NEW YORK _ NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill announced Monday he is firing Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the Staten Island chokehold death of Eric Garner.
"I examined the totality of the circumstances and relied on the facts�" O'Neill said in a press conference at police headquarters in lower Manhattan when announcing the decision.
"If I had been in Officer Pantaleo's situation I may have made similar mistakes," O'Neill added. "Being a police officer is one of the hardest jobs in the world."
The long-awaited decision, on the heels of a recommendation by an NYPD judge that the officer get the ax, caps a painful saga that began more than five years ago, helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement and prompted the police to train its officers how to de-escalate tense street confrontations.
"I can't breathe," Garner cried out 11 times as he was brought down to the sidewalk on Bay St., as seen in a cellphone video exclusively obtained by the Daily News that went viral and drew cries of outrage from around the world.
Garner, suspected of selling loosies _ individual, untaxed cigarettes that merchants complain undercuts their licensed businesses _ told police he had just broken up a fight and did nothing wrong.
The 43-year-old Garner, whose arrest record included arrests for selling loosies, railed against police harassing him and resisted arrest.
"This ends today!" he yelled.
The standoff was a garden variety encounter until police moved in to handcuff him and Pantaleo, far smaller than the 395-pound Garner, took him to the ground, his arm around Garner's neck as they hit the sidewalk.
Pantaleo, who joined the NYPD in 2006, clasped his hands and Garner, suffering from asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, among other illnesses, started coughing, the judge, Rosemary Maldonado, said in her decision.
The officer's lawyer, Stu London, argued at Pantaleo's deparmental trial that Pantaleo used a department-approved seatbelt technique to take Garner down and that he did so in part to avoid he and Garner cracking a storefront plate glass window. Garner died, London argued, because he resisted arrest and was in poor health.
But shortly after the July 17, 2014, incident, then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said Pantaleo used a department-banned chokehold. An internal investigation concluded the same, as the did the city Medical Examiner's office.
Maldonado, who presided over Pantaleo's departmental trial, said much the same thing in her 46-page decision and all but called Pantaleo a liar.
The 34-year-old officer _ who was cleared by both a Staten Island grand jury and the U.S. Department of Justice and had been working a desk job, without his shield and gun, since Garner died _ sat stone-faced throughout the trial and did not testify.
But in an interview with internal investigators, the content of which was not revealed in any meaningful way until Maldonado's decision, Pantaleo was "untruthful," the judge found, noting that his explanation of the fatal encounter was "implausible and self-serving."
