‘I knew time was running out … that he was going to die’
Children bear tearful witness to George Floyd’s last moments during powerful testimony at trial of former Minneapolis cop.
It’s a sight no child should ever have to see.
A man dying. A man dying with a cop’s knee on his neck. A Black man dying with a white cop’s knee on his neck.
That will stay with this little Black girl forever.
The youngster was a witness to the extinguishing of George Floyd’s life on May 25, 2020. She was eight years old.
A godawful experience that might very well eternally scar her perception of police officers.
“The ambulance had to push him off of him,” the child testified in a Minneapolis courtroom Tuesday. “They asked him nicely to get off him. He stayed on him.
“I was sad and kind of mad. ’Cause it feeled like he was stopping his breathing.”
He: Derek Chauvin, the sacked Minneapolis police officer who’s pleaded not guilty to charges of second and third degree murder and manslaughter.
Four minors took the witness stand on the second day of the trial. Their surnames are protected and they’re not shown on live broadcast streams, only heard. Which was powerful enough.
This child, on that evening, had gone to Cup Food with an older cousin. They’d just walked by the scene in front of the neighbourhood market where Floyd was pinned to the ground by Chauvin, hands cuffed behind his back, moaning that he couldn’t breathe, pleading for Chauvin to ease his compressing weight.
The cousin, Darnella, who was then 17, immediately steered the younger girl into the store, because she did not want the child to witness what was unfolding. Then she began recording the incident on her cellphone. It was that footage, posted on social media shortly afterward, that went viral around the world, sparking mass street protests and animating the Black Lives Matter movement. In Minneapolis, the demonstrations would turn violent as the city burned in fury.
Under questioning from prosecutor Jerry Blackwell, the teenager recounted what she’d observed in horror.
“I seen a man kneeling. I seen a man terrified, scared, begging for his life. It wasn’t right. He was suffering. He was in pain I heard George Floyd saying, ‘Please get off.’ He cried for his mother.”
More bystanders, a dozen, had gathered by then. Some were yelling at the officers. “Get off him!” “Are you enjoying this?” “You’re a bum.”
None were allowed to get nearer, said the teen. “Any time anyone tried to get close, they (the officers) were defensive.” She refuted claims made by the defence at various junctures that the “mob” had turned menacing, to the point that those appalled civilians had distracted the officers, diverting their attention from Floyd’s distress as he lost consciousness.
“No,” the teenager insisted. “I would say everyone reacted in different ways to what we were seeing. We all knew it wasn’t right.”
Her description of Chauvin, the man she pointed to at the defendant’s table: “He had this cold look, heartless. It seemed like he didn’t care what we were saying. It didn’t stop him from doing what he was doing.”
The teenager hasn’t been able to erase those dreadful memories ever since.
“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, I look at my brother, I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black,” she said, crying, tears rolling down her face that she didn’t wipe away. “I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends.
“I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them. It’s been nights I’ve stayed up, apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more. And not physically interacting. Not saving his life. But it’s not what I should have done. It’s what he should have done.”
The officers did nothing to alleviate Floyd’s misery, court has been told. The three other cops, also fired, are to be tried later in the year. Chauvin faces the most serious charges, which carry a potential sentence of up to 40 years.
As testimony goes, Darnella’s was the most dramatic yet elicited: knocked it out of the park. But everything the jury heard Tuesday was compelling as the tenor of the trial shifted from opening day, heightened in intensity. Which explains why the defence kept crossexamination of the minors short, even passing completely, if hurrying to get them off the stand. There were no points to score here.
The third minor, a teenaged high school senior, explained that she was headed to buy an auxiliary cord at Cup Food, the everything-you-need mart for locals. She’d been there hundreds of times before but on this evening she was fated to become part of the historical record.
She too recorded the event, for a while. Frustrated, she told court, that she couldn’t do anything “physical” to intervene, even as she saw Chauvin increase the pressure on Floyd’s neck. “I saw (Chauvin’s) back foot lift and his hand go into his pocket … I saw him putting more pressure with his knee.
“I could see (Floyd) was going unconscious. His eyes were starting to roll to the back of his head and he had saliva coming out of his mouth.”
The prosecution has said Floyd slipped out of consciousness about halfway through the nine-minute-29-second video that Darnella has shot as his brain was deprived of oxygen, his rib cage unable to expand beneath Chauvin’s weight. Court has not yet heard from a forensic pathologist about the cause of Floyd’s death. The state claims he asphyxiated; the defence maintains he was felled by a combination of pre-existing health issues and an unintended drug overdose.
The teenager continued, of watching Chauvin’s condition deteriorate: “I knew time was running out or it had already … that he was going to die. He didn’t look alive.”
The final minor to testify recounted how Floyd had “looked kind of purple.”
“I didn’t know for sure if George Floyd was dead until after the fact. But I had a gut feeling.”
So did Genevieve Hansen, an off-duty firefighter who happened on the scene that night. She saw a group of officers pressing on a prone man. “He wasn’t moving, he was cuffed. Three grown men, when putting all their weight on somebody, that’s too much: His neck.”
One of the cops, Chauvin, she said, looked unconcerned about the suspect’s distress. “He had his hand in his pocket, he looked so comfortable.”
The suspect’s face was swollen, “smooshed” into the pavement. Trained to save lives, Hansen desperately wanted to help the man, but was forbidden. Indeed, one of the officers told her, she testified: “If you really are a Minneapolis firefighter, you would know better than to get involved.”
She was shocked and dismayed because the suspect clearly needed medical assistance. She could tell the man — she called him “patient” — was “agonal” breathing, which means struggling to breathe because of cardiac arrest or some other medical emergency.
Hansen pleaded, reasoned, tried calm, tried swearing, to no avail.
“There was a man being killed. I would have been able to provide medical assistance to the best of my abilities and this human was being denied that.”
On a day when the tenor in the courtroom palpably shifted from Monday, there was heightened tension and some sharp exchanges during the carry-over morning crossexamination of Donald Williams, a 35-year-old who brought to the stand his insights as a mixed martial athlete, former college wrestler, bouncer and sometimes security guard.
Under direct questioning the previous day, Williams had described how he saw Chauvin holding Floyd in “a blood choke,” shimmying his own body across the suspect “to get the kill choke.”
Williams admitted to lead defence attorney Eric Nelson that he could be heard on the videotape repeatedly shouting at the officers, calling one of them — who was restricting Williams to the sidewalk — a “bum” on 13 occasions.
Nelson: “Didn’t you say you hoped he’d shoot himself in the head?”
Williams: “I said, ‘Within two years you’ll shoot yourself in the head, because of what you did.’ ”
Becoming emotional, wiping away tears, he said of Chauvin: “He just pretty much killed this guy who was not resisting arrest.”
He’d called 911.
“I did call the police on the police because I believed I witnessed a murder.”
Three times Williams tried to state precisely how Floyd had appeared to him as the fading man’s breathing grew more shallow, his words turning into a mumble.
“Fade away, slowly fade away, like a fish in a bag.”
And each time the judge struck the comment, directing the jury to disregard it.
As if.
“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, I look at my brother, I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black. I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends.”
DARNELLA
MINNEAPOLIS TEEN WHO SHOT FLOYD VIDEO