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 |  Subject: The Never Ending poLICE Barbarism: Eric Garner tragedy brings back pain, loss for mother of another chokehold victim  Sun Jul 20, 2014 4:16 am | |
| 'It brings up everything like it was yesterday,’ says Iris Baez, whose son Anthony died on Dec. 22, 1994, when a routine arrest went tragically wrong.
The heartbreaking details were all too vivid for Iris Baez: the cops, the outnumbered victim, the chokehold, the motionless body on the ground.
“It brings up everything like it was yesterday,” said Baez, whose son Anthony died on Dec. 22, 1994, when a game of street football escalated into tragedy outside her Bronx home.
“It brings up so much of the wound and it opens up everything all over again. This heartbreak keeps happening.”
Baez spoke Saturday to the Daily News, just two days after the death of Eric Garner, 43. He died after a Staten Island cop wrapped a forearm around his throat.
“They keep on doing the same thing as before,” she lamented. “Like they can do anything they want.”
 HO Mirabel and Anthony Baez are shown on their wedding day in 1992.
Anthony Baez — an asthmatic, like Garner — was tossing a football with his brothers just three days before Christmas and the pigskin accidentally hit a nearby police car.
Baez, 29, stepped in when police grabbed his kid brother, and he was mortally injured as cops tried to arrest him for disorderly conduct.
The Orlando man was visiting for the holidays.
The family charged an enraged cop choked Anthony unconscious, and then left him lying in the street for 10 minutes before taking him to a hospital.
 COURTESY OF GARNER FAMILY Eric and Esaw Garner. His death has brought back the chokehold death of Baez's son, Anthony.
Baez was dead on arrival. Garner, too, was declared dead at a nearby hospital.
“This young man didn’t kill himself,” Iris Baez said of Garner.
“They put an illegal chokehold on him. . . . He was clearly (saying), ‘I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!’ ”
While five officers were involved in the Garner case, Anthony Baez was subdued by a half-dozen cops.
 Michael Schwartz for New York Daily News Iris Baez wore this button during the trial of Frank Livoti for the death of her son, Anthony Baez.
Iris Baez read about the death in The News, while both her son and daughter called after hearing what happened on the news.
But she refused to watch the viral video obtained by The News that captured the arrest and its aftermath.
“I chose not to,” she explained. “I already imagine what that man went through from when my son went through it. I could just figure it out, the same way they took him down.
“He took him down with an illegal chokehold. He couldn’t breathe.”
 W.A. FUNCHES JR./AP Police officer Frances Livoti appears in Bronx Supreme Court in 1996. He served seven years in federal prison for a civil rights violation after a state trial ended in his acquittal for criminally negligent homicide.
She later attended a Saturday morning Harlem rally where Garner’s wife, mother, sister and daughter turned out for support.
“We’re here for them,” Baez told The News before heading to the event. “Hopefully, we can unite . . . and be there just to give support. I sympathize with you and I’m there for you because I’ve been there — and I know what it is and I know what it feels like.”
The horrors of that December day are never far off for Iris Baez — she still lives in the same home on Anthony Baez Place, renamed to honor the memory of her son.
The holidays remain particularly hard almost two decades later, and Baez predicted Garner’s family — particularly his six kids — will suffer the same pain.
 ALAN RAIA/AP Anthony Baez’s father, Ramon Baez, wraps his arm around the neck of a Bronx prosecutor during the trial to show the chokehold.
“At Christmas, my son used to love to dress up for the kids,” she recounted. “Now, when Christmas comes, we don’t have a Santa Claus anymore.
“You know, little things,” Baez continued. “At dinner, he loved the drumsticks of the turkey. Those little things are here with me for life.”
She was also upset that cops escalated what started as a simple arrest for allegedly selling untaxed single cigarettes.
“He didn’t lunge at the police,” she said. “He didn’t have a knife, he didn’t have a gun. Why couldn’t the police negotiate with him? . . . If he needed a ticket, then give him the damn ticket and leave him alone.”
Officer Francis Livoti did seven years in federal prison for violating Anthony’s civil rights after a state trial ended in his acquittal for criminally negligent homicide.
Iris Baez hopes the officers involved in Garner’s death pull even stiffer sentences if they’re charged.
“They have to bring someone to justice because they committed a crime,” she said. “I say the officer who choked him should get 25 to life. That’s the minimum he should get.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/eric-garner-tragedy-brings-back-pain-mother-chokehold-victim-article-1.1872979
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