Cases

On the afternoon of July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man and father of six, was stopped by NYPD officers on a Staten Island sidewalk near the St. George Ferry Terminal. In his neighborhood he was known as a peacemaker — someone who broke up fights and kept things calm. Officers Daniel Pantaleo and Justin D'Amico had responded to a report about a fight; Garner had already helped defuse it. The confrontation that followed turned on allegations of illegal cigarette sales. Within minutes, Garner was dead. Pantaleo and D'Amico approached Garner about the cigarette allegations — something for which he had been stopped before, and which he denied at that moment. He told the officers he was tired of being repeatedly harassed and insisted he had not been selling anything. When they moved to arrest him, Pantaleo reached around Garner's neck from behind and applied a chokehold, a technique explicitly banned under NYPD policy. Garner was taken to the ground. As officers restrained him, he said "I can't breathe" eleven times. He lost consciousness and was pronounced dead approximately one hour later. The New York City medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, finding that the chokehold had directly contributed to it. A bystander captured the encounter on video. The footage began circulating within hours. Those eleven words ran through it — clear and repeated — and then moved through the country. "I can't breathe" was becoming something more than a description of physical distress. It was becoming a phrase that named something. The legal proceedings that followed revealed how difficult criminal accountability would be. A Richmond County grand jury was convened to consider whether Pantaleo should face charges. On December 4, 2014, the jury declined to indict him on any count. The decision sparked protests across New York and around the country and became a focal point for national debate about the prosecution of officers in deaths involving Black Americans. Civil accountability arrived on a different timeline. In July 2015, the City of New York agreed to pay the Garner family $5.9 million to settle a civil lawsuit, without any admission of wrongdoing. Internal NYPD disciplinary proceedings moved slowly: Pantaleo remained on the force for five years after the incident. In August 2019, he was terminated and stripped of his pension. He had been 29 years old at the time of the encounter, living in Eltingville, Staten Island. By the time he was fired, Garner had been dead for more than five years. The toll on Garner's family extended far beyond that sidewalk. His daughter Erica became one of the most recognized faces of the movement against police violence, leading rallies, attending court proceedings, and refusing to let the case fade. She died in December 2017 at the age of 27. The NAACP noted that the stress of the prolonged legal fight had contributed to her death. Garner's widow Esaw remained a public advocate until her own death in 2024. His mother Gwen Carr and his son Eric Garner Jr. have continued to speak on his behalf. In a 2024 interview marking ten years since his father's death, Garner Jr. said he was no longer angry at the police — a statement that carried the weight of everything that had happened in the decade between. In May 2020, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, and he too said "I can't breathe" repeatedly as he died. The phrase connected two deaths across six years and different cities, and made it harder to dismiss what activists had argued since 2014: that the Garner case was not an isolated failure but a symptom of something structural. What had begun as eleven words on a Staten Island sidewalk had traveled into the vocabulary of a movement. Twelve years after his death, no officer was ever criminally charged in the case, the civil settlement required no admission of liability, and the officer who applied the prohibited chokehold was fired five years after the fact. What changed was the conversation — and through it, the scale of the movement that still carries his name.