Orta’s video — soon to be seen by the world — showed Garner trying to explain that he’d done nothing wrong. Then a police officer wrapped his arm around Garner’s neck, gripping him in a choke hold until he collapsed. The video showed Garner saying eleven times that he couldn’t breathe. It showed the officers ignoring Garner’s distress, pushing his head into the pavement, letting him lose consciousness there, die there.
Now, near midnight, Orta was in his apartment, the door locked behind him. His house was dark. His family was asleep. He went to the window, looking for the black Crown Vic that had tailed him as he’d walked home. He checked the security of the locks on the door, then checked again. He got into bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. Images from the day swirled above on his dark ceiling.
The police killed my friend, he thought.
Suddenly, Orta’s bedroom filled with light. Disoriented, he wondered if he’d fallen asleep without realizing it and had woken to the dawn. He rose. It wasn’t daylight but a spotlight blasting his home from outside. The metal bars on his windows cast back on him as a grid of shadows. He ran out to the street and saw police cars parked in front of his house, the silhouettes of faceless officers watching.
They’re here for me, Orta thought, because I have proof of what happened.
Orta believed the video would guarantee justice for his friend. He would be wrong. The officer who choked Garner, Daniel Pantaleo, would not be indicted by a grand jury. But in the weeks to come, the footage of Garner’s killing would travel far and wide, and the haunting echoes of “I Can’t Breathe” would become a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, a phrase emblazoned across the chest of LeBron James, a lasting reminder of a plea for help ignored.
Someone will have to pay for this, Orta thought, looking at his phone, not realizing that someone would be him, not knowing that the cops would exact their revenge through a campaign of targeted harassment, that within a year he’d be in prison and facing constant abuse, his enduring punishment for daring to hold the police accountable. But looking out into the final dark minutes of July 17th, 2014, watching the police cars drive away, Orta believed he held an important key that would bring justice, one that would force change.
There is no way to ignore this video, he thought. And he felt something close to hope (Jones 1-2).
On Monday, Orta will begin a four-year prison sentence, after taking a plea deal in July for a weapons and drug case.
It is the result, he and his lawyers argue, of a police campaign to harm his life. After filming Garner’s death, they claim, he was increasingly harassed and targeted by police and was arrested at least eight times in fewer than two years.
Of several criminal cases against him, only two charges stuck. Two weeks after filming Garner’s death, Orta was arrested on charges of possessing a handgun and was later caught [allegedly] selling heroin to an undercover policeman.
…
In August 2014, Pat Lynch, president of New York’s biggest police union, said it “is criminals like Mr. Orta who carry illegal firearms who stand to benefit the most by demonising the good work of police officers” (Safdar 2).
In a statement released to the media last night, the NYPD announced that Ramsey Orta, 22, allegedly tried to hide a gun on a teen girl.
According to the NYPD, at 9:45 p.m. on August 2, members of the "Staten Island Narcotics Module" saw Orta talking to a 17-year-old girl at Bay Street and Victory Boulevard. Cops say the pair walked into "the Hotel Richmond, a known drug prone location, located at 71 Central Avenue. The two suspects are inside only for moments and then depart."
Then, police say, plainclothes cops with their shields out approached the two, but Orta slipped an item into the girl's waistband. The officers then "took control of the two" and found an unloaded .25 caliber Norton handgun on her.
Orta was charged with criminal possession of a weapon while the girl, Alba Lekaj, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and unlawful possession of marijuana. Orta has been arrested numerous times, for assault, rape, robbery, menacing and more, and has "three other criminal cases pending against him."
Orta's family says he's been a target for the NYPD, after sharing the distressing video he took of police officers putting Eric Garner into a chokehold on July 17 (Chung “Man” 1-2).
Orta insisted the gun wasn’t his. "When they searched me, they didn't find nothing on me. And the same cop that searched me, he told me clearly himself, that karma's a bitch, what goes around comes around," Orta said, adding later, "I had nothing to do with this. I would be stupid to walk around with a gun after me being in the spotlight." He also explained what he was doing out:
My wife asked me to go get a Yoo-hoo and a Tylenol PM, so that's what I decided to do. I knew that they were following me from my house to KFC (on Victory Boulevard near Bay Street). When I went inside the bathroom in KFC and I came back out, they were still following me. So I walked up the hill towards Central Avenue, next thing I know, they jump out on me.
"They searched me, they didn't find nothing. They searched the girl, they found the gun on her. Then all of a sudden, they're telling me to turn around."
Orta's family also said the police have been following him around since his incriminating video was shown. His wife said, "He called me and said, 'babe, hurry up and come over here. They’re trying to pin something on me.' The day after they declare it a homicide, you find someone next to him with a gun, and you saw him pass it off? Out in public when he knows he’s in the public spotlight? It makes no sense."
The teen girl's mother says her daughter is innocent and that Orta got her in trouble (Chung “Ramsey” 1).
In the last year, Orta’s life has been upended. He has been arrested three times since August 2014. The first, for criminal possession of a handgun he allegedly tried to give a 17-year-old, came a day after Garner’s death was ruled a homicide by the city’s medical examiner. In February, he was arrested again on multiple charges of selling and possessing drugs. The third came on June 30 when he was accused of selling MDMA to an undercover cop. A lab test later showed that the alleged MDMA was fake and the charges were reduced. ...
Orta, 23, is shy and speaks in a soft almost-mumble. He would be unassuming if not for his steady gaze, which makes you think he’s going to say more, though he rarely does. And he is tiny. Arrest records list him at 5’6” and 115 lbs., but that might be generous.
Orta was born in Manhattan and lived there until he was about 10 years old. Around age 12, his parents split up and he soon found himself helping raise his younger brother Jaime.
“He grew up fast,” says Emily Mercado, Orta’s mother. “He was like my little husband, telling me what to do, where I’m going.”
The family bounced around from New Jersey to Pennsylvania and then back to New York, relocating to Staten Island around the end of 2009. Back in New York, Orta says he worked mostly in delis stocking shelves and making sandwiches. Orta didn’t finish high school but later attended trade schools and studied carpentry.
He also had multiple run-ins with the law. Since 2009, Orta has reportedly been arrested dozens of times. In August, an unnamed police source told the Staten Island Advance that Orta had been arrested 26 times, with at least 10 of those cases sealed by the courts. His lawyers say his number of total arrests is far fewer (Sanburn 1-2).
“My grandfather and grandmother sold coke until the day they died. They ran prostitutes who stayed with us sometimes.” He recalls the women chasing him when he was a boy, threatening to pull down his pants to see if he was hung like his grandfather. He remembers that the apartment was always crowded, with strangers appearing at all hours, disappearing in back rooms, reemerging somehow changed. This was normal to him. It took him until he was a teen to understand exactly what he’d been born into. And then he started selling drugs himself. He’d moved PCP on Staten Island for a while, but quit after he’d tried it himself a few times with bad results.
“I like weed, I like ecstasy. That’s it now,” he says. “Nothing else.”
Orta’s family moved to Staten Island when he was thirteen. Before that, he grew up in the Baruch Housing Projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As a kid, he played sports at the Boys’ Club on Pitt Street. One summer he hurt his back during a swimming competition. It seized completely and he couldn’t move. He began to sink and was certain he would drown. There were so many kids in the pool, he didn’t think anyone would notice him on the bottom. Someone from the crowd jumped fully clothed into the pool to pull Orta out. His mother gave him Vicodin for the pain, and when the pain subsided, an addiction had bloomed in its place.
“I lost the summer that way, on Vicodin,” he says.
Orta was nine years old. He started taking other pain pills, mixing them with Seroquel, which he’d been prescribed to treat his depression and mood disorder.
When he was ten, members of the Bloods recruited him into petty thefts. He was small and could kick out window air conditioning units and squeeze through the space they left. For a while, he tried to stay out of trouble by spending all his free time in the safety of the Boys’ Club, but it shut down in 2003 when Orta was eleven. When his family moved to Staten Island, he didn’t move with them. He was locked up in Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, a facility so notorious for detainee abuse that it was forced to close forever in 2011.
I ask him how he’d ended up in Spofford. “I brought a knife to school and held it to some kid’s neck,” he says.
Why? Had he threatened you?
“Nah, I never got bullied because I was a Blood. I’ve just always had one of those short-guy complexes. I used to think I had to let everyone know what I was about. So, no, that kid never messed with me. I just put my knife on him.” Orta was 13.
In Spofford, he learned skills that help him to survive in prison.
“You learn how to fight with the tools you’ve got,” he says. “Like, there’s one hot pot in the kitchen that boils water. If someone is fucking with you, you fill it with baby oil and throw it at them.”
Why baby oil?
He looks at me incredulously, my lack of imagination further proof of my privilege.
“Hot water will burn you,” he says. “But baby oil sticks to you, and when you try to wipe it off, your skin comes off, too.”
Ah.
“Look, the point is, I’m smart about certain things. I’ve been on the streets doing my dirt for a long time,” he says. “So you have to understand how ridiculous this gun charge is. There’s no chance I’m dumb enough to give a girl a gun out in the open like that. The cops had been following me every day since Eric died, shining lights in my house every night. You think I’m walking around with a stolen gun that now they say wasn’t even loaded?”
Orta says that when he was arrested on the gun charge, the officers told him it would be better to kill himself before they locked him up with their people. At the station, he began to have a panic attack and had to be taken to the Richmond hospital for a psych evaluation. There was a phone call to his mother, allegedly from the hospital, telling her that he was a suicide risk.
But Orta believes that the call was really from the 120th Precinct, that they’d allowed him to go to the hospital to establish a paper trail, so that when they killed him, they could make it look like a suicide. Orta posted bail, and as soon as he returned home, he made a video saying that if he died, do not believe that he’d done it himself, and know it was murder (Jones 8-11).
From February to April, Orta was locked up in Rikers Island, New York City’s largest jail, awaiting bail following his arrest on drug charges.
At intake, everyone knew his name. He told me the COs taunted him about the Garner video. “You’re ours now,” he claims they said. “Not so tough without your camera.”
The threats continued. When his cell block was put on lockdown, his anxiety spiked. Lockdown meant Orta was restricted from participating in the preparation of his own food. On March 3rd, 2015, Orta’s cell block was served a meal of corn, cabbage, bread, juice, and meatloaf. He didn’t touch it. He’d fallen ill a few times after eating the food at Rikers and was convinced he was being targeted and poisoned.
“Eat, inmate,” a CO commanded, banging Orta’s cell with a baton. The guards were all standing too close, watching too intently as the others ate. This kind of attention was unusual. He saw others from his cell block staring down into their meatloaf, forks frozen in midair.
“We’re not going anywhere until you eat,” a CO said and entered Orta’s cell. He hit Orta with his baton, hurled slurs, promised a citation for refusing orders. “How many days in SHU you want?”
Orta rattles his chair as he tells me this part of the story. “He tried to bend me up,” he says, then shows me how, miming his arms being twisted behind his back.
Some of the prisoners had eaten everything quickly, and now they had strange looks on their faces. Orta could see a man in a nearby cell. He opened his mouth and Orta leaned forward to hear what he had to say, but instead of words, blood flowed from the man’s parted lips. He was vomiting blood. Others were vomiting blood; some were on the floor of their cells, clawing at their own bodies.
Later, in depositions, the affected would say their stomachs were on fire. Some felt pain in their chests and worried they were having heart attacks. Others were so dizzy they couldn’t stand. They writhed on the floor of their cells. Some claimed the guards walked by, watching, laughing, flipping them all the bird. The stench of vomit and feces permeated the cell.
No one was taken to the infirmary. Orta had wrapped up his meatloaf in a napkin, hoping it could be tested for the poison he was certain was there. When he looked closely at the meatloaf, he saw the top was a speckled bluish-green.
Court documents filed six days later alleged that the prisoners had suffered and continued to suffer from “nausea, vomiting, pain, dizziness, aches, headaches, stomach/intestinal pains, dehydration, diarrhea, nosebleeds, throwing up blood, diarrhea with blood, and/or an overwhelming sense of illness.” The symptoms were consistent with human consumption of rat poison, and when the tainted meatloaf was finally tested, the results found that the blue-green pellets visible in the meatloaf were brodifacoum, the active ingredient in rodenticide.
After this, Orta stopped eating. He refuses to eat anything other than what has been sent in packages from Deja or is available in his commissary. Deja tells me packages are often returned to her ripped open with items destroyed or missing.
Orta posted bail and pleaded “not guilty” on the gun charges.
In the early morning hours of February 10th, 2015, Orta’s apartment was raided. The police stated they had months-old recordings of him selling drugs to an undercover cop. They held that they’d captured nine sales, a charge that came with the possible sentence of ten years per sale (Jones 8-11).
On Feb. 10, Orta, his mother, and brother, Michael Batista, were arrested on multiple drug charges after police entered their home in the early morning hours. All three were charged with multiple felony and misdemeanor drug counts. Those cases are still pending. Orta’s mother says she’s been in therapy since the incident for what she describes as post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I don’t want to be around cops,” Emily Mercado says. “I stay indoors.”
Orta’s aunt, Lisa Mercado, who has often spoken on behalf of the family, says she too has been followed by the police and claims that Orta’s possessions were taken from his former Staten Island home after he moved. She says the family filed a police report but the cops never investigated.
“Only Ramsey’s stuff was missing,” she says ((Sanburn 4).
The police claimed to ...have Orta’s mother, Emily Mercado, on film aiding in the drug sales. She was also arrested in the February raid. At the arraignment, Mercado was traumatized, weeping. Orta was never shown the video and had initially wanted to fight the charges, but when the DA offered him a plea deal that included dropping all charges against his mother, he took it.
“She’d die in here,” he says. “But me, I know how to do the time. I’ve been locked up my whole life” (Jones 5-6).
We hear a voice say, “My girl.”
Deja doesn’t turn around but smiles and jams more quarters into the vending machine, faster now, punching buttons, piling food on a nearby table.
I know this voice, too. I’d heard it rise from behind the camera at the beginning of the Garner video to say, “Once again, police beating up on people.” At first that voice is weary, resigned — the scene he’s capturing is his everyday life. But it quickly changes, fills with concern, when Garner falls. Orta whispers, “He can’t breathe.”
Orta, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and an African American father, stands framed by a window of cross-hatched metal bars. He is cuffed at the wrists and ankles, smiling. Orta is shockingly thin. His cheekbones jut from his pale gray skin. His hair — buzzed short in pictures from before his arrest — sticks wildly from his head in clumps.
The guard who led him out says, “Jesus, Orta, couldn’t find a comb?”
“You won’t let me tie it up!” Orta replies.
Orta calls for Deja again. He looks sidewise at the correctional officers, and when he is sure they aren’t looking, he puckers his lips to fit them through the iron grid separating him from her, and they kiss. Soon she is back at the vending machine.
“She always does this,” he tells me. “I won’t eat in here, so she’s worried I’m starving.” The circles around his eyes are so dark, the whites of his eyes shine as if from the bottom of a hole.
“Do you want a sandwich?” Deja asks him. The only time she can be certain he’s eating is when she buys his food herself during visits. He agrees to a burger, and she buys three. They are dispensed frozen and I offer to heat them in the microwave, wanting to give Orta and Deja a minute alone.
A correctional officer approaches and tells me the microwave is broken. I see its power cord pulled from the wall and jammed behind a toaster. I plug it in, push a few buttons, and it buzzes to life.
“I told you it’s broken,” the CO says.
I’d crossed an invisible line. The door of the microwave reflects back our distorted image. I can see the CO standing behind me, waiting.
When I return with the still-frozen burgers, Orta explains: “They fuck with my food. They know I won’t eat what they give me, not since Rikers” (Jones 3-4).
Deja tells me packages are often returned to her ripped open with items destroyed or missing.
Orta claims he is constantly ticketed by the COs for petty or falsified offenses. One night he was having stomach troubles and requested a pass from the facility’s nurse to sleep on the bottom bunk, to be closer to the toilet. A CO woke him and ordered him to sleep on the top bunk. Orta explained that he had a sick pass, and the CO wrote him up for disobeying a direct order. Tickets like these trigger the loss of privileges, like the ability to receive outside packages of food. Or worse: the ticket that had landed him 60 days in solitary was for smoking a cigarette in the wrong part of the prison.
Orta says he’s been threatened, called racist names, beaten. He talks about these incidents in a measured, almost casual way. He’s been locked up before and possesses fluency in a prison’s violent rhythms. But there’s one form of harassment he describes at length and with visceral anguish. In the process of inspecting his cell, the COs routinely crush to dust his Pop-Tarts, chips, ramen packets. This is the food Deja sends him, the only food he feels safe eating (Jones 7).
New York’s Freedom of Information Law, I’m able to review the records of Orta’s citations and grievances filed while he was in custody. The stack follows a conspicuous pattern. Orta is cited for petty offenses until the number of tickets triggers the loss of privileges, including access to phone calls or the commissary, often for 25 or 30 days. As soon as the penalty expires and his privileges are restored, the ticketing cycle begins again.
“What you’re seeing with Ramsey — the incessant petty tickets — that is not something that we see frequently. That happens to people who are specifically targeted,” says Adriano De Gennaro of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the New York City Legal Aid Society. “However, falsified tickets, inflated charges, petty tickets, that’s par for the course. The State Department of Corrections uses tickets as a cudgel against people who are in custody. But the sustained pattern of these petty tickets is at least somewhat unique to Ramsey.”
No matter how minimal the charge may be, these citations accumulate to devastating effect. Multiple tickets can mean a loss of Good Time, which can push back release. Orta has lost his earliest release date, extending his sentence by a minimum of six months.
De Gennaro’s colleague Dori Lewis adds, “When investigations happen in response to grievances or claims of harassment, those investigations are conducted by security staff at the prison. Basically they’ll consist of asking the officer, ‘Hey, did you do this?’ and they’ll say, ‘No, I didn’t’ and that’s it. Investigation closed. Sometimes the grievances never even get submitted.”
Orta’s grievances have all been denied. He lists the names of dozens of other prisoners as witnesses to his harassment, but the official forms claim they all refused to participate in the grievance process.
“When the witnesses ‘refuse,’” Lewis says, “it’s hard to know if they were ever asked or if they refused out of the fear that if you testify against correctional staff that you’ll be harassed next.”
Grievances can be appealed to the superintendent of the facility, and in turn to higher-ups in Albany. But it’s unlikely that a new investigation would occur. The grievances are kicked back to the facility, and sometimes the staff in charge of investigating the incidents are the same ones involved in the incident. It’s a closed circle, a clenched fist (Jones 15-16).
The man who filmed police officer Daniel Pantaleo fatally choking Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014 has been released from prison.
Ramsey Orta had been serving a four-year sentence on gun charge … just a month after Orta filmed Garner's death in July 2014.
…
… a Department of Corrections and Community Supervision spokesperson also confirmed his release. His prison sentence is officially over on July 11th [2020]; after that, Orta will remain under court supervision until January 2022," … (Chung “Filmed” 1).
[September 2020] Ramsey Orta, 29, the man who recorded Eric Garner’s death, was charged in Brooklyn Federal Court in a gun possession case, reported the N.Y. Daily News.
The report says Orta was hit with “felon in possession of a weapon” charges in a complaint filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Police allegedly stopped Orta as he was driving his BMW in Brooklyn on Wednesday on Roebling St. and S. 2nd St. Police allegedly found him with loose marijuana on his lap, the report says.
After a search, police allegedly uncovered a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm caliber pistol with 12 bullets in it, the criminal complaint says (Porpora 1).
Works cited:
Chung, Jen. “Ramsey Orta, Who Filmed the Police Killing of Eric Garner, Released from Prison.” Gothamist, June 9, 2020. Net. https://gothamist.com/news/ramsey-orta-who-filmed-police-killing-eric-garner-released-prison
Chung, Jen. “Man Who Filmed NYPD's Fatal Chokehold Arrested on Gun Charges.” Gothamist, August 4, 2014. Net. https://gothamist.com/news/man-who-filmed-nypds-fatal-chokehold-arrested-on-gun-charges
Chung, Jen. “Ramsey Orta "100% Sure" Cops Arrested Him as Revenge for Filming Fatal Chokehold.” Gothamist, Updated July 24, 2017. Net. https://gothamist.com/news/ramsey-orta-100-sure-cops-arrested-him-as-revenge-for-filming-fatal-chokehold
Jones, Chloe Cooper. “Fearing for His Live.” The Verge, March 13, 2019. Net. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18253848/eric-garner-footage-ramsey-orta-police-brutality-killing-safety
Porpora, Tracey. “Report: Ramsey Orta, Who Filmed Eric Garner’s Death, Charged with Gun Possession.” Silive.com. September 27, 2020. Net. https://www.silive.com/news/2020/09/report-ramsey-orta-who-filmed-eric-garner-death-charged-with-gun-possession.html
Safdar, Anealla. “NY Man Who Filmed Eric Garner’s Death Heading to Jail.” Aljazeera, October 1, 2016. Net. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/10/1/ny-man-who-filmed-eric-garners-death-heading-to-jail
Sanburn, Josh. “One Year after Filming Eric Garner’s Fatal Confrontation with Police, Ramsey Orta’s Life Has Been Upended.” Time, June 8, 2020. Net. https://time.com/ramsey-orta-eric-garner-video/
No comments:
Post a Comment