Mayor de Blasio on Friday slammed the NYPD lieutenant who shrugged off the death of Eric Garner as “not a big deal,” calling the callous supervisor’s cold text to a subordinate an affront.
“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” de Blasio said as he stood outside an ethanol refinery in Gowrie Iowa, his first stop in his 2020 run for the White House. “That’s not moral wording.”
The cold exchange between Lt. Christopher Bannon and Sgt. Dhanan Saminath came to light Thursday during the department trial for Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is accused of using a banned chokehold maneuver on Garner as he and other officers were trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island nearly five years ago.
An email to the NYPD for comment was not immediately returned.
As Garner was loaded into an ambulance and sent to Richmond University Medical Center without a pulse, Saminath alerted Bannon to the Staten Island resident’s likely death.
“Danny and Justin went to collar Eric Garner and he resisted,” Saminath wrote. “When they took him down Eric went into cardiac arrest. He’s unconscious. Might be DOA.”
“For the smokes?” Bannon asked.
“Yeah,” Saminath fired back. “They observed him selling … Danny tried to grab him, they both went down. They called the [ambulance] ASAP. He’s most likely DOA. He has no pulse.”
“Not a big deal,” Bannon fired back. “We were effecting a lawful arrest.”
Garner’s pained gasps for air — where he panted “I can’t breathe” 11 times — was captured on video and helped fuel the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.
The lieutenant’s “Not a big deal” comment drew an outraged response from the audience in the trial room at police headquarters.
Bannon claimed on the stand that he had written his “not a big deal” text to comfort Pantaleo.
“My reasoning behind that text message, not to be malicious, it’s to make sure the officer knew was put in a bad situation … to try to bring him down to a level where you put him at ease,” Bannon said under cross-examination. “That was my intention.”
“Would you agree that Garner was put in a bad situation?” asked Suzanne O’Hare, a prosecutor for the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Bannon said. “I don’t know if he was or wasn’t.
“It’s a big deal if somebody dies during anything,” he later added.
Lou Turco, head of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, said Bannon was just trying “to alleviate the immense pressure often experienced by an officer after a tragic event and to dissuade an officer from spiraling into an emotionally distressed state.”
The Pantaleo trial resumes Tuesday.
