NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- The man who filmed Eric Garner’s death has been released from prison, nearly four years after he pleaded guilty to drug and gun charges, Department of Correction records show.
Ramsey Orta, 28, was released from prison at the end of May, Rolling Stone first reported.
He was being held at the Queensboro Correctional Facility in Long Island City, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision records show.
Orta, who filmed former NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Eric Garner in a chokehold on Staten Island in 2014, was sentenced to four years in prison in October 2016.
Following Garner’s death, Orta was arrested twice, once in 2014 on charges that he slipped a handgun into a 17-year-old girl’s waistband outside a hotel on Staten Island, and a second time in 2015 for selling drugs in a park on Staten Island, just steps from where Garner was arrested.
Orta and his family claimed the NYPD specifically targeted him after Garner’s death for filming and sharing the video he took.
“First, the Daily News got in contact with me and asked me if I had any pictures, and I told them, ‘I got a video,’ and we took it from there,” he told Democracy Now in January 2016. “And from then on, I’ve been targeted by NYPD.”