Girlfriend’s tears for George Floyd
She told court of his kindness and addiction battle
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 deadly 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. Miss 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 ten million 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.’ Miss 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?’, Miss 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.’
Miss Ross said she and Mr Floyd dated for the next three years. Miss Ross was the thirteenth 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’, the trial has heard.
Miss 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, like he was broken... he didn’t have the same kind of bounce’.
Miss Ross said Mr Floyd saved her name in his phone as ‘mama’ – the same name he cried out as Chauvin pressed down on his neck. Miss Ross said between March, April and early May, Mr Floyd had been clean of drugs.
The defence are set to claim Mr Floyd’s drug use was the reason he died. The trial also heard from Seth Bravinder, the paramedic who attended to Mr Floyd and found him unresponsive.
The court was shown a video shot by a bystander in which Mr Bravinder was seen making a hand gesture to Chauvin to release his grip, ‘so we could move the patient’.
Chauvin, 45, denies charges of murder and manslaughter.
The trial continues.
‘Suffered from chronic pain’