EXCLUSIVE: Eric Garner’s Widow Reminisces About Their Love Story On the Sixth Anniversary Of His Death
Amid ongoing protests still erupting in cities across the nation following George Floyd’s deadly police encounter on Memorial Day in Minneapolis, July 17 marks the sixth anniversary of an earlier police-involved killing in New York City that also shocked the nation.
Viral cell phone video captured the chaotic scene of several NYPD officers wrestling Eric Garner to the ground, reportedly while trying to arrest him for allegedly selling ‘loosies’ (loose cigarettes) outside of a Staten Island grocery store. The 43-year-old Black man’s pleas of “I can’t breathe” were eerily echoed by Floyd. They have become a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, police defunding efforts, and justice reform policy initiatives.
Now Garner’s widow — Esaw Snipes-Garner — is speaking out for the first time to BET.com about the man she fell in love with and was married to for decades and the new film she’s a part of called “American Trial: The Eric Garner Story,” which premiered on REELZ in June 2020 and is now streaming on Altavod. Directed by Roee Messinger, the unscripted, hybrid fiction-documentary shows the mock trial of Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer accused of placing Garner in a chokehold while taking him into custody.
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Gasping for air, Garner repeated 11 times that he could not breathe. Shortly after the incident, he was pronounced dead at an area hospital. While his death was categorized a homicide, a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo for the crime. Pantaleo, however, was eventually fired by the department in 2019.
The film depicts the former officer (played by an actor) and uses actual attorneys, former New York State prosecutors and `witnesses’ to present facts to `the jury’ – in this case, the audience - to determine guilt or innocence. There is no script: only real people and raw emotion from those like Snipes-Garner, who was married to him for some 25 years and provided “testimony” for the courtroom documentary told through a cinematic lens.
“The movie has helped me in the healing process. Not that I’ve healed any,” Snipes-Garner, 52, shared during a recent phone interview. “To me, it was point blank murder. I believe he [Pantaleo] should have gone to jail.”
The death of George Floyd unveiled the systemic issues that continue to plague many police departments across the country where racial profiling and prejudicial policing are standard practices when enforcing the law. It ignited the country in a way we haven’t seen in decades, but for Snipes-Garner, Floyd’s death simply triggered a new round of pain and heartbreak.
“I cried as if I was watching Eric die all over again," she said. "The media often used the video [of Eric and police] as a point of reference. I didn’t sleep for days. I didn’t eat. I was so upset all over. I tried to stop watching the news but I couldn’t. It was horrible. I still feel it.”
A native New Yorker with African-American, Jewish and Native American roots, Snipes-Garner spent her early childhood in the Marcy Projects public housing in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Later, her mother moved their family to the Lindsay Park Housing co-op in Williamsburg.
She met Garner— a fellow New Yorker — in the late 1980’s on what she terms “one of those dating party lines.”
“I was 19 going on 20. Eric was 16 going on 17. But he lied and said he was older,” she chuckled. “We talked on the phone for days and days. And it took off from there. We became a couple.”
The two were married in August 1989. “We had a big wedding in a small church where my husband's grandfather, who was the pastor, married us. We had a reception in the community room. And then we went on a honeymoon for a week to. ... New York City! We stayed at a hotel near Broadway,” she reminisced.
While 2020 would have marked three decades of marriage, the couple was reportedly separated when Garner passed. Without elaborating, Snipes-Garner makes it clear that regardless of where they were as a couple at the time of his passing, she lost the man she’d loved for most of her adult life.
Together they raised six children including four biological siblings and her two eldest daughters from prior relationships. Still, she says Garner was a good father who accepted her daughters as his own. “He said whatever you want to do, I’m with you 100 percent.”
When it came to his personality, Snipes-Garner fondly described her late husband as “a character.”
“He was very funny. He loved to make people laugh. He was very intelligent. He was a whiz in math. He could do math in his head like 1-2-3. When we were at the grocery store I would ask him, `How much do we have to spend? And what might I need to put back?’ He would do the [prices] and taxes, this and that. He would even tell me if we had enough to go out afterwards.”
While most of the country saw Eric Garner in his last moments as a man suffering and gasping for breath, his wife wants to remember the man who had a “very generous” spirit and was well known among many in their local community.
“He would give anyone the shirt off his back. There was a homeless guy on Staten Island and Eric would buy him a sandwich everyday. Another time, Eric brought a young lady some groceries at the supermarket. He loved kids. He would buy every kid in the park an ice cream.”
The generosity he extended to strangers was also practiced at home. “Every two weeks, he would have the girls go get their hair done,” said Snipes-Garner. “Oh my God, [they] and my sons were so spoiled.”
Numerous media reports have delved into Garner’s past arrests and incarcerations, but Snipes-Garner says there was so much more to him than this one myopic portrayal.
“He was not just some street thug trying to sell cigarettes,” she said. “Everything he did was for his family.”
Garner was a graduate of Automotive High School in [Brooklyn] and attended a year of technical college out of state. He loved cars and worked for some time as a diesel mechanic for Greyhound. As newer car and truck models required diagnostic tests that increasingly required computer skills, Snipes-Garner says her husband’s ability to maintain his livelihood suffered. He was also dealing with a long history of run-ins with police that took its toll in ways both above and below the surface.
“As a young, Black man growing up in New York, he just had a lot of trouble including being arrested,” she explained. “Two years here, a year there, eight months there [in prison], it was horrible...It's so ironic that with his feelings about the police that it would end up being the police who killed him.”
The last six years haven’t been kind to Snipes-Garner and these days she’s not only grieving her spouse, but the loss of their daughter, Erica, who died of a heart attack in 2017. Erica left behind two small children whom Snipes-Garner and her daughter, Emerald, are helping to raise. Before her passing, Erica turned her pain into activism fighting to have the officers involved in her father’s death brought to justice.
“I believe in God wholeheartedly. If not, I probably would have killed myself or lost my mind. You’re with someone for 26 years, then all of a sudden they’re not there anymore. I never thought I’d live my golden years by myself.”
While Snipes-Garner has participated in demonstrations and vigils and grants occasional interviews, she leaves most of the public events to relatives. Garner's mother, Gwen Carr, has represented the family by steadfastly championing police reforms and fighting to keep her son's legacy alive.
However, today, on the anniversary of her husband’s death, Snipes-Garner said her children and three grandchildren will likely be at her home in suburban New Jersey for a family barbecue.
“The kids usually write something to Grandpa and read their thoughts out loud. And then we’ll release balloons,” she says, with the promise that the love and prayers for Grandpa are delivered up to heaven.
Donna M. Owens is an award-winning multi platform journalist. BET has been covering every angle of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s deaths in police custody, other social justice cases and the subsequent aftermath and protests. For our continuing coverage, click here.
