Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner who became an outspoken activist against police brutality after her father’s death at the hands of a New York police officer, died on Saturday, according to her mother. She was 27.
Ms. Garner had been placed in a medically induced coma last week after an asthma episode precipitated a major heart attack. She was being treated at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in Brooklyn, and died there. No official cause of death has been given.
“The only thing I can say is that she was a warrior,” Ms. Garner’s mother, Esaw Snipes, said on Saturday. “She fought the good fight. This is just the first fight in 27 years she lost.”
Ms. Garner became a central figure in the charged conversation about race and the use of force by the police after a New York Police Department officer placed her father into an unauthorized chokehold on Staten Island in 2014 while responding to complaints he was selling untaxed cigarettes.
As Mr. Garner, who also suffered from asthma, was being choked by the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, he repeated the words “I can’t breathe” 11 times — a phrase that became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and other activists.
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An autopsy by the city’s medical examiner ruled Mr. Garner’s death a homicide. No charges were brought against Officer Pantaleo.
Ms. Garner was initially apprehensive about becoming a face of the movement for police accountability, according to her website. But she became outspoken, organizing a “die-in” on the same corner where her father was placed in the chokehold, and accusing Mayor Bill de Blasio of not caring about African-Americans.
In a tweet on Saturday, Mr. de Blasio praised Ms. Garner’s “unshakable sense of justice and passion for humanity.”
In an interview this month with Benjamin Dixon, the host of a progressive podcast and YouTube show, Ms. Garner described the frustrations and physical toll of her activism.
“I’m struggling right now with the stress and everything,” she said. “This thing, it beats you down. The system beats you down to where you can’t win.”
Ms. Garner had an 8-year-old daughter and a 4-month-old son, whom she named after her father.
DeRay Mckesson, a national voice for the Black Lives Matter movement, said in an interview on Saturday that Ms. Garner had inspired other activists.
“Erica took the truth with her everywhere she went, even if that truth made people uncomfortable,” he said, recalling her willingness to confront President Barack Obama and demand that he take a stand against racially charged policing tactics.
Civil rights activists and celebrities flooded social media with tributes to Ms. Garner.
Even as Ms. Garner pressed politicians and law enforcement officials to hold the police accountable for her father’s death, she was emphatic that her personal tragedy was also a public one.
“Even with my own heartbreak, when I demand justice, it’s never just for Eric Garner,” she wrote in The Washington Post in 2016. “It’s for my daughter; it’s for the next generation of African-Americans.”
In addition to her children and mother, she is also survived by two sisters, two brothers and her grandmother, Ms. Snipes said.
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