Tears, fury, pain: George Floyd’s death in witnesses’ words
Gruelling testimony of eye witnesses, emergency workers and the words of Derek Chauvin himself provide a powerful narrative that shows the US judicial system at its best.
The trial in Minneapolis of police officer Derek Chauvin, 45, over the death of George Floyd, 46, on whose neck he knelt for more than nine minutes, is a seminal moment in American history.
The case, which has led to protests across the US and other countries, is being closely watched by both the public and by political and judicial commentators who believe it is one of the most important in recent history; a trial that could change the progress of America’s civil rights moment.
Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter and third-degree murder after kneeling on Mr Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds in Minneapolis.on May 25 last year. His defence team argue that the policeman “did exactly what he had been trained to do over his 19-year career” and that Mr Floyd died as a result of a heart attack brought on by drugs combined with heart disease, high blood pressure and adrenaline.
The gruelling testimony of eye witnesses, emergency workers and the words of Chauvin himself have provided a harrowing but powerful narrative that shows the US judicial system at its best.
Here, we publish the testimony of the witnesses so far, in their own words.
‘Call me a snitch’: 911 operator who reported the incident
Emergency operator Jena Scurry, who dispatched police to Cup Foods after getting a call about a man with a counterfeit bill testified that she became concerned when her monitors showed the responding officers, including Chauvin, kneeling on top of Mr Floyd, pinning him to the ground.
She initially believed the screen had frozen, then realised Chauvin simply was not moving as he knelt on Mr Floyd.
“My instincts were telling me that something was wrong. Something wasn’t right,” Ms Scurry, who had a view of the interior of the squad car from which Mr Floyd was dragged, said. “It was an extended period of time. ... They hadn’t told me if they needed more resources.”
She added: “I don’t know if they had to use force or not. They got something out of the back of the squad, and all of them sat on this man. So I don’t know if they needed to or not, but they haven’t said anything to me yet.”
After watching the live video feed for several minutes, Ms Scurry called the sergeant in charge of the officers, saying, “You can call me a snitch if you want to,” then reported what she was seeing on her screen.
‘Officer killed a citizen’: The man who called 911
Donald Williams II, a mixed martial arts fighter and security guard wiped tears from his eyes on the witness stand as he listened to a recorded 911 call he made shortly after George Floyd was taken away in an ambulance.
Mr Williams told the court he called 911 because he believed he had witnessed a murder.
“Officer 987 killed a citizen in front of a Chicago [Avenue] business,” he said in the call, using Derek Chauvin’s badge number.
“He had his knee on the dude’s neck the whole time. The man was not breathing, he wasn’t resisting arrest or nothing, he was already in handcuffs.”
Mr. Williams said he became more emotional during the incident because police weren’t responding to his concerns that Chauvin was using a manoeuvre called a “blood choke” familiar to mixed martial arts practitioners.
Defence lawyer Mr Nelson implied that the police were worried for their safety as a crowd of bystanders gathered at the scene.
In the tensest exchanges so far in the trial, Mr Nelson asked Mr Williams if he had called Mr Chauvin a “bum” 13 times during the video, and other derogatory terms. “If that’s on the video,” Mr Williams responded.
Mr Nelson also said Mr Williams had continued yelling at the officers as they took Chauvin away and even after. “You kept yelling over and over and over again,” he said.
“Because I wasn’t being heard,” Mr Williams replied.
‘I couldn’t save you’: The teen who videoed Floyd’s death
The 17-year-old girl who recorded the notorious video showing the death of George Floyd tearfully told the court she saw “a man terrified, scared, begging for his life”.
Ms Frazier, now 18, was the first witness on the scene after taking her young cousin shopping. She told the court she had pulled out her phone instinctively to record the scene.
Ms Frazier recounted how Mr Floyd was calling for his mother.
“He was stating that he was in pain, his neck, his back, everything hurt. ‘I can’t breathe,’ ” said Ms Frazier, with tears flowing down her face.
She recalled the officer restraining Mr Floyd with his knee on his neck, refusing to remove it despite emotional pleas from witnesses, including an off-duty member of the fire department, until an ambulance arrived and the emergency medical technician checked Mr Floyd’s pulse and told the officer to get off.
“It wasn’t right. He was suffering, he was in pain,” she said.
Ms Frazier wept as she explained how she would stay up at night apologising to Mr Floyd for not being able to save him.
“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, my brothers, my cousins, my uncle because they are all Black men,” she said. “It’s been nights I’ve stayed up apologising to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life.”
Asked by Jerry Blackwell, leading the prosecution, to describe the demeanour of Chauvin she said he seemed to apply more pressure to Mr Floyd’s neck as bystanders gathered and began pleading for him to stop and take Mr Floyd’s pulse.
“He just stared at us, he had this cold look, heartless,” said Ms Frazier.
“It seemed as if he didn’t care what we were saying. It didn’t change what he was doing.”
Ms Frazier said that one bystander, a firefighter, pleaded repeatedly with officers to check Mr Floyd’s pulse but Chauvin and another officer, Tou Thao, put their hands on their cans of spray to ward people off. “They definitely put their hands on the Mace and we all pulled back,” she told the jury.
When Ms Frazier was asked by Mr Blackwell whether she saw signs of violence that day she replied: “Yes, from the cops. From Chauvin and from Officer Thao.”
Ms Frazier’s 9-year-old cousin, Judeah Reynolds, said she was sad to see Mr. Chauvin with his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. “The ambulance had to push him off him,” Judeah said. “They asked him nicely to get off him ... He still stayed on.”
‘There was a man being killed’: The off-duty firefighter
Off-duty firefighter Genevieve Hansen, 27, called 911 when police refused to let her treat George Floyd.
Ms Hansen told the court she was “desperate” to check Mr Floyd’s pulse but was denied access by the officers detaining him.
She said she begged the officers to check for signs of life and that after Mr Floyd’s limp body was loaded into an ambulance she called 911 to report what she had seen.
“There was a man being killed, and had I had access to a call similar to that I would have been able to provide medical attention to the best of my abilities and this human was denied that right,” she told the court.
“I think it all settled in that I wished I had called 911 immediately, it was ridiculous that Fire Station 17 was as close as it was and they hadn’t been there.
“I should have called 911 immediately but didn’t. When things calmed down I realised I wanted them to know what was going on and to basically report it.”
Ms Hansen, an EMT certified firefighter, had been on a walk on a day off when she came across the incident.
She said she was “concerned to see a handcuffed man who was not moving with officers with their whole body weight on his back and a crowd that was stressed out”.
Ms Hansen said officer Tou Thao had demanded she remain on the sidewalk.
She described Mr Floyd has having a “puffy and swollen” face and was concerned about fluid leaking out of his body.
“We see a patient release their bladder when they die. That is where my mind went. He was not moving, he was being restrained but he was not moving,” she said.
Ms Hansen said she then identified herself to Mr Thao, but told the court that the policeman told her that “if you really are a Minneapolis firefighter you would know better than to get involved”.
‘Disbelief, guilt’: the store clerk
Christopher Martin, now 19 years old, was the clerk who accepted the bill George Floyd offered at Cup Foods store, which led to police being called.
“It had a blue pigment to it like a $100 bill would have, so I thought that it was fake,” he said.
Mr. Martin said he had a pleasant conversation with Mr. Floyd, even though the older man was a bit slow in his responses and appeared to be high.
When Mr Floyd gave him the bill, Mr Martin said he immediately suspected it was fake but decided to accept it as a favour to Mr. Floyd, since he seemed impaired. He said he did so knowing that managers had told him that he would have to replace any counterfeits he accepted with his own money.
Mr Martin and other co-workers twice went out to Mr Floyd’s car to try to persuade Mr Floyd to return to the store. After he refused, a co-worker called 911.
Later, as Mr Floyd lay on the ground under Mr Chauvin’s knee, Mr Martin could be seen on video pacing behind a crowd of onlookers and putting his hands on his head. Asked what was going through his mind, he said, “Disbelief and guilt,”. “If I had just not taken the bill, this wouldn’t have happened.”
‘We’ve got to control him’: Chauvin’s defence
Derek Chauvin defended his actions to a bystander after holding George Floyd to the ground with his knee for about nine minutes, according to video that provides a justification in his own words.
In a clip from Chauvin’s body camera recorded shortly after Mr Floyd had been taken away in an ambulance, Chauvin can be heard defending his actions to Charles McMillian, a witness to the incident.
“I don’t respect what you did,” Mr McMillian, 61, says he told Chauvin at one point in their conversation, which can be hard to decipher.
“That’s one person’s opinion. We’ve got to control this guy because he’s a sizeable guy,” Chauvin said at another point, referring to the 6-foot-4-inch, 223-pound Mr Floyd. “It looks like he was probably on something.” The body-camera footage, which hadn’t been previously aired, amounts to a rare instance of Chauvin defending how he handled Mr. Floyd.
At one point, one of the officers asks Chauvin, the senior officer on the scene, whether they should roll Mr Floyd over. He says no. It also shows the officers’ unsuccessfully trying to find Mr Floyd’s pulse.
Long term opioid addiction: the girlfriend
George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross told the court Mr Floyd was back on drugs after a long struggle with opioid addiction at the time he died.
Ms Ross said Mr Floyd became addicted after taking prescription drugs and returned to illicit opioids two weeks before his death, despite having suffered an overdose from similar pills that required hospital treatment two months earlier.
After telling the court how “devastated” Mr Floyd, 46, was by the death of his mother in 2018, Ms Ross said that his pet name for her was “mama”. As Mr Floyd lay dying on May 25, struggling to breathe, he called out for “mama”.
Ms Ross, a coffee shop assistant who also struggled with opioid addiction, said she had been in a three-year relationship with Mr Floyd. She last saw him the day before he died.
“It’s a classic story of how many people get addicted to opioids,” she said. “We both suffered from chronic pain. Mine was in my neck and his was in his back. We both had prescriptions but after prescriptions that were filled … we got addicted and tried really hard to break that addiction many times.”
Ms Ross confirmed to Eric Nelson, for the defence, that Mr Floyd had bought drugs illicitly about a week before he died that resembled those he overdosed from in March, requiring five days’ treatment in hospital. “We got pills in May that reminded me of the same feeling, I don’t know if they were the same pills [as in March],” she said.
Mr Nelson asked: “Do you recall telling the FBI that at times Mr Floyd was up and bouncing around and at times unintelligible?”
Ms Ross said: “That is in the transcript.”
Earlier Ms Ross told the court how she met Mr Floyd, a father of two, when he was a security guard at a Salvation Army hostel where the father of her son was staying. She said that she had become upset because the father did not come to the lobby to discuss their son’s birthday. Mr Floyd had come over to check on her. “Floyd has this great southern voice, raspy. He was like, ‘Sis, you OK, sis?”’ Ms Ross recalled. “I was tired. We’ve been through so much, my sons and I, and [for] this kind person just to come up and say, ‘Can I pray with you?’ … it was so sweet.”
‘He was dead’: the paramedic
Paramedic Derek Smith said he couldn’t find George Floyd’s pulse when he arrived at the scene and believed he was already dead. He said he had first felt Mr. Floyd’s neck for a pulse while police officers were still on top of him.
“In lay terms, I thought he was dead,” Mr Smith told the court. After taking Mr Floyd into the back of an ambulance, Mr Smith still could not find a pulse, and when he placed pads on his body to monitor his heart, the monitor showed a “flatline,” he said.
Paramedics used a device to administer chest compressions and a defibrillator to restart his heart but nothing worked, Mr Smith said.
Seth Bravinder, another paramedic who responded to the scene, also said Mr Floyd had appeared to be unresponsive.
Force used longer than necessary: Chauvin’s supervisor
The sergeant overseeing Derek Chauvin on the night of George Floyd’s death testified that he could have stopped restraining Mr Floyd shortly after he stopped resisting arrest, rather than keeping his knee on his neck for more than nine minutes.
“When Mr Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended their restraint,” said David Pleoger.
It was the first testimony from a superior of Chauvin’s that he had used what could be considered excessive force.
Prosecutors also played part of a phone call between Mr Pleoger and Chauvin shortly after his deadly encounter with Mr Floyd. The sergeant had called Mr Chauvin after being alerted to what a 911 dispatcher felt was a concerning use of force. The recording offered a rare explanation in Chauvin’s own words for how he and other officers handled Mr Floyd.
“I was just going to call you and have you come out to our scene here,” Chauvin told Mr Pleoger, according to the recording. “We just had to hold a guy down. He was going crazy,” Chauvin can be heard saying, adding that Mr Floyd “wouldn’t go in the back of the squad.”
During cross examination, Eric Nelson, the lawyer for Chauvin, asked if Mr Pleoger had conducted a full use-of-force review of the incident. Mr Pleoger said he hadn’t, since it had been upgraded to a critical incident after Mr Floyd’s death and the review was handled by others higher up the chain of command.
With The Times, WSJ, Agencies
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