Jason Fulford doesn’t breathe like everyone else. He’s aware of the air that enters his lungs and then exhales. “I feel blessed to be able to take another breath,” he says, like someone who has thought a lot about the short time between being alive and not being alive. He is the cousin of Eric Garner, the African-American who died exactly ten years ago in front of a beauty supply store in Staten Island, begging the authorities to let him breathe. That’s what Fulford heard when he opened his Facebook page and saw his cousin moaning on the ground, repeating eleven times the phrase “I can’t breathe” (“I can’t breathe”), in a video that paralyzed New York and the country, and reminded the world of the deformed face of police violence against black people in the United States.
In 2014, Fulford was 33 years old and had just arrived in Puerto Rico. It was the summer months and he took advantage of his vacation from school teaching to attend a friend’s wedding. At some point, from the lobby From the hotel where he was staying, he checked his Facebook page. “I saw a video that was trending and a lot of people were sharing it,” he says. “Then I looked at it and I was like, wait, that’s my cousin Eric. Right away I started getting messages and calls from my family. I didn’t want to believe it. I still have that image in my head.”
In the video, which was recorded by friend Ramsey Orta and shared by millions of users, Garner is seen in yellow shorts and a purple sweater, speaking in an exasperated tone outside a Bay Beauty Supply, surrounded by several police officers. They were arguing over the same thing that police have charged Garner with before: selling loose cigarettes without a license. A report by The New York Times Garner says that in 2007, Garner filed a complaint in federal court alleging that an officer searched him and stuck his “fingers in my rectum in the street.” Garner, who had six children and three grandchildren, was known in the Bay Street area for sitting on the sidewalk playing chess and selling loose cigarettes. He was seen selling cigarettes more than once near the Staten Island ferry terminal or around Tompkinsville Park, where, according to the officer, he was also seen selling cigarettes. NYTThat year, at least 98 arrests, 100 court summonses, 646 calls to 911 and nine complaints to 311 were recorded.
On July 17, 2014, police approached Garner following a complaint from Mr. Gjafer Gjeshbitraj, a resident who was upset about people loitering in the neighborhood.
“Why, what did I do?” Garner asked the officers.
—For selling cigarettes, they replied.
At some point during the argument, the officers pounced on Garner, throwing his 6-foot-2, 395-pound body to the ground. What followed was forever etched into the consciousness of the black community: eleven cries for help, eleven times the phrase “I can’t breathe” without the officers taking any notice. Daniel Pantaleo, 29, a member of the New York Police Department who was later found to have a history of abuse as a police officer, put Garner in a chokehold that suffocated him. Garner was pronounced dead at 4:34 p.m. on July 17 at the University of Richmond Medical Center.
Now that he has just turned 43, Fulford can’t help but draw out certain accounts that remind him of how close death and violence have come in his life. Today, he is the same age as Garner when he died, and the same age as Nicholas Heyward, his African-American friend who was also killed by police when they were both 13. Heyward lived in the Gowanus Houses public housing project in Brooklyn, where Garner also grew up. On Sept. 27, 1994, while playing cops and robbers with some friends using plastic guns, a patrol officer responded to a call, showed up and shot Heyward in the stomach.
Two years later, in 1996, Fulford learned of the death of his cousin Emery, Garner’s brother. It’s something that almost no one knows, he says, but Eric lost one of his brothers to a gunshot wound in a street fight. In 2013, the family also received the news of the death of Joe Flagg, Fulford and Garner’s cousin, who was shot when they tried to rob the store where he worked in New Jersey. It was at cousin Flagg’s funeral that Fulford last saw his cousin Garner. He felt like he was protecting him. “We were at the grave, I remember him standing behind me. It was a very comforting feeling.” A year later, Garner would die. “I thought to myself how, how, how, how is it possible that my cousin, who lived showing how much heart he had, is taken from us in this brutal way,” says Fulford. “It hurts to lose people you love to violence, it’s a hard reality that I have to deal with. I feel like sometimes we don’t understand the pain that someone has to keep inside.”
Being the youngest cousin, Fulford had great admiration for Joe, Emery and Eric. If he had to say something about them, he would say that they were the most “cool” that he had ever known. They wore clothes “cool”, they wore styles “cool” in the hair and they heard music “cool”. Everything Fulford wanted to be, violence snuffed out forever. Fulford is quick to say that he has also felt fear for himself, a black man from New York. “When you have that kind of fear instilled in you and people who look like you, you know, it’s hard not to feel it. Historically, things tend to happen not just in my family, but to people who look like me,” he says. “But I will say that as I get older, as I grow, I’m learning not to be afraid. Fear disconnects us from the real work that we could be doing.”
‘Taking Our Breath Back’, in honor of Eric Garner
On December 4, 2014, a Richmond County grand jury decided that Pantaleo would not be charged in Garner’s death. Despite a medical examiner ruling the death a homicide, NYPD officials and officers attempted to cover up the incident, blaming Garner’s health and “morbid obesity,” according to Pantaleo’s attorney, Stuart London. Garner’s death, and the jury’s subsequent decision, prompted thousands of people in New York and other cities such as Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Oakland to take to the streets in protest of police brutality. It was not until 2019, after a five-year, relentless fight by the Garner family and civil rights groups, that Pantaleo was fired from the NYPD, after it was proven that he “recklessly caused injury to Eric Garner by holding a prohibited chokehold for nine to 10 seconds,” the judges said.
This Wednesday, on the 10th anniversary of Garner’s death, the family has called for a march starting in Staten Island to the sign that reads “Eric Garner Way,” at the corner of Bay Street and Victory Boulevard. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, has been vocal in demanding justice for the deaths of her son and other black people at the hands of police in the United States. “My aunt Gwen is one of the strongest women I’ve ever met in my life,” Fulford says. “She’s been handling this in an amazing way and making an incredible impact with the things she does.”
Following Garner’s death, a series of police killings of black people followed: Michael Brown, 18, shot and killed by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri; Walter Scott, 50, killed by another officer in North Charleston, South Carolina; Freddie Gray Jr., 25, who was fatally wounded in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. In 2020, the case of George Floyd caused people to break through the coronavirus lockdown and take to the streets: again, the death of an African American man, with a white Minneapolis officer’s knee on his neck. His last words, “I can’t breathe“, were the same ones Eric Garner said in 2014.
“Watching it happen to Floyd years later was very difficult,” Fulford says. “It was like reliving Eric’s murder in its entirety. I felt it showed that as a society we weren’t making any progress.”
This Wednesday, Fulford also debuts as a rapper. He will honor Garner’s memory with the project “Amplify Vo!ces” by Catalan pianist, composer and producer Albert Marquès, which aims to help people who are not musicians tell their stories. “The idea is to give voice, to amplify the voice of those who do not have one,” says Marquès, who has already extended the microphone to African-American Keith LaMar, who has been on death row at the Ohio State Penitentiary since 1995, for a crime he claims he did not commit.
Marqués and Fulford met at a Manhattan public high school where the former teaches and the latter is an alumnus. LaMar, and the activism they have both done to demand justice, is a cause that unites them. A while ago Marquès invited Fulford to take the microphone this time to tell his family’s story. “It was a great honor that he asked me to do that,” says Fulford, who was in charge of the lyrics for Taking Our Breath Back (“Catch Your Breath”), the song that mixes hip hop, jazz and rock, and tells the story of Eric Garner.
“I feel like I just want to honor my cousin,” Fulford says. “I feel like we all need to understand how important every breath is.” In the video, which features him singing the lyrics he wrote, which Marquès set to music, Fulford takes a breath and wonders, “How long are we just going to sit there, make excuses, while they suffocate us?”
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