Back in August, just one month after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo was filmed choking Eric Garner to death while attempting to arrest him on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, the man who filmed it, Ramsey Orta, was arrested for alleged possession of a firearm. While Officer Pantaleo was not indicted by the grand jury for being filmed killing Eric Garner, Mr. Orta was in fact indicted for third-degree criminal weapons possession and criminal firearms possession. Despite the fact that cops claim Orta was in possession of a weapon, the story behind the arrest is a bit shady.
Police claim that they saw Orta pass a .25-caliber Norton semiautomatic handgun to a 17-year-old girl named Alba Lekaj, while outside of a hotel on a block that the authorities describe as "drug-prone." Ironically, the arrest occurred just blocks away from where Garner was strangled to death, and Orta claims that the cops set him up for filming the Garner slaying. At the time of the arrest, Orta told police, "you're just mad because I filmed your boy."
He detailed how he believes the cops set him up.
"When they searched me, they didn't find nothing on me," Ramsey said. "And the same cop that searched me, he told me clearly himself, that karma's a b*tch, what goes around comes around. I had nothing to do with this. I would be stupid to walk around with a gun after me being in the spotlight."
Ramsey's wife, Chrissie, believes that the police are trying to punish him for filming one of their own killing a man without reason.
"It's obvious what they're doing: they're trying to shut him up," she said. "They're trying to keep him away. They're trying to find anything to crucify him. They're bringing up his past, when they should be bringing up the officer's past, who committed this murder."
Despite Ramsey's defense, a Staten Island grand jury indicted him anyway. Many people have reacted to Mr. Orta's indictment and the entire Eric Garner situation with the popular Twitter trend, #ICan'tBreathe.
Check out what many people had to say about the drama above.
