garner well, mostly for selling untaxed cigarettes not far from the nearby Staten Island Ferry Terminal.
Mr. Garner — who at 6 feet 2 inches tall and 395 pounds was hard to miss — recognized them, too. Everyone did, at least among those who hawked cigarettes and cheap goods on that stretch of Bay Street along Tompkinsville Park. For years, they played a cat-and-mouse game with the New York City officers who came to arrest them.
As the officers approached, Mr. Garner, 43, shouted at them to back off, according to two witnesses. He flailed his arms. He refused to be detained or frisked. He had been arrested twice already that year near the same spot, in March and May, charged both times with circumventing state tax law.
But on that sweltering day in July, the officers left him with a warning.
"It was the first time I ever saw them let him go," said John McCrae, who watched the encounter near the park. Mr. Garner took that experience to heart, Mr. McCrae said.
"You figure if it stops them the first time," he said, "it might get them to stop the second time."
The next time came later that month: July 17, a Thursday.
One of the officers, Justin Damico, returned, accompanied by a different partner, Daniel Pantaleo. As they moved in, a cellphone camera held by a friend of Mr. Garner recorded the struggle that would soon be seen by millions.
The chokehold. The swarm of officers. The 11 pleas for breath.
Mr. Garner’s final words — "I can’t breathe" — became a rallying cry for a protest movement. On screens large and small, his last struggle replayed on a loop. Official scrutiny and public outcry narrowed to focus on the actions of a single officer.
But interviews and previously undisclosed documents obtained by The New York Times provide new details and a fresh understanding of how the seemingly routine police encounter began, how it hurtled toward its deadly conclusion and how the police and emergency medical workers responded.
This was not a chance meeting on the street. It was a product of a police strategy to crack down on the sort of disorder that, to the police, Mr. Garner represented. Handcuffed and motionless on the ground, he did not receive immediate aid, and the apparent lapses in protocol prompted a state inquiry. The first official police report on his death failed to note the key detail that vaulted the fatal arrest into the national consciousness: that a police officer had wrapped his arm around Mr. Garner’s neck.
Medical Workers Attend to Eric Garner
The actions of emergency medical technicians, from arriving at Eric Garner’s motionless body to wheeling him away on a stretcher, were captured in a cellphone video.
Mr. Garner’s death was the start of a succession of police killings that captured national attention and ignited debate over race and law enforcement. From Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., to Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the deaths of black men at the hands of the police have faced a level of scrutiny that would have been unlikely just a year ago, before Mr. Garner died and before a grand jury in December declined to bring charges in his death.
Nearly a year after the fatal encounter on Staten Island, the actions of the officers, their commanders and the emergency medical workers remain the subject of official investigations.
Even as those investigations have yet to yield any public conclusions about the case, the intervening months have allowed the events that led to Mr. Garner’s death to come into clearer focus.
Cellphone video gave the world an unobstructed view of the chokehold, which was found to be a cause of Mr. Garner’s death, along with the compression of his chest by officers who helped to handcuff him. For all the clarity the video seemed to provide, the focus on the chokehold left largely unexplored crucial events before, during and after the fatal confrontation.
Tensions had been building well before July 17. That day, a lieutenant from the 120th Precinct, on his way to a meeting, saw a group of men on Bay Street and recognized them as a chronic source of problems in the area, said Lou Turco, the head of the lieutenants’ union. The lieutenant called the precinct. Officers Damico and Pantaleo were sent to address it.
At the scene, the two plainclothes officers moved in, and the supervisors who arrived moments later never gained control. Two witnesses said they heard a sergeant tell the officers to ease up as they held Mr. Garner down on the sidewalk. "Let up," a beauty store manager, Rodney Lee, recalled hearing the sergeant say that day. "You got him already."
For minutes as Mr. Garner lay on the ground, he was not given oxygen by the responding emergency medical personnel, who were from Richmond University Medical Center.
"If someone was choked out, probably they need oxygen right away," said Israel Miranda, president of the Uniformed E.M.T.s, Paramedics and Fire Inspectors F.D.N.Y. Local 2507, which does not represent the Richmond University medical personnel.
In the hours after Mr. Garner died, an initial five-page internal report prepared for senior police commanders, known as a 49, did not refer to contact with his neck. The report, as well as the actions of supervisors involved, is part of the review by the New York Police Department, a spokesman said.
Instead, the report quotes by name a witness who described seeing how "the two officers each took Mr. Garner by the arms and put him on the ground." That same witness, Taisha Allen, later said she told the grand jury on Staten Island that she saw a chokehold. She said the statement attributed to her in the report was not accurate.
Without video of his final struggle, Mr. Garner’s death may have attracted little notice or uproar. Without seeing it, the world would not have known exactly how he died.
The video images were cited in the final autopsy report as one of the factors that led the city medical examiner to conclude that the chokehold and chest compression by the police caused Mr. Garner’s death. Absent the video, many in the Police Department would have gone on believing his death to have been solely caused by his health problems: obesity, asthma and hypertensive cardiovascular disease. The autopsy report, which is confidential, was provided by a person close to Mr. Garner’s family.
"We didn’t know anything about a chokehold or hands to the neck until the video came out," said a former senior police official with direct knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his access to confidential department information. "We found out when everyone else did."
A Site of Disorder
It was March of last year and Gjafer Gjeshbitraj had had enough. A landlord on Bay Street, Mr. Gjeshbitraj went online to 311, the municipal hotline’s website, to complain about men loitering outside his Staten Island apartment building.
They gathered there to sell cigarettes and drugs, he said. One was named Eric.
The business of loose cigarettes is simple and longstanding. Drive to Pennsylvania or Delaware or a nearby Indian reservation. Return to heavily taxed New York City with cheaper boxes of cigarettes. Sell for a profit. Repeat.
For years, such cigarettes had been sold around Bay Street and the park, a poor and working-class area whose population swells each day with those bound for the welfare office across the street. Some readily opt to buy cigarettes individually at $1 or less, rather than a whole pack for 10 times that.
Mr. Garner was among a handful of men, mostly middle-aged and black or Hispanic, who sold near the park. He used the money to help support his wife, Esaw, and their six children.
"We met because I asked him to have a place there to sell cigarettes," said Hiram Guzman, who sold loose cigarettes alongside Mr. Garner for years. "He said, ‘You do whatever you want.’ That was about six years ago."
To the local merchants, Mr. Garner was a daily presence — a friendly face to some and an unwanted competitor to others.
To the Police Department, he was a "condition," a nettlesome sign of disorder well known in the 120th Precinct, whose ranks are filled with officers who also call Staten Island home.
Teams of officers, such as the one Officer Damico belonged to, are supposed to address such conditions. Commanders are grilled at weekly meetings on how well the conditions are being addressed.
That intense focus is borne of a policing strategy — variously known as quality of life or "broken windows" policing — that was popularized by William J. Bratton during his first tour as New York’s police commissioner in the mid-1990s. It remained in place when he returned in 2014, and it continues to be the lodestar of his crime-fighting approach, even as city leaders debate the merits of less punitive measures for minor offenses in this era of lower crime.
On Staten Island, Tompkinsville Park provides a microcosm for that approach. The park and surrounding streets, familiar to veteran Staten Island officers from past drug arrests, have seen improvements, including renovated apartment buildings on Victory Boulevard. But the area remains a magnet for crime and complaints.
The spot where officers approached Mr. Garner on July 17 had already that year been the site of at least 98 arrests, 100 criminal court summonses, 646 calls to 911 and nine complaints to 311.
Among the most consequential of those complaints appeared to come from Mr. Gjeshbitraj, 47. He said in a recent interview that he complained only after physically fighting with the men on the block who sold drugs. The cigarette sellers, he said, provided cover for more illicit activities.
(Though police officials understood the Eric of his complaint to be Mr. Garner, Mr. Gjeshbitraj said he was referring to someone else.)
The complaints eventually reached Police Headquarters, where leaders track spikes in 311 calls for problems such as noise or graffiti as harbingers of more serious crime. Staten Island commanders were briefed in March on the conditions around Tompkinsville Park, a triangle of land just south of the borough’s main courthouse. Mr. Gjeshbitraj was not the first to lament the disorder there. But after his March complaint, he saw swift changes, mostly in the form of arrests.
Despite the extra attention, he said the problem persisted.
Gjafer Gjeshbitraj, a landlord on Bay Street, had complained to the city about men loitering outside his apartment building, selling drugs and cigarettes. Credit Andrew Spear for The New York Times
In June, a unit of officers recorded video of the cigarette sales around the park. The Times viewed some of the footage.
The footage was viewed by police commanders. Word trickled back to the local precinct: There were complaints; this condition persists; officers need to address it.
"We chased him; we arrested him," one police official said of Mr. Garner, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the department’s internal investigation has yet to be disclosed publicly. "But once you’ve chased a guy, what’s a warning going to do?"
The Times tried to reach each of the officers listed as taking part in Mr. Garner’s arrest — some in person, others by phone or through their lawyers. None provided a comment or responded to requests to talk about the encounter. Department policy precludes officers from speaking publicly without authorization.
A Fatal Encounter
Most days Mr. Garner could be found around Bay Street. He played chess and checkers on stools near the curb, peeled off dollar bills for children when the ice cream truck came around and served as a kind of peacekeeper for the motley regulars who occasionally found themselves at odds, said friends and those who knew him from the neighborhood.
On July 17, Mr. Garner had just come from eating lunch with a 23-year-old friend, Ramsey Orta, when a scuffle broke out in front of them on Bay Street. One man accused another, known locally as Twin, of talking inappropriately with his daughter. The girl’s father punched Twin in the face; Mr. Garner shot up from the stoop. "You can’t keep doing this; there are kids out here," Mr. Garner said, as he held the men apart, according to Ms. Allen.
The men went on their way. Soon after, Officers Damico and Pantaleo arrived.
For Officer Pantaleo, 30, who joined the department in 2006, it was not a typical call. He usually worked in a plainclothes unit focused on violent street crime.
But that afternoon, Lt. Christopher Bannon, driving by, had spotted a group that included Mr. Garner on the sidewalk. He called the precinct to tell officers to "get out there," according to the former police official. Officer Pantaleo was ordered to go with Officer Damico, 26, an officer since 2010.
With Officer Pantaleo behind the wheel of an unmarked police car, the two officers, in shorts and T-shirts, circled twice, watching Mr. Garner. As they approached, many on the block recognized them as officers and believed they had come in response to the fight, witnesses said; that they moved to arrest Mr. Garner was a surprise.
As the two officers closed in on Mr. Garner, Mr. Orta began taking video that would total about 16 minutes and would be shown to the grand jury impaneled on Staten Island in September to hear evidence in the case against Officer Pantaleo.
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Officer Damico told Mr. Garner, according to a transcript of the videos prepared by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau and reviewed by The Times.
The transcript documents nearly two minutes of back-and-forth between the officers and Mr. Garner preceding the chokehold — footage not included in the widely circulated clip of Mr. Orta’s video, first posted by The Daily News six hours after Mr. Garner died.
"For what, what did I do?" Mr. Garner said.
"For selling cigarettes," Officer Damico replied.
In the course of the encounter, officers tried to grab his arms at least twice, according to the transcript.
"Don’t touch me please, do not touch me," Mr. Garner told them.
Officer Pantaleo, anticipating an arrest, radioed for backup before swinging one arm over Mr. Garner’s shoulder and around his neck and another under his arm, an attempt to twist the larger man’s body to the ground. The pair rammed against the plate glass window of Bay Beauty Supply; by that time, at least four uniformed officers had arrived.
As Officer Pantaleo and other officers pressed Mr. Garner onto the sidewalk, a uniformed patrol sergeant, Kizzy Adonis, entered the tight frame of the video. It was not clear exactly when a second sergeant, Dhanan Saminath, arrived. In the report, both described arriving after Mr. Garner was on the ground.
The beauty store manager, Mr. Lee, said he heard the female sergeant say, "Let up, you got him already." An officer looked up but did not let go, Mr. Lee said.
Before the grand jury, Mr. Lee said he testified briefly about what he saw, but left feeling the jurors, who were able to ask questions, were uninterested. "They didn’t ask me nothing," he said.
Mr. Orta also told the grand jurors that a sergeant instructed officers to ease up. "Let him go, let him go, he’s done," Mr. Orta recalled her saying.
In the video, Officer Pantaleo, who moved from holding Mr. Garner’s neck to pressing his head to the pavement, Officer Damico and two uniformed patrol officers, Mark Ramos and Craig Furlani, helped handcuff Mr. Garner. As they did so, Mr. Garner repeated, "I can’t breathe."
Ms. Allen also testified about the medical response to a Staten Island grand jury. Credit Andrew Spear for The New York Times
Edward D. Mullins, the head of the sergeants’ union, said the officers and their supervisors did nothing wrong. Officers can take action without sergeants present and regularly do, he said. The lack of any reference to contact with Mr. Garner’s neck in the initial police report was not troubling, Mr. Mullins said, because the Internal Affairs Bureau would later prepare its own, more detailed report.
In addition, Mr. Mullins said, "no one" at the scene thought a chokehold was used.
He said the sergeants were still "being kept inside," or off the streets, pending results of the department’s investigation.
A lawyer for Officer Pantaleo, Stuart London, declined to comment and pointed to a summary he provided in December of the officer’s statements to the grand jury. Officer Pantaleo testified to trying a takedown move during the arrest and said he began holding Mr. Garner’s neck out of fear that they would both crash through a glass storefront.
"He thought that once E.M.T. arrived, everything would be O.K.," Mr. London said at the time.
Difficulty Breathing
Officers in the videos did not appear to respond to Mr. Garner’s pleas. Sergeant Saminath reported Mr. Garner had difficulty breathing and called an ambulance, but he said Mr. Garner "did not appear to be in great distress," the report said.
The department’s Patrol Guide, its manual of rules, calls for officers to immediately send a person with a life-threatening medical condition — "apparent heart attack, breathing difficulties" — to the nearest hospital.
At 3:32 p.m., officers radioed for an ambulance, said a city official, who requested anonymity to discuss details of the response that remained under investigation by state authorities. About a minute and a half later, another request was made. Both were categorized as "unknown," a low priority.
Sergeant Adonis told investigators that she "believed she heard the perpetrator state that he was having difficulty breathing," according to the department’s initial report. Sergeant Saminath said the ambulance he requested arrived about five minutes later.
Witnesses said the officers did not react in accordance with Mr. Garner’s medical distress. (After his death, current and former officers said those at the scene might have believed his pleas were part of a ruse to avoid arrest.)
But even after emergency medical workers arrived, the response appeared disorganized.
Their actions, from arriving at Mr. Garner’s motionless body to wheeling him away, were captured in an eight-minute video recorded by Ms. Allen, who lives in the area and was on the block shopping for sandals. The video of the medical response has not been as widely understood as those of the physical struggle recorded by Mr. Orta.
An ambulance crew arrived unaware of Mr. Garner’s condition, or that police officers were involved. A stretcher was not immediately brought to him. A bag with oxygen equipment that should have been near his body at all times was carried away.
Ms. Allen said in an interview that when medical workers arrived, they casually asked Mr. Garner to wake up, appearing to believe he was "faking it," she said, recounting her testimony before the grand jury.
At first, one emergency medical technician, Nicole Palmeri, leaned over Mr. Garner to feel for a pulse, first on his wrist and then his neck, according to Ms. Allen.
As Ms. Palmeri checked for a pulse, another E.M.T., Stephanie Greenberg, walked back to the ambulance to retrieve a stretcher. An E.M.T. trainee followed her, walking away from Mr. Garner with the oxygen equipment.
Five medical workers were there: the two medical technicians, the trainee and two paramedics who arrived later and are not seen on video. They were from Richmond University Medical Center. Supervisors from the Fire Department are routinely dispatched to serious medical calls, but the Garner call was not initially considered serious. No supervisorsassisted in his medical care on the scene.
Ms. Palmeri did not respond to phone messages or a letter left with a relative. Ms. Greenberg declined to comment.
Mr. Miranda, the union leader for city medical technicians, said he thought the care could have been more aggressive. "I didn’t see any real attempt initially to treat the patient."
A hospital spokesman declined to comment, citing patient confidentiality, but said the medical technicians are still being kept on non-patient duty, while the paramedics have returned to normal duty.
Ms. Allen said the medical response and Mr. Garner’s prior ailments seemed to preoccupy the prosecutors and grand jurors when she testified. Mr. Garner had acute asthma, hypertension and a history of diabetes. He was also obese; these conditions were all listed as contributing factors to his death.
Several times during her testimony, which is kept secret under grand jury rules, Ms. Allen said prosecutors urged her to watch her words. When she said Mr. Garner did not appear to have a pulse, a prosecutor stepped in. "Don’t say it like that," she recalled the prosecutor saying. "You’re only assuming he didn’t have a pulse."
A prosecutor also interjected when she told jurors how Mr. Garner was taken to the ground. "I said they put him in a chokehold," Ms. Allen recalled saying. " ‘Well, you can’t say they put him in a chokehold,’ " she said a prosecutor responded.
A spokesman for the Staten Island district attorney’s office declined to comment, citing restrictions on grand jury proceedings.
Roughly four minutes after medical workers arrived, Mr. Garner was lifted onto the stretcher, with the emergency medical staff assisted by police officers.
At 3:44 p.m. — 12 minutes after the first request for an ambulance — emergency medical workers upgraded the seriousness of the situation to the highest priority level, or Segment 1. They did so, the city official said, because Mr. Garner was in cardiac arrest.
Sergeant Saminath instructed Officer Damico to ride in the ambulance with Mr. Garner. Mr. Garner was declared dead at 4:34 p.m. at Richmond University Medical Center.
An autopsy was performed the next day. "On external examination of the neck, there are no visible injuries," according to the final report. On the inside, however, were telltale signs of choking: strap muscle hemorrhages in his neck and petechial hemorrhages in his eyes. No drugs or alcohol were in his system.
The results of the examination contrasted sharply with the Police Department’s initial account, titled "Death of Perpetrator in Police Custody, Within the Confines of the 120 Precinct." It contained no mention of any contact with Mr. Garner’s neck.
Struggling to Move On
Eleven months later, a lush patch of grass in a faded field in Union County, N.J., is all that marks Mr. Garner’s grave. His mother, Gwen Carr, said she was waiting for the ground to settle as she tried to gather money for a headstone. Frustration and anger remain over his death as many of its central players have struggled to move on.
Ramsey Orta, the man who recorded the deadly confrontation, is facing charges for gun and drug offenses that his family believes are retaliation by the police. Both arrests were made after Mr. Garner’s death.
The family of Mr. Garner is in talks with the city about a financial settlement. "If we haven’t made progress with resolving it by the anniversary of his death, we will go forward with a lawsuit," Jonathan Moore, their lawyer, said.
One of Mr. Garner’s granddaughters, Kaylee, now runs to the television when activists appear, chanting "Hands up, don’t shoot" and "No justice, no peace."
"It’s cute, but it’s a shame at 3 years old that she knows that," Mr. Garner’s wife, said. "She should be reciting the A B Cs."
Visits with hip-hop stars and protest organizers have not muted the pain of her husband’s death. "Empty, empty," Ms. Garner said, lifting a cup of coffee from beside an ashtray. "From day to day, I don’t even know what to do sometimes."
Reverberations from death after death of unarmed black men have not helped Mr. Garner’s family. "It’s like a vision that I’m seeing again, seeing my son dying again," Ms. Carr said.
New York City leaders, including Commissioner Bratton, are changing how minor criminal offenses are handled, exploring ways to make the outcomes less punitive and mulling a new form of warnings in lieu of arrest or summons.
Earlier this year, the Police Department created a new centralized unit, the Force Investigation Division, to investigate fatal police encounters.
In a written response to questions, Mr. Bratton said the creation of the unit "was not a direct result of the Garner incident but rather something that I recognized a need for on a more general basis." He said the notion of retraining predated Mr. Garner’s death, but added that "there is no question that the Garner incident added new dimensions and certainly new immediacy."
Though the Police Department has concluded its investigation into Mr. Garner’s death, the results — and any internal discipline that may come for officers — are delayed until a civil rights inquiry by the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York is completed. An investigation by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates police misconduct, has been similarly delayed.
Stephen Davis, the Police Department’s top spokesman, declined to respond to a list of questions about Mr. Garner’s death and the police response because of "the ongoing federal and departmental reviews into this matter."
In the only inquiry completed so far, a Staten Island grand jury found Officer Pantaleo committed no crime when he used a chokehold — a technique banned by police rules.
Daniel M. Donovan Jr., who was the Staten Island district attorney, fought to keep secret the testimony and other evidence presented to the grand jury. In May, Mr. Donovan was elected to Congress.
Elected officials and civil liberties advocates have unsuccessfully tried to pry open the grand jury transcripts. Separately, lawyers from the civilian review board argued before a Staten Island judge on Friday for access to the transcripts.
"Efforts to obtain N.Y.P.D.’s investigative file of the incident from the N.Y.P.D. have been unsuccessful," the board’s lawyers wrote in legal filings.
On a recent afternoon, steps from where Mr. Garner was arrested in July, a dozen men congregated on the stoop of a Bay Street building owned by Mr. Gjeshbitraj, the landlord who named an "Eric" in his 311 complaint. A man sweating through a red tank-top turned his back to a companion, who put a cigarette in his palm. He raised it to his lips and walked away.
Mr. Gjeshbitraj said in a recent interview that he no longer called the city or the police to complain about the conditions around his building, as he had frequently in the months and years before Mr. Garner died.
"The last time I called the cops, someone got choked to death," he said. "Eric got killed because I called."
Nate Schweber and Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting, and Elisa Cho and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
The message was clear to Tommy McCarthy as soon as the sturdy metal gates were installed on his stoop and on those of nearly 20 other buildings along his block in Manhattan south of Columbia University.
