ERIC GARNER

     I’ve not written Eric Garner’s name until now… because as a white man seeing the same video clip everybody else has seen over and over on TV news of Eric Garner’s death, I haven’t known what to say about it; so I haven’t said anything… until now.  I have a hard time believing what happened.  I still don’t know what to say about it that would satisfy me… something that would clear up for me how and why such incidents happen on the streets of my country which is described as the world’s greatest democracy by most politicians who get elected to the House of Representatives or the Senate… especially this week when we’ve endured stories about other killings by police officers, and about a renewed focus by Congress on the decay of our nuclear arsenal, and reminders about terrorism being citizens’ greatest worry in Europe and America homelands, and fear that young people are fleeing the West to join the effort to establish an Islamist state which that movement’s leaders describe as a determination by God’s warriors to create an Islamist caliphate under which the whole world will live according to the will and oversight of Allah.

     According to the New York Daily News this is what happened in New York:  Garner, a 400-pound, six-foot-four resident of Staten Island was sitting in front of a beauty shop on Bay Street when two plainclothes  police officers began questioning him about selling single, untaxed cigarettes.  

     Garner responded to their questioning by saying, “I didn’t do shit.  I was just minding my own business.  Every time you see me you want to mess with me.  I’m tired of it.  It stops today!” he yelled.  A young man named Ramsey Orta, who later shot the video many people have now seen, tried to explain to the officers that his friend had just broken up a fight between three men and had not been selling cigarettes.  

     Backup uniformed officers arrived and moved in to cuff Garner.  “Don’t touch me, please,” he said.

     The video footage shows that when Garner refused the order to put his hands behind his back, one of the plainclothes cops got behind him and put him in a chokehold. Garner struggled as three police in uniforms joined in the effort to subdue him, knocking him to the ground.  Garner began saying, “I can’t breathe…,” Six times he said it before he became quiet and paramedics were called.

     Ramsey Orta says, “They jumped him and they were choking him.  He was foaming at the mouth,” he told a reporter.  “And that’s it, he was done.  The cops were saying, ‘No, he’s O.K., he’s O.K.’  He wasn’t O.K.”

     Another witness Valencia Griffin said, “They were choking him. He kept saying, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Get off of me, get off of me’ and I didn’t hear any more talking after that.  He died right there.” 

     Another witness, who could only give his first name, Douglas, said he’d known Garner for four years.  “He’s a very big man, very intimidating, but he’s just a big teddy bear,” Douglas said. “He’s the nicest guy.  I can’t believe what I saw.  That’s no way to do an address.”

     Where is the sense here?