Tearful girlfriend tells of George’s kindness
Trial hears of his sweet nature and addiction woes
GEORGE Floyd’s girlfriend sobbed in court yesterday as she told how his drug addiction battle began with a bad back.
Courteney Ross recalled how she and Mr Floyd first met when he offered to pray with her, less than three years before his fatal arrest, and described how they both struggled with opioids.
Both tried ‘really hard to break that addiction many times’, she told the murder trial of the white policeman accused of killing the black father-of-five. Ms Ross said Mr Floyd started using drugs again two weeks before his death having been clean for a few months.
She said it was a ‘classic story of how many people get addicted to opioids’ in a country where 10million people a year misuse painkillers or illegal drugs. She said: ‘We both suffered from chronic pain.
‘Mine was in my neck and his was in his back. We both have prescriptions. But after prescriptions were filled we got addicted, and tried really hard to break that addiction many times.’
Ms Ross broke down almost immediately as she gave evidence at the Hennepin County Court in Minneapolis. She said that she met Mr Floyd in 2017 and they became ‘very, very close’. He walked up to her in the lobby of a Salvation Army facility while she was upset and, in his ‘great, deep southern voice’, asked: ‘You OK, sis?’, Ms Ross told the court.
The 45-year-old mother-of-two said: ‘I wasn’t OK... he said, “can I pray with you?” I was so tired. We had been through so much, my sons and I. And this kind person, just to come up to me and say can I pray with you, when I felt alone in this lobby. It was so sweet.’
Ms Ross said she and Mr Floyd dated for the next three years.
Ms Ross was the 13th witness in the case brought against former policeman Derek Chauvin, who last May put his knee on Mr Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while the victim pleaded, ‘I can’t breathe’.
Ms Ross called Mr Floyd a ‘mama’s boy’ who was ‘devastated’ when his mother died in 2018.
She said when he came back from his native Houston he was ‘a shell of himself ’. Ms Ross said Mr Floyd saved her name in his phone as ‘mama’ – the same name he cried out as Mr Chauvin pressed down on his neck.
The defence are set to claim Mr Floyd’s drug use was the reason he died. Mr Chauvin, 45, denies charges of murder and manslaughter. The trial continues.
‘Suffered from chronic pain’