Did riots shift the blame?

THREE months ago, prosecutors got terrible news: George Floyd probably wasn’t murdered by racist white police, after all.

No, Floyd — filmed lying in a Minneapolis gutter with a policeman’s knee on his neck — had taken an overdose of fentanyl, more than twice the amount that would kill most people.

That’s right. All those Black Lives Matter riots that have raged for months, torched a dozen US cities, destroyed countless businesses and killed at least 15 people were seemingly based on a lie. Prosecutors were warned about this in May, but kept silent until now, when court documents finally revealed what the Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner actually told them.

On May 31 they’d met Andrew Baker to discuss his toxicology report on Floyd’s body, after an autopsy found Floyd hadn’t actually been choked to death and didn’t have bruises on his throat.

Dr Baker told them straight. Floyd not only had a bad heart, sickle disease and coronavirus.

He’d also had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances” — the kind that can cause pulmonary edema, a build-up of fluid in the lungs.

That would explain why the autopsy found Floyd’s lungs weighed two to three times the normal weight.

The prosecutors’ notes of this meeting record the medical examiner adding a devastating conclusion for their murder case: “If Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he (Baker) would conclude that it was an overdose death.” Why was this terrible news? It put the prosecutors and the Missouri government in a horrible spot. If they dropped the murder charges against police officer Derek Chauvin and his three colleagues, they’d be slimed as racists and Black Lives Matter mobs would burn down the country. Dr Baker did later submit a final report that blamed Floyd’s death on “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression”, and an Armed Forces Medical Examiner agreed “death was caused by the police subdual and restraint with cardiovascular disease and drug intoxication contributing”.