source: 4WardEverUK

published: 22 June 2025

Image Credit: George Becker at www.Pexels.com

From all of our hundreds of Remembrance Calendar entries, we particularly feature certain cases that were of notable historical significance.

Eric Garner

Police chokehold kills father of six:

On Thursday 17 July 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six of Staten Island, went into cardiac arrest after officers attempted to take him into custody on charges of selling illegal cigarettes.

He was pronounced dead at the hospital approximately one hour later.

A video published by the New York Daily News apparently captures Eric's final moments. In the footage, a plainclothes officer tells him that he watched him sell cigarettes. Eric went on to deny this, saying: “I didn't sell nothing. Every time you see me, you want to harass me, you want to stop me.”

Eric Garner died at the hands of an NYPD officer after being taken down in what is now an illegal chokehold. His dying cry of "I can't breathe" became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Eric and the officer continue to quarrel, and then the officer reaches for Eric's hands in an attempt to place him in handcuffs but he resists, and another officer can be seen putting his arm around his neck and wrestling him to the ground. In the video, Eric repeats: “I can’t breathe, I can't breathe,” as more officers surround him and keep him pinned to the ground.

It was said that Eric Garner had been arrested more than 30 times, often accused of selling loose cigarettes bought outside the state. He resented the scrutiny by the police which he considered harassment. In 2007 he filed a handwritten complaint in federal court accusing a police officer of conducting a cavity search of him on the street, “digging his fingers in my rectum in the middle of the street” while people passed by.

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