New York Daily News – by ERIK BADIA , TINA MOORE , CORKY SIEMASZKO
The Staten Island man who took the cellphone video seen around the world of a cop killing Eric Garner with a chokehold said the grand jury was rigged.
“I think they already had their minds made up,” Ramsey Orta told the Daily News a day after the panel voted not to charge NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo with a crime.
“I feel like it wasn’t fair at all,” he said. “It wasn’t fair from the start.”
Orta said he arrived at the Staten Island courthouse on Sept. 1 prepared to be grilled for hours about what happened on July 17, when cops confronted Garner on a Tompkinsville street for selling unlicensed cigarettes.
Ten minutes later, Orta said, he was done.
“When I went to the grand jury to speak on my behalf, nobody in the grand jury was even paying attention to what I had to say,” Orta said. “People were on their phones, people were talking. I feel like they didn’t give (Garner) a fair grand jury.
“People was on their phones, people were having side conversations, like it was just a regular day to them,” he said of the jurors.
Orta, 22, said his appearance before the panel started two hours late because some of the jurors had not shown up.
Then someone turned on the disturbing video of Pantaleo subduing Garner.
“They were asking me piece by piece — where I was, where I was standing at, if I was the one who shot the video,” he said of the prosecutors.
One of them “wasn’t even asking no questions about the police officer, he was asking all the questions toward Eric,” Orta said. “What was Eric doing there? Why was Eric there?
“Nothing pertaining to the cop choking him,” he said.
Only a few jurors asked any questions.
“Maybe three, that’s all,” he said. “The rest of them, they weren’t even worried about nothing.”
Those who did pose questions were also more focused on Garner than Pantaleo, he said.
“One grand juror asked me, ‘If you knew he was selling cigarettes, why didn’t you tell him the cops was there?’” he said.
Orta said he told the juror, “Well, miss, we know the cops is there every day, but the man has to make a living, some way, somehow.”
Another grand juror asked Orta if he had ever been arrested.
“I said, ‘Miss, what does my criminal history have to do with Eric?’” he recalled. “I said we shouldn’t be sitting here talking about me. We should be talking about Eric now. And we shouldn’t even be talking about Eric. We should be talking about the cop.”
But the question on the minds of prosecutors and the jurors, Orta said, was “Why was Eric standing there?”
“The whole thing was just about Eric — why was he selling cigarettes, did you know he was selling cigarettes? It was bulls—,” he said.
Orta said the exchange upset him. He complained and then was told by a man he thinks was an assistant district attorney “to watch how I talk.”
“I said, ‘First of all, you ain’t gonna tell me how to talk,’” he said. “These are my feelings and I feel like there should be no sugar-coating.”
Orta said prosecutors “brushed it off.”
“They actually cut my time short,” Orta said. “My lawyer told me I was supposed to be in there for at least a half an hour and I only stayed maybe 10 minutes.”
A spokesman for District Attorney Daniel Donovan’s office refused to comment on Orta’s account.
Orta said he feels the Garner family was cheated and is glad the Justice Department will investigate the killing.
“The feds should pick it up,” he said. “Staten Island is too tied up. They all know each other. They won’t violate their own kind.”
Asked if he was surprised by the decision, Orta said, “I knew this was going to be the verdict.”
Orta said the jurors saw the video that everybody else saw and still wouldn’t charge Pantaleo with a crime.
“We shouldn’t have to fight for it. It’s plain. It’s right there,” he said.
Orta’s remarks were echoed by 37-year-old Rodney Lee, a manager of the beauty supply store in front of which Garner was killed. He said he testified for “about 10 minutes” on Oct. 22.
“I told them what I saw and that was it,” Lee said. “They didn’t ask me how I feel about it, what it looked like, what I thought.”
Lee said the jurors showed little respect for some of the witnesses.
“They all treated us like we were dumb, like we didn’t know nothing …I mean, what was the point of us even being there if they weren’t going to listen to us?”
Meanwhile, Eric Garner’s son said the grand jury failed.
“For six months, I had faith that they would indict the officer,” Eric Snipes, 19, told The News on Thursday. “I think the grand jury didn’t come up with the right decision. I need to talk to them. They need to explain to me why they didn’t indict the officer.”
Snipes is still hopeful.
“I want the federal government to prosecute him,” he said.
Until FDR, a grand jury could be called by any citizen. Now it’s a tool used & controlled by the prosecutor’s. More democrat destruction of our constitution.
Well, Orta’s account certainly contradicts my wife’s story of the juror interviews. They claimed to have not seen the entire video, Orta says they did. I suspect now they feel guilty after seeing the reaction to their stupidity so they are trying CYA.