When a family in New York lost someone to police violence, Iris Baez was often among the first to arrive. Baez, the Puerto Rican American activist who spent more than three decades organizing on behalf of families like her own after her son Anthony died in a 1994 police encounter, died in Florida on September 10, 2026, at 80, according to NY1.

Baez was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and moved to New York City with her mother before she turned two. Her formal schooling ended after sixth grade, when she was needed at home to help raise two younger sisters. She later worked as a teacher's assistant and a home care aide, married Ramon Baez, and raised their children in a three-story brick building in the Bronx, according to a 2016 BuzzFeed News profile.

That life changed on December 22, 1994, when her son Anthony died in the Bronx after a police officer placed him in a chokehold, a hold barred under NYPD policy, during a confrontation that began when a football struck a parked patrol car near the family's home. Baez, who had never been an activist, began pressing for accountability almost immediately, including leading a sit-in at the Bronx District Attorney's office.

At a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally in January 1995, she met Margarita Rosario, another Bronx mother whose son and nephew had been killed by police weeks after Anthony. Within months the two women had co-founded Parents Against Police Brutality. "I grew up watching Martin Luther King on TV, so I knew that I was going to have to take that kind of action," Baez told BuzzFeed News.

In July 1996, Baez founded the Anthony Baez Foundation, registering it with New York State as the Anthony Baez Memorial Fund from her home on Cameron Place, and turned its basement into an organizing base for other families. In April 2000, New York City renamed that stretch of Cameron Place "Anthony Baez Place." That December, she appeared on a panel at a Harvard Law School conference on race, police, and community, identified there as the foundation's founder.

Four years later, Baez was one of three mothers, alongside Kadiatou Diallo and Doris Busch Boskey, profiled in "Every Mother's Son," a documentary by Tami Gold and Kelly Anderson that premiered on PBS's POV on August 17, 2004. The film followed an unlikely coalition, a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx, a West African immigrant, and a Jewish woman from Long Island, each organizing after a son's death at the hands of police.

Baez kept showing up for other families for the rest of her life. She submitted testimony to the New York City Council's Public Safety Committee in March 2015, and that Mother's Day weekend she joined a Million Moms March to the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington. In 2019 she served as a family representative in a year-long, roughly 50-member collaboration at John Jay College that produced a national toolkit for prosecutors investigating officer-involved deaths. Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, described what Baez meant to her: "This is my support. This is who I stand with. This is who stands with me."

"That's how we survive, by giving support and being there," Baez said of the mothers she counseled and accompanied to funerals, rallies, and courtrooms over the decades. She kept testifying before the City Council into her eighties, including a 2024 statement opposing a mayoral appointment to the city's top legal post. In its tribute after her death, the Justice Committee, the coalition she helped build, put it simply: "If there was a righteous action, you bet Iris was there."

Anthony Baez Place still marks that Bronx corner where the football struck the patrol car more than three decades ago. The foundation Baez registered in her son's name in 1996 still carries it, and the coalition of mothers she assembled for a documentary camera in 2004 kept meeting at rallies and City Council hearings for two more decades, carrying forward the habit she taught them: find the next grieving family, and stand beside them.