Eric Gardner was a black man living in Staten Island.

Kind of one of those neighborhood fixtures, you know, for folks who've lived in any big

city in New York.

Certainly, you have the people who are just around.

The guy who runs the Bodega, the woman who sells beads in the park.

And Eric Gardner was just one of those people who was known around the neighborhood for,

you know, selling cigarettes.

So in New York City, there are very high-syn taxes, right?

Sigarettes are very expensive.

And so what this has done is it's created a black market for cigarettes.

And so what people do is they drive down the states like Virginia where the taxes are

much lower, buy cartons and cases of cigarettes, then drive them back up to New York where

they sell them either one or two at a time or buy a pack.

It's a lucrative little market.

And so all of this brings July 17th, 2014.

Eric Gardner had a few run-ins with the police where they had either arrested him or

talked to him about selling on tech cigarettes.

One of the commanding officers for the local police precinct is driving into the office,

sees a group of people standing on a street corner.

According to witnesses who were kind of supporting Eric Gardner in critical of the police

account, there had been a fight that had broken out between two men.

Eric Gardner had jumped in to try to stop it as he stops the fight, the responding police

...