Dec. 30 (UPI) — Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed in a chokehold by a New York Police Department officer in 2014, died Saturday after a heart attack.
“She passed away this morning,” a tweet posted to Erica Garner’s Twitter account by family members Saturday morning read. “The reports are real. We didn’t deserve her.”
“Her heart was bigger than the world,” another tweet posted to her account read. “She cared when most people wouldn’t have. She was good. She only pursued right, no matter what.”
The 27-year-old mother of an 8-year-old girl and 4-month old boy had a heart attack on Dec. 23 and was on life support in a Brooklyn hospital.
A message posted on her Twitter account said she had brain damage “from lack of oxygen while in cardiac arrest.”
“She was a warrior, she was a fighter and we didn’t pull the plug on her,” Esaw Snipes, Erica Garner’s mother, said to the New York Daily News. “She left on her own terms.”
Snipes said the cardiac arrest was brought on by an asthma attack.
She also had a heart attack after giving birth to a boy named after her father in August.
Doctors said the pregnancy had put a strain on her heart, which doctors discovered was enlarged, her mother, Snipes, said
Erica Garner became a victim’s advocate after her father, 43, died when he was placed in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014 over the alleged sale of untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island.
A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo. In September, the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board recommended the NYPD discipline Pantaleo because he used a banned chokehold while trying to arrest Garner.
