Just as the family of Eric Garner was finalizing a $5.9 million wrongful-death settlement with New York City, a similar police-involved killing occurred in Mississippi. This one involved Jonathan Sanders, 39, an African-American man who died last week in the small city of Stonewall, Mississippi, after an altercation with a police officer. Witnesses say they saw the officer maintaining what looked like a chokehold on Sanders while he tried communicating that he couldn’t breathe—a story starkly similar to how Eric Garner died.
Ryan L. Nave of the alt-weekly Jackson Free Press recently sat with the Sanders family’s attorneys, who provided some additional details about the fatal encounter, which occurred Wednesday, July 8, while Sanders was riding in a horse-led buggy:
