By Matt Agorist
“I wouldn’t really say [he was killed] because Eric was a black man. It’s due to the fact that they stole money from [Eric] and refused to give him his money, and he filed charges against them.”
New York, NY — The Free Thought Project has been given exclusive information as to why Eric Garner may have been killed by the NYPD. This new information paints an entirely different picture as to why police were harassing Garner that fateful day back in July.
The information comes from an interview that took place last Thursday with Benjamin Carr. Benjamin Carr is Eric Garner’s stepfather, who was in the media recently peacefully resolving a situation with an angry protester.
The brief clip, obtained exclusively by the Free Thought Project, is part of a much larger collection of video which is going to be part of a documentary on police misconduct, which is why the videographer who gave it to us, has placed a watermark over it.
In the interview, Carr tells us that police didn’t show up that day because Garner broke up a fight or sold loosey cigarettes; they were there because police had a history of harassing Garner.
Carr explains that police had actually stolen money from Garner, who subsequently planned to file charges against the NYPD for this theft. Police were there that day, Carr says, not to shake Garner down for selling smokes, but to retaliate against him for filing charges against them.
When the interviewer asks Carr if he thinks that the police singled out Garner because he was black, this is what he said,
“I wouldn’t really say [he was killed] because Eric was a black man. It’s due to the fact that they stole money from him and refused to give him his money, and he filed charges against them. This is why they had a vendetta against him. “
The Free Thought Project tried multiple times to confirm this complaint against the NYPD by reaching out to their Staten Island precinct. However, after being placed on hold by the NYPD for long periods of time, hung up on, and eventually ignored, we were unable to get a statement from them in regards to this case. The recordings of these calls will be put up on our Radio Show youtube channel for review.
However, we did confirm with a member of Garner’s family that Eric Garner was frequently harassed by these officers, and it goes much deeper than money. Garner had actually been sexually assaulted by the NYPD, on multiple occasions, according to our sources.
Of course, this sounds ridiculous. How would the NYPD sexually assault a man like Eric Garner, and why? But if we dig a little deeper we see that officer Daniel Pantaleo, the man who was responsible for Garner’s death, has been sued three times for violating the constitutional rights of other black males in the area, by performing humiliating strip searches and fondling the genitalia of his victims, some of them in public view.
The most recent of these lawsuits was just filed in November and comes from Kenneth Collins, who says in the lawsuit that he “was subjected to a degrading search of his private parts and genitals by the defendants.”
The NYPD paid out a settlement last year to two men who sued the city because Pantaleo forced them to strip naked in public as he “touched and searched their genital areas, or stood by while this was done in their presence.”
According to another lawsuit, victim Rylawn Walker, was charged with marijuana possession and underwent similar rights violations by Pantaleo. The charges were dismissed against Walker and the case sealed on a motion from prosecutors. His lawsuit against the NYPD stated that Walker “was committing no crime at that time and was not acting in a suspicious manner.”
Defense lawyer Michael Colihan summed up this atrocity when he wrote a letter in August 2014 to U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos. In his letter, Colihan said:
“To put it mildly, many police on Staten Island have been playing fast, loose and violently with the public they seem to have forgotten they are sworn to protect,” wrote Colihan. “After litigating about 200 of these civil rights matters in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York since 1977, I have seen no interest by the managers of the New York City Police Department, or anyone employed by the city of New York, in doing anything to stop this.”
After knowing what the NYPD is capable of, these allegations by Benjamin Carr are not surprising in the least. In fact, just 2 months ago, an NYPD officer was actually caught on film stealing over $1,000 in cash from victim Lamard Joye, during a “stop and frisk.” The entire incident was caught on film and we were told that it’s “under internal investigation,” yet nothing has happened.
How many incidents like this one happen daily without consequences for the perpetrators?
Is it any surprise now, seeing why Garner reacted to police with such contempt and non-violent resistance? We are looking at a man being shaken down by people, who’ve allegedly sexually assaulted him multiple times, as well as stolen money from him. And from the video of the incident, it appears that they wished to cause him harm as well.
Would you have been as cordial if armed men with a history of stealing from you and feeling up your private parts, were there to do it all again?
Via:: Free Thought Project
