Eric Garner's widow doesn't think his death was a "black-and-white thing," but she said Sunday she does believe the fatal result after being arrested for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island last summer was murder.
"I feel like it's just something that he continued to do and the police knew," Esaw Garner told
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. "You know, they knew."
She appeared on the Sunday morning show along with Al Sharpton and despite her statements that she doesn't believe her husband's death had a racial component, she has joined with Sharpton and other activists in calling for the civil-rights investigation that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week.
Garner told Todd during the interview that her late husband, who was the 43-year-old father of six, started selling individual cigarettes on the street because he couldn't hold a job because of health — and he "was very lazy."
"He tried working with the Parks Department," she said. "But he had asthma. You know? He had issues. You know? Heavy guy. And he was very lazy. You know? He didn’t like to do anything."
She also acknowledged that her late husband had had several run-ins with the police, and they knew him by name and officers often taunted them both when they saw them on the street.
“They said things to us: ‘Hi, Cigarette Man. Hey, Cigarette Man Wife.’ You know? Stuff like that,” she said.
Further, she admitted that her husband had had troubles with the law. “I’m not going to say he was a career criminal, but I’m going to say he had a past of being arrested,” Garner said. “And he never, not once, ever resisted arrest.”
Garner also said that she purchased candy so that her youngest son would not go out on Halloween, and warned her older son at college to not attend parties. "I'm so afraid of what could happen to them in the street by the police," she added.
Protests have been going on in New York City and nationwide since last week, when a grand jury in Staten Island refused to indict the white police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who had used a chokehold to subdue Garner during the fatal arrest, even though the man had told officers that he could not breathe,
reports The New York Post.
On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio refused to say if he respects the grand jury's decision to not indict Pantaleo.
Further, he said he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, have taught their own biracial son, Dante, about the dangers police can pose, but insisted he has "immense respect for the men and women who protect us" while admitting there is a "rift here that has to be overcome."
The head of the NYPD sergeant's union responded by calling de Blasio's comments "really hypocritical and moronic."
“Ultimately, if this individual who’s in charge of running this city doesn’t have faith in his own son being protected by the NYPD, he may want to think about moving out of New York completely,” the union leader, Ed Mullins, told “The Cats Roundtable” on AM 970.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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