Off-duty firefighter tells Chauvin jurors of her attempts to intervene

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minneapolis firefighter who was off-duty when she came upon the scene of George Floyd’s arrest testified in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial Tuesday that she feared for Floyd’s life and offered to give him emergency medical attention or at least direct the officers to do so.

“He wasn’t moving, and he was cuffed,” Genevieve Hansen said. “Three grown men is a lot ... putting their weight on somebody — too much.”

Hansen, 27, a two-year member of the Fire Department, testified that she was out for a walk on a day off and heading home when she came upon the scene at E. 38th Street and Chicago in late May. She circled around and grew immediately concerned.

Hansen said Chauvin appeared “very comfortable with the majority of his weight balanced on top of Mr. Floyd” while pinning him to the pavement with his knee.

“I identified myself right away because I noticed that he needed medical attention. It didn’t take long to notice that he had an altered level of consciousness,” she said. “My attention moved from Mr. Floyd to ‘How can I gain access to this patient and give him medical attention or provide direction to the officers?’”

However, she was repeatedly rebuffed by Officer Tou Thao, who was keeping increasingly agitated bystanders at bay as they pleaded for Chauvin to set Floyd free.

Prosecutor Matthew Frank asked Hansen how she felt being unable to use her training and tend to Floyd.

“There is a man being killed,” she said, “and I would have been able to provide medical attention to the best of my abilities, and this human was not provided that right.”

Hansen said that if given access to Floyd, she would have called for more assistance, then asked for someone to fetch a defibrillator from the nearby Speedway gas station. She also would have checked his airway and looked for a spinal injury “because of all the weight on him.”

“Were you able to do any of those steps?” Frank asked.

“No sir,” she said. “How did it make you feel?” Frank asked. “Totally distressed.” “Were you frustrated?” “Yes,” Hansen said, beginning to cry.

In his cross-examination of Hansen, defense attorney Eric Nelson raised potential inconsistencies in her testimony compared to previous statements to investigators, such as whether Chauvin had one hand in his pocket, or whether or not she described the bystanders as comprising a “heavy crowd.”

Nelson also reminded Hansen that she earlier described Floyd as a small man, despite his being roughly 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighing well over 200 pounds.

He asked her whether she ever had a citizen yell at her or tell her she was doing her job wrong while fighting a fire, an apparent allusion to how the bystanders on May 25 were reacting to the tactics being used to detain Floyd. She repeatedly said it would not faze her, because she is confident in her training.

After exchanges with Nelson that grew testy at times, Judge Peter Cahill dismissed the jury for the day and admonished Hansen not to argue, and that it is Nelson’s job to ask her questions.

“You will not argue with the Court, you will not argue with counsel,” Cahill said repeatedly.