In more than ten hours of tedious questioning of police officers and supervisors under oath this week, a broader picture has begun to emerge of the days, weeks and months leading to the moment when former police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold in July of 2014.
The questioning is part of a rare judicial inquiry that aims to shed light on four main questions: what led up to Garner’s stop and attempted arrest; was false documentation filed after Garner’s death; how confidential health and arrest information about Garner was leaked to the press; and whether Garner was given adequate medical treatment at the scene.
“There was no cover up in this case here. I’ll stand behind the findings we had back in 2014 as I sit here today,” said Deputy Commissioner of Internal Affairs Joseph Reznick, defending his department’s choice to only discipline just two officers involved in Garner’s death five years after the fact. “To Ms. Carr, as a father of three sons, I’m sorry.”
Reznick’s comments came on Tuesday afternoon, the second day of a proceeding that’s expected to last for several weeks with more members of the NYPD slated to testify. It’s likely to offer a rare look behind-the-scenes of one of the most high-profile police killings in New York City history, though it won’t lead to any official rulings or charges for anyone involved.
Instead, it’s an open-ended inquiry requested by Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, and other police reform advocates under a rarely-used provision of the city charter that allows citizens to request an inquiry into misconduct.
“It’s about transparency. It’s about creating a record,” explained New York State Supreme Court Justice Erika Edwards, who is overseeing the virtual proceeding. “It’s about letting the public better understand what happened and did not happen seven years ago.”
The first day of testimony featured NYPD Lieutenant Christopher Bannon, who oversaw quality-of-life concerns in Staten Island, and Officer Justin D’Amico, Pantaleo’s partner, who helped Pantaleo tackle Garner to the ground.
Bannon testified he was summoned to a meeting at police headquarters in Lower Manhattan in March of 2014, four months before Garner’s killing, and was told by NYPD leadership to crack down on the sale of untaxed cigarettes in his precinct. He said the day of Garner’s death he saw a crowd of people on a Bay Street sidewalk and called his officers to the scene, even though he wasn’t able to see any evidence of a crime being committed from his car some distance away.
“You didn't see any actual cigarette sales,” asked Alvin Bragg, one of several attorneys working on behalf of Carr and the other petitioners.
“No sir,” Bannon responded.
The spot on Bay Street on Staten Island where Eric Garner died
Bannon was also pressed about his text message to Officer D’Amico, first unearthed during disciplinary hearings in 2019, that assured D’Amico it was “not a big deal” that Garner was dead.
“Any loss of life is of course a tragedy, so my intention regarding this text message was to kind of bring their mindset back to center,” Bannon said, adding that he was concerned about officers self-harming in the wake of a death in police custody.
D’Amico testified he knew of Eric Garner before the day he was killed because Bannon kept a book with people’s names in the precinct of “potential suspects,” and Garner’s name and photo were in it, along with a handful of others who were thought to be selling untaxed cigarettes. D’Amico also described stopping Garner on Bay Street two or three weeks before the fatal stop, but didn’t file the required paperwork documenting it.
“You can’t be doing this here, you can do this wherever you want, please don’t do it here,” D’Amico said he told Garner in that earlier stop. “I’m new to the area, I’m going to be addressing these types of crimes.”
D’Amico was prodded repeatedly about why he charged Garner with a felony of having 10,000 or more cigarettes on arrest paperwork he submitted after Garner’s death, when officers say they only found four packs. Making false statements is a violation of the NYPD’s patrol guide, but D’Amico did not face repercussions for the misstatement.
“Due to the circumstances I wasn’t thinking clearly, I may have rushed the paperwork a little bit,” D’Amico testified. “This was a total mistake.”
The ongoing judicial inquiry is possibly the last route for the Garner family to secure some type of accountability for what happened.
A Staten Island grand jury didn’t bring forward criminal charges and federal probes amounted to nothing. Former Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner in a fatal chokehold, remained on the force for five years on modified duty after he killed Garner, and was eventually fired following a disciplinary trial in 2019. Sergeant Kizzy Adonis lost 20 vacation days for failing to supervise.
But Carr, other family members, and police accountability advocates have pressed for years for other officers who made key decisions surrounding her Garner’s death and those who were at the scene to be fired from the NYPD. Carr and other petitioners sued in 2019 to demand the judicial inquiry, which is thought by legal experts to be the first of its kind in a century.
But the de Blasio administration’s Law Department fought Carr’s request at every step of the process. They attempted to have the request blocked and dismissed in court, and appealed several times, eventually allowing the proceeding to go ahead when they’d exhausted their legal options.
“It’s been delays. It's been postponements, just always trying to sweep it under the rug,” Carr said at a press conference on Monday. “As Eric’s mother I was not letting it get swept under the rug.”
