Ramsey Orta stands ironically accused of “criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation” under New York Penal Code 121.11 as well as two felony counts of armed robbery and weapons charges plus two new misdemeanors, according to public records.
NYPD brought Orta in for questioning earlier this week regarding an incident reported to authorities by his wife of less than two months on February 13, filing multiple criminal charges against him on February 19.
Now his supporters are once again raising bail to assist the Manhattan native, which includes a YouTube video from his wife, Jessica, where she accuses the NYPD of escalating things to retaliate against her husband.
“Everybody knows that Ramsey and I had somewhat of a whirlwind romance and we got married very quickly and in any relationship that happens like that, there are bound to be issues, so we had a couple,” she says.
“However, it’s gotten to the point to where NYPD has escalated it past any reasonable level and now Ramsey is in custody.”
So now it appears as if she no longer wants to file charges, even though she was the one who filed the initial report.
The video, posted below, was included on the fundraising page launched by the New York City activist group, El Grito de Sunset Park, whom we’ve written about before here.
According to the New York Daily News, who broke the recent story on his arrest:
Orta, 24, had been sought since a Feb. 13 argument with wife, Jessica Orta, 32, in their Lower East Side apartment, the sources said. He allegedly menaced her with a knife and choked her.
“Don’t you know I don’t give a f—, b—-!” he yelled at her, police sources said. “I’ll kill your a–…You’ll be lucky if you leave this room.”
On his way out of the apartment at the Baruch Houses, he allegedly struck the victim’s 2-year-old son with one of several household items he had flung, the sources said.
Cops picked him about 1:50 p.m. Friday in the Bronx.
PINAC readers may recall that Orta was kept in jail on other allegations even after supporters had posted bail in 2015, which he claimed were filed in retaliation for recording Eric Garner’s last moments in a video that went viral after it was first published in theNew York Daily News.
Orta was 22 when he recorded the final moments of his friend’s life at the hands of New York City police detective Daniel Pantaleo, who placed Garner in an illegal chokehold as the 43-year-old man repeatedly gasped, “I can’t breathe.”
It wasn’t Orta’s first brush with NYPD.
He’d been arrested and charged with numerous offenses twice in two months prior to recording Garner’s arrest, though many of the most serious felony charges have already been dismissed. New charges have been filed in those cases too, all of which was already causing Orta to face numerous battles in criminal court this spring.
Orta was working as a landscaper on Staten Island when became an accidental activist, thrust into the national spotlight.
Orta was first arrested after the Garner video in August 2014 and charged with weapons violations by NYPD, but he said that detectives were simply retaliating against him for shooting one of the highest profile cases of police brutality in the last 25 years.
Later, NYPD began following Orta’s family, and filed drug charges against him, and held Orta in New York’s infamous Riker’s Island prison, where he was living off of packaged food for months, for fear of being poisoned.
If you think Orta is just paranoid, over a dozen other former Riker’s Island inmates have filed suit alleging the use of rat poison by NYPD’s island jailers.
Ramsey Orta later joined Copwatch, a national organization dedicated to safely and lawfully recording the police founded in Oakland, California with chapters in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere.
He met his future wife Jessica Hollie aka Bella Eiko, at a National Lawyer’s Guild Conference in Berkeley.
Hollie is an experienced activist, and was active in the Occupy movement in Oakland as a live streamer documenting police brutality against those protesters. Her father was leading member of the Black Panthers.
The pair met, and sparks flew according to this recent news report about the “Revolutionary Love” shared by the two.
Orta and Hollie were married in December after an activists romance.
In 2014, news reports referred to a woman named Chrissy Ortiz as his wife, but in 2015, Vice referred to her as his “then-girlfriend,” so he apparently was never legally married to her.
Until Ramsey’s latest legal troubles, the pair both worked closely with Copwatch, who produced the below video about Orta where he talks about his life experience and the “bad time” he’s had with NYPD.
You can see the latest police allegations below.
