Around 3:30 p.m., officers called for an ambulance to assist Garner, and emergency personnel arrived five minutes later. As he lay motionless on the ground, emergency workers were slow to give him oxygen or place him on a stretcher. The video shows emergency workers and police officers still trying to communicate with Garner although he was unconscious, and there appears to be no urgency to save his life. It wasn’t until twelve minutes later that medical workers upgraded the situation to Segment 1, the highest possible level. Garner was in cardiac arrest and needed to be rushed to the hospital right away. It was too late; he was declared dead at 4:34 p.m. at Richmond University Medical Center. Two weeks later, the chief medical examiner’s office ruled Garner’s death a homicide caused by neck compressions from a choke hold. “Racist-ass cops on Staten Island,” one woman says in the cell phone video, “this is what the fuck they do.”
The circumstances surrounding Garner’s death were eerily similar to a 1994 incident on Staten Island, where a twenty-two-year-old man named Ernest Sayon suffocated and died at the hands of a New York City police officer named Donald Brown. Sayon was standing outside a housing complex at Park Hill Avenue and Sobol Court when officers said they heard what they thought was a firecracker or a gunshot during drug sweeps in the neighborhood. There had been thick tension between the police and young black twentysomethings who felt they were being harassed and picked up on false charges of loitering. In some cases, according to the New York Times, the cops would pull down the young men’s pants in a vigorous search for drugs. Sayon, described as gentle by friends and residents, had a criminal record, so he garnered extra attention in a community where some residents were already feeling unsafe. He reportedly sold crack and cocaine, but he wasn’t some bloodthirsty kingpin terrorizing the block. “He never bothered nobody,” his friend Corey Washington told the Times. “It wasn’t like he was a menace to society.” Still, in 1992, Sayon was arrested for drug possession and resisting arrest, in which, according to police, he “flailed his arms and rolled on the ground,” causing injury to an officer’s thumb. On the night Sayon died, Brown tried to detain Sayon and a struggle ensued.
The two knew each other and had an adversarial relationship. A witness, who had just parked her car along Park Hill Avenue, claimed she saw Brown beat Sayon. “I saw Officer Brown,” said the woman, according to the Times. “He had his head in a choke-hold. He hit his head on the ground.” Reports the following day said Sayon might have died from a head injury, but the chief medical examiner ruled it a homicide caused by pressure on his back, chest, and neck while handcuffed on the ground. So for Staten Island residents, Garner’s death was more of the same. “It’s not new to us in Staten Island, which is sad,” Clifford “Method Man” Smith Jr., a Staten Island native and member of the Wu-Tang Clan, told the Huffington Post in 2015. “If we can just get a human level, and police can stay on a human level with the community… If we can just bridge that gap and get those two together… If we can be treated as human beings in our communities, we wouldn’t have any problem with being policed.”
On the morning of August 9, 2014, some 960 miles from Staten Island, Michael Brown Jr. walked into a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri, a mostly black community roughly twelve miles outside St. Louis. The teenager could be seen on surveillance video retrieving a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, then shoving a clerk into a display case on his way out. But according to other surveillance footage, the young man had visited the store earlier that morning, shortly after 1:00 a.m., trading a brown bag for the cigarillos he’d pick up later that day.
At 11:53 a.m., a police dispatcher reported “stealing in progress” at the Ferguson Market, and Brown, wearing a white T-shirt and a red St. Louis Cardinals hat, was the prime suspect. Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, left the store in the direction of a QuikTrip convenience store nearby. Then, at noon, police officer Darren Wilson arrived in an SUV and saw Brown and his friend walking down the middle of Canfield Drive. He asked them to walk on the sidewalk; Johnson said they were almost at their destination, but Brown had stronger language. “Fuck what you have to say,” he reportedly told the officer. A tussle ensued between Brown and Wilson at the vehicle. Wilson pulled a handgun and threatened to shoot. “I’m standing so close to Big Mike and the officer, I look in his window and I see that he has his gun pointed at both of us,” Johnson once said. “And when he fired his weapon, I moved seconds before he pulled the trigger. I
