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It’s crazy how people blame violence on kids growing up without fathers while police are out here KILLING unarmed fathers...

Two Staten Island police officers have been placed on desk duty after five cops were photographed and videotaped taking on an unarmed grandfather for selling cigarettes outside a beauty salon.

NY Daily News did a great interview with his widow Esaw Garner aka Pinky, which we’ve excerpted below:

He has two grandkids who love him to death,” she says of her late husband. “Every time he walks into the room they scream ‘Pop-Pop and Ganpa.’ He was great to me and his six kids. And a wonderful grandfather.”

She said her husband was 6-foot-5 and weighed over 300 pounds and loved to eat. He could be as loud as she was when they argued.

“But his bark was always bigger than his bite,” she says.

On Thursday morning, Eric gave Pinky $400 and told her to get groceries for the house and then went to his corner of Bay St. and Victory Blvd. where he made his living selling bootleg cigarettes, $7 a pack and 75 cents for loosies. On the street he was known simply as “E.”

Pinky told the Daily News the couple met on a late night chat line, and met briefly before he went away to school. She thought she’d never see him again, but when he returned and showed up at her doorstep she was pregnant by a man who was no longer in her life. He immediately stepped in to father her first child.

Together they had five more kids. Their oldest boy, Eric Jr., 18, just graduated from Curtis High and got a basketball scholarship to Essex County College.

“We had a wonderful marriage,” she says. “Sure we had our problems. We separated once. But we never stopped loving each other and got back together.”

At 3:15 p.m. Thursday Pinky said she was watching People’s Court when her son Eric Jr. asked for $20 to go to W. 4th St. in Greenwich Village to play hoops. Then he said he received a text saying his father was being hassled by cops on Bay St. Pinky figured he was being arrested again. She started getting dressed when she received a flurry of calls and texts saying Eric Garner had been arrested by a group of cops and stopped breathing.

“I rushed to the hospital in a cab at 4:10 p.m.,” she says. “I couldn’t get answers. I remembered that in the morning before he left I told him I loved him and he said, ‘Right back at ya.’ Then he kissed me … Little did I know it would be the last kiss he’d ever give me.”

“The thing I’ll miss most is his snoring,” she says, laughing through tears. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to sleep again without hearing Bear snoring beside me.”

This is so sad and so unnecessary. Previous accounts of the incident say Garner warned the cops he couldn’t breathe and they continued their aggression anyway. Internal Affairs is now looking into the incident — and for good reason. One of the officers has already faced two previous lawsuits!

According to NY Daily News:

Officers Daniel Pantaleo, with eight years on the force, and Justin Damico, a four-year veteran cop, were both put on desk duty a day after the death of Eric Garner, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said.

Pantaleo has been accused of false arrest and violating police procedures in two lawsuits, court records show. In one, two African-American plaintiffs won $15,000 apiece after claiming they’d been falsely arrested on Staten Island in 2012 and forced to publicly strip so cops could search them. All charges against them were dropped.

Watch the full video that captured the entire incident below:

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