An NYPD cop lost 30 days pay for kneeling on the back of an emotionally disturbed Manhattan suspect as he cried out “I can’t breathe,” the Daily News has learned.
Officer Gabriel Perez-Ponce was penalized by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in September after she agreed with the findings of an NYPD judge who earlier this year presided over a departmental trial prosecuted by the Civlilan Complaint Review Board.
Perez-Ponce’s partner, Officer Cesar Mejia, retired before he too could face a departmental trial at NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan, according to the CCRB.
NYPD documents, recently posted on the department’s website, describe an encounter in which P.C, the initials by which the man was identified, was face down, hands cuffed behind his back, for more than seven minutes until an NYPD supervisor showed up and ordered the officers to “Sit him up.”
P.C., 27 at the time, was then taken to Bellevue Hospital for treatment.
“[Perez-Ponce’s] actions on the date in question posed a significant risk to P.C’s well-being and could have resulted in more dire consequences,” NYPD Judge Vanessa Facio-Lince wrote in her summary of the case.
It took more than five years to adjudicate the case, in part because of COVID delays.
The incident, in Chinatown on Feb. 11, 2020, happened six years after Eric Garner’s similar plea of “I can’t breathe” as he was arrested by Staten Island NYPD cops became a rallying cry for social justice activists in the wake of his death.
And just three months after the 2020 Chinatown incident, George Floyd was murdered by a Minnesota cop who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
The Floyd murder lead to a New York City law making it a crime to compress a suspect’s diaphragm.
According to the documents in P.C.’s case, the officers were first called to a drug treatment center on Essex St., where a staffer told them P.C. was having a mental health episode and talking about killing himself.
P.C. had already left the location but the officers got his description, found him nearby and arranged for him to go to a hospital, as P.C.requested.
But he apparently wasn’t at the hospital for long, with Perez-Ponce and Mejia about three hours later being called to Division St. near Canal St. by a woman who said there was a shirtless man swinging a stick or pipe.
It was P.C., who ran when the officers approached.
They chased him, took him to the ground and handcuffed him, his hands behind his back as he lay on the ground, the judge wrote.
The officers, she said, held him “down on the ground with their hands and knees while they called for an ambulance and backup.”
When a lieutenant arrived he had Perez-Ponce and Mejia lift P.C. into a sitting position.
The evidence presented at trial includes the partners’ body-worn camera videos, plus other videos.
P.C., who urged bystanders to record what was happening, did not resist during the encounter or appear to try to escape, the judge noted.
Instead, she wrote, he was clearly worried about his well-being, citing video of the clash.
“P.C. is audibly upset, in that he is crying and grunting at various points during the encounter, but remains still on the ground while in the officers’ custody. [Perez-Ponce] and Officer Mejia’s hands and knees are on P.C.’s back, keeping him pinned to the ground … At about the one minute mark, P.C. can be heard saying in sum and substance: “I got a bad heart, I got asthma! He’s kneeing me in my chest,” and “I can’t breathe.”
Eric Garner
Perez-Ponce testifited that he kept P.C. on the ground because he was being “very erratic” and a “flight risk.”
He claimed he wasn’t kneeling on the man’s back but rather “touching” P.C.’s right shoulder with his knee and that P.C. never “showed any signs of distress.”
The judge called that claim “a distinction without a diifference,” noting that pressure on either spot “may result in reducng the subject’s ability to brathe and (are) expressly prohibited by the Patrol Guide.”
The judge agreed with the CCRB that Perez-Ponce was guilty of violating the department’s force guidelines and that he should lose 30 days pay. Tisch, without eleborating signed off on that recommendation.
AP
George Floyd responds to police after they approached his car outside Cub Foods in Minneapolis in this May 25, 2020 image from police body camera video.
Perez-Ponce, who joined the NYPD in January 2017, is back on patrol at the 7th Precinct, the same command he was assigned to at the time of the incident. He did not respond to a request for comment and his lawyer had no comment.
Mejia, who joined the department in April 2017, resigned in September 2021. The CCRB by then had recommended Mejia also be charged with violating the department’s force guidelines by using a prohibited method of restraint.
Mejia could not be reached for comment.
P.C. told the CCRB he had been hospitalized at various times because he has a mental hearlth issue that causes him to act erratically. He could not be reached for comment.
