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.