‘Crowd begged Floyd’s killer to stop – he just knelt harder...’
THE policeman who knelt on the neck of George Floyd had ‘no feeling, no remorse, no response’ despite desperate pleas from bystanders for him to stop, a jury was told yesterday.
Tearful witness Donald Williams said he dialled the emergency number 911 after Mr Floyd was taken away by paramedics because he ‘thought he had witnessed a murder’.
Another 17-year-old witness said police officer Derek Chauvin knelt harder on Mr Floyd’s neck when angry onlookers begged with him to stop. The witnesses gave evidence on the second day of Chauvin’s trial for allegedly murdering father- offive Mr Floyd whose death sparked race riots in the US and Black Lives Matter protests around the world.
Former security guard Mr Floyd, 46, pictured, died in May last year as he was arrested by police for using a fake $20 note in Minneapolis. Mr Williams said he felt he needed to speak up because he got ‘no feeling, no remorse, no response from Chauvin’ and the other three officers on the scene.
The jury heard the 911 call Mr Williams made because he ‘felt the need to call the police on the police’. The 17-year-old girl, who was identified by her initials DF, said she sent her nine-year-old cousin into a grocery store when she saw Chauvin with his knee on Mr Floyd’s neck because she thought he was a ‘man terrified... begging for his life’.
The teen said: ‘It wasn’t right. He was suffering. He was in pain’. The girl said Chauvin did not respond to calls from the crowd of onlookers and ‘if anything he was kneeling harder, he was shoving his knee in his neck’. She added that Chauvin was ‘feeding off our energy’. The witness told the jury: ‘He just stared at us, looked at us, He had this cold look – heartless. He didn’t care. It seems as if he didn’t care what we were saying.’
She cried as she said she has spent sleepless nights ‘apologising to George Floyd’ for not doing more to save him. The teenager said: ‘When I look at George Floyd, I look at my Dad. I look at my brothers. I look at my cousins, my uncles. Because they are all black.
‘And I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them’. The nine-year- old cousin said she saw paramedics ask Chauvin ‘nicely’ to get off Mr Floyd but he did not. She said: ‘I was sad and kind of mad because it felt like he was stopping breathing.’
Chauvin, 45, who was later fired by the Minneapolis police department, denies murder and manslaughter. He has been accused of ‘ betraying his police badge’ by using ‘excessive and unreasonable force’. Prosecutors have claimed he placed his left knee on Mr Floyd’s neck and kept it there for more than nine minutes.
Two other officers are said to have helped pin down the suspect, while another prevented witnesses from intervening. The court has been told Mr Floyd said 27 times: ‘I can’t breathe.’ A video of the arrest shows him going limp and being carried away by police. He was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later. Lawyers for Mr Floyd’s family have said America is also in the dock as it faces its biggest period of reckoning on race in 30 years. The hearing is expected to last at least a month.
Three other former officers have been charged with aiding and abetting Mr Floyd’s murder and will be put
on trial in August.