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

TOMPKINSVILLE, Staten Island (PIX11) -- Marchers descended on Tompkinsville Park Wednesday morning in memory of Eric Garner, a Black man killed by a police officer 10 years ago. 

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

Protesters around the world echoed the words “I can’t breathe” after a widely spread video showing then-NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in a chokehold on the sidewalk. The video shows Garner struggling on the ground while saying he couldn’t breathe at least eight times before he lost consciousness in Pantaleo’s chokehold. He was left 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 a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests across the country called for police reform after a stretch of similar incidents involving white police officers killing Black civilians, including Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, 2014.

Pantaleo was fired from the NYPD in 2019 but 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 medical examiner’s office ruled Garner’s death a homicide. However, as then-U.S. attorney Richard Donoghue explained, “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.”

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.