(AP) — Eric Garner was a familiar figure on the streets near Staten Island’s ferry docks: to his friends, a congenial giant with a generous gesture or a calming word; to police, a persistent face of the small-time crime of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.
Garner’s last run-in with police spiraled into a confrontation in which an officer applied an apparent chokehold, leaving the married father of six dead and police tactics under scrutiny. And it left some who knew him wondering why such conduct was used against a man they describe as a neighborhood peacemaker.
“That’s the ironic part about it. He’s the most gentle of everybody over there,” friend Irvine Johnson said.
Public anguish over Garner’s death kept building Monday, as a small group of demonstrators gathered outside City Hall to demand the police commissioner’s resignation. Medical examiners were working to pinpoint the cause of Garner’s death, prosecutors and police internal affairs detectives were investigating officers’ conduct in the encounter, and the Fire Department was probing paramedics’ and emergency medication technicians’ actions.
Garner, 43, whose friends called him “Big E” and “Teddy Bear,” had a son starting college, five other children and two grandchildren, and a quarter-century-long relationship with his wife, Esaw. He’d had had a couple of temporary jobs with the city Parks Department in recent years, most recently helping with horticulture crews and maintenance in 2013.
