'I Can't Breathe' Echoes in Voices of Fury and Despair

New York: They chanted it in Grand Central Terminal, shouted it in Times Square, emblazoned it across Facebook and Twitter, the three words that came to stand for the death of another unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer.

"I can't breathe," Eric Garner had gasped after the officer put his neck in a chokehold on a hot July day on Staten Island, a fatal encounter captured on video and viewed by millions of people. On Wednesday, after a grand jury declined to indict the officer, the words - and the video - were revived in a wave of despair and fury that rolled as far out as the corridors of Capitol Hill and the streets of Oakland, California.

Elected officials in New York and Washington, too, did not hold back, offering an extraordinary outpouring of stunned reaction that seemed to mirror - and perhaps calm - protesters' anger.

As demonstrators rushed to Staten Island, hundreds of people marched north from Times Square, trying, and failing, to push through police barricades to disrupt the annual Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center. Protesting from midafternoon to late into the night, they blocked traffic on the West Side Highway, disrupted it on the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, sat en masse at Columbus Circle and held "die-ins" at Grand Central Terminal and near Radio City Music Hall.

"We can't breathe," they chanted.

Unlike those in Ferguson, Missouri, after a grand jury decided not to indict a police officer in the death of an unarmed black teenager there, the protests remained peaceful, with about 30 arrests by 10 p.m. Yet this was no Ferguson, where conflicting witness accounts obscured the circumstances of the confrontation between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot him. This encounter was recorded at close range on a cellphone camera, the fact that kept many on Wednesday asking: How? Why?

"You can see the video," said Diane Moss, 63, of Staten Island, her voice strained with disbelief. "It's one thing if it's 'he said, she said,' but when you see the video - the guy wasn't resisting."

Her neighbor, Marjorie Fabre, 53, seethed next to her.

"They keep on showing the tape on TV, over and over and over," she  said. The officer, Daniel Pantaleo, had been trying to arrest Garner for selling loose cigarettes. "I mean, over a cigarette?"

What could you say, people asked, when the evidence could not seem clearer. What conclusion could you draw, other than:

"It looks like there's no change," said Jesse Love, who was one of a few dozen protesters who gathered at the scene of Garner's death, outside a beauty supply store and opposite a humble park. No change in police behavior, in the way African-Americans are treated by the legal system, in race relations.

"We had a video. How can we win? We can't win," said a man who gave his name as James, his head hanging.

Nearby, Daniel Skelton, 40, ripped cigarettes from a pack of Newports, flung them to the ground and stomped on them.

"Black lives," he shouted.

In Oakland, a diverse crowd of about 200 marched under a light rain.

"There's this big talk about the body cameras, and here we have this officer killing Eric Garner on camera, and he still gets away with it," said Ashlee Johnson, 26, an administrative assistant from San Leandro.

Reacting swiftly, President Barack Obama said the decision not to indict the officer underscored the frustrations that many African-Americans felt about their treatment by a legal system they believed was stacked against them.

Most were less restrained.

"The failure to indict is a stunning miscarriage of justice and makes clear that equal protection under the law does not exist for all Americans," said Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from Brooklyn who, along with other members of New York's congressional delegation, spoke at the Capitol to call for a federal investigation into Garner's death.

"What more does America need to see?" Jeffries said. "We are better than this as a country."

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., called Garner's death "a tragedy that demands accountability."

"Nobody unarmed should die on a New York City street corner for suspected low-level offenses," she said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio canceled a scheduled appearance at the tree-lighting ceremony to speak at a church on Staten Island.

At Grand Central, dozens of protesters lay on the floor amid commuters to symbolize black men killed by the police.

"I cannot believe I live in a country where this is happening in 2014," said Talibah Newman, 30.

On the narrow street outside the courthouse, Rosalyn Warren, 52, a Legal Aid staff member, recalled her childhood on Staten Island, where the largely white South Shore was all but off limits to her.

And now? "Different year, same faces, same views," she said. She shook her head.

"History," she said, "was not going to be made on Staten Island today."