Cop-watch activist Ramsey Orta, 24, the man who recorded Eric Garner’s July 17, 2014 fatal encounter with the NYPD’s Daniel Pantaleo, was incarcerated Friday, Feb 19, 2016, allegedly for domestic violence. However, Orta claims the police have constantly followed and harassed him ever since he released the haunting footage that showed Garner gasping “I can’t breathe!” shortly before eternally losing consciousness from suffocating in a chokehold. Orta said this arrest is his fifth since the deadly incident. He claims the NYPD has been targeting and railroading him on trumped-up charges in retaliation for recording the tragedy, and then releasing the footage.
On the February night in question, the police claimed he “assaulted his wife.” Jessica Orta, 32, disputed that, stating, “This is an absolute lie.”
“Ramsey has been the target of police harassment and has been arrested repeatedly by the police since his video of an NYPD detective fatally choking Eric Garner in Staten Island went viral two summers ago,” Mrs. Orta said. “Ramsey was arrested just a few days ago and the media have used unnamed police sources to suggest that Ramsey has assaulted [me].”
Mrs. Orta contended, “The NYPD and the media’s version of events are inaccurate and have been misrepresented precisely because it involves Ramsey Orta.” She added, “The character assassination and criminalization of Ramsey must not be allowed to continue.”
Mrs. Orta agreed that they argued but said that other parts of the police’s story are fabricated. She asked the public to support her husband as “the NYPD has escalated a situation between [the couple] into an arrest.”
She explained that some people say that “[Ramsey Orta] is merely a pawn caught up in the NYPD’s machinery of retribution.”
Police reported that Orta assaulted his wife inside their Baruch Houses apartment in Lower Manhattan. He’s also accused of striking her 2-year-old son in the head with several household items.
Cops arrested him in the Bronx that Friday at approximately 2:30 p.m.
“Everybody knows that Ramsey and I had somewhat of a whirlwind romance, and we got married very quickly,” said Mrs. Orta in a video she released after the incident. “And in any relationship that it happens like that, there are bound to be issues—so we had a couple. However, it has gotten to the point to where NYPD has escalated it past any reasonable level.”
Ramsey was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court and held on $10,000 bail. Prosecutors charged him with third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, second-degree menacing, attempted robbery, acting in a manor injurious to a child under 17 and criminal obstruction of breathing, court records show.
All money being raised will go towards his bail fund.
Mrs. Orta noted that during her husband’s previous arrest, police placed rat poison in his food in an attempt to kill him. He then began a hunger strike.