George Floyd, like so many of us, felt afraid, helpless

It has been more than 10 months since George Floyd was pinned to the Minneapolis pavement, a knee hard on his neck as the life drained out of him and he moaned, again and again, “I can’t breathe.” The people who were there — along with countless others who watched the horrifying video — have had that time to come to terms with it, or at least to try.

Still, Charles McMillian all but collapsed on the witness stand, a 61-yearold man crying beyond control at his recollection of what he saw. He can’t shake it. That’s true of witness after witness at this trial. They’re tormented by their memories of Floyd’s last minutes.

McMillian possibly articulated one of the reasons with the words he squeezed out between his sobs. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I couldn’t help but feel helpless.”

“Helpless.” Even the witnesses who didn’t say that said it in one way or another. Helplessness is a big part of what this trial is about.

Floyd felt helpless once police officers descended on him. What he’d experienced and observed in his life to that point convinced him that the odds were stacked against him and that he was in danger. “Please don’t shoot me,” he begged when they ordered him out of his car. The fear in his voice — heard on video played in the courtroom — was real.

Witnesses felt helpless as Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. Chauvin was in uniform. He was the law. Can you call the police on the police? It’s like some rhetorical riddle, signaling a world out of whack. Three witnesses actually did call the police on the police, but it was too late.

Listening to testimony I got the sense that some of them felt helpless not only to stop what was being done to Floyd but also to affect the larger forces that conspired in his death and trap so many Black Americans like him in a place of vulnerability and pain.

“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad,” Darnella Frazier testified. She took the video of his death that went viral. “I look at my brothers. I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black.

“I look at how that could have been one of them,” she added. She also said that there have “been nights I’ve stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more.”

She was 17 then. There were four police officers on or around him. She couldn’t see a way to help.

But society isn’t helpless. That’s why we have trials like this one. They’re our attempts to find the truth, to address any injustice, to declare our values — here’s what we will permit, and here’s what we won’t — and perhaps make us better in the long run.

Chauvin is charged with murder. At some point the trial will turn toward forensics and feuding claims over the specific cause of Floyd’s death. Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson, will mine autopsy results for ambiguity. He’ll assert reasonable doubt that Chauvin’s knee was the murder weapon.

But Chauvin’s inhumanity is indisputable, and the depth of the mark it left on the people who intersected with it has been heartbreaking to behold. What happened on May

25, 2020 was a chilling lesson in power and powerlessness. It both validated and stoked their fears.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anybody be killed,” testified another witness, Genevieve Hansen, an off-duty firefighter who was at the scene. “But it’s upsetting.” That was putting it mildly, to judge by her expression and her voice, in which there was still so much rage and so much regret that she couldn’t intervene.

“I was desperate to help,” Hansen said. But she was helpless.