He was released from prison in late May, owing to the coronavirus pandemic.)įulford, whose expressions narrated his torment as he spoke to The New Yorker’s Christopher Hwisu Kim, found out about his cousin’s death on social media, along with the rest of the world. (Orta was arrested for gun charges filed just a month after he uploaded the video, in 2014. The only person who served jail time in connection to Garner’s death was Ramsey Orta, the man who took the video. Fulford says that Garner “had such a huge heart.” The world knows Eric Garner’s name because the moments when that heart gave out, under the unrelenting stress of the officer’s grip, were captured on video. Fulford talks about the experience that his family went through in the video above, and offers advice to the family of George Floyd. Garner let out his cry of “I can’t breathe,” now a viral rallying call against racist police brutality, as a group of officers forced him to the ground and eventually smothered him to death with an illegal choke hold that induced a heart attack. Fulford’s cousin, Eric Garner, was the black man killed by New York City police officers for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. In 2014, Fulford endured yet another tragedy, this time in his own family. The details of Heyward’s killing too closely mirror the case of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who was killed by a police officer in an Ohio park, in 2014, also for playing with a toy gun, in an eerie congruence too cruel and precise to be merely coincidental. In 1994, Nicholas Naquan Heyward, Jr., a thirteen-year-old black boy, was playing with a toy gun in a stairwell when he was shot in the stomach by a police officer. It was at the Gowanus Houses where Fulford was first made aware of a murder at the hands of the police. Jason Fulford grew up in Brooklyn, a few subway stops away from the Gowanus Houses, the public-housing project where his cousin and grandparents lived.

Marred for Life! by Jason Fulford