Friends miss Floyd away from cameras
Ana Goñi-Lessan says those who grew up with him in Third Ward wept and cheered at the verdict, relieved to see some justice at last.
Count 1: guilty. Count 2: guilty. Count 3: guilty.
The verdict blared from speakers and echoed off the walls of Cuney Homes where George Floyd grew up, and people wept. They cheered. They exhaled with relief.
Eleven months of grief, anger and frustration paused for a moment as Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd, was put into handcuffs and escorted out of the courtroom.
Earlier in the day, as a jury in Minneapolis discussed Chauvin’s fate, a group of Big Floyd’s peers held court in Third Ward. They talked about the video, the allegations against Floyd — the $20 bill — they talked about their lack of trust in the justice system.
I met Travis Cains, Christopher Hutchins and other community members 11 months ago as they stood outside the Scott Food Mart in the dark and watched a graffiti artist memorialize Floyd, just days after he was murdered. After the mural went viral on social media and after the attention subsided, I’ve visited the Cuney Homes community — for Floyd’s birthday, for a block party, sometimes just to listen to the OGs who sit on the corner and talk about their day.
They told me some people had watched the trial at home, some on their phone. Others said they could only skim the headlines because the replaying of Floyd’s last minutes, as he gasped for his breath under Chauvin’s knee, were too much.
“I don’t want to relive that,” said Hutchins, 39.
For Floyd’s friends, watching the trial wasn’t riveting court TV, it was exhausting. They saw the defense trying to damage his character and bogus testimony about “excited delirium” as distractions from the true cause of death, asphyxiation by sadistic knee.
“They’re bringing up stuff that don’t even matter,” Hutchins said. “I don’t care if he was intoxicated, it doesn’t give you the right to sit on his neck and kill him.”
The defense simplified Floyd’s death in ways that left Cains, who thought of him as a brother, feeling disrespected.
On Monday, defense attorney Eric Nelson compared the prosecution’s burden to prove Chauvin guilty to a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
Instead of ingredients, there’s evidence, Nelson said. Without all the ingredients, you can’t bake the cookie, or in this case, you can’t prove Chauvin murdered Floyd.
“It’s the way that he said it,” Cains said. “You compared my little brother (and his death) to a chocolate chip cookie.”
Before the verdict, some Third Ward residents were optimistic that the system would work. Some were nervous, that if the verdict went the way it usually does, that if once again a jury decided that police would not be held to account, that there would be violence around the country.
They had a reason to be concerned, and I felt uneasy about it, too. After all, the vast majority of police who kill aren’t ever charged with murder. If they are, the cases usually end in acquittal or a conviction of a much lesser charge. The possibility of a jury finding Chauvin only guilty of manslaughter, for example, was a real one.
But violence from those who knew Floyd was not.
Floyd’s best friend Cal Wayne has always said he was a gentle giant. Even the aggravated robbery charge on his record wasn’t really him at all, Wayne said. He was taking the fall for someone else, he told me, standing in the front of the same section of Cuney Homes when I first met him June 1, 2020.
Yesterday, he insisted on the same thing — that Floyd was gentle. I heard this over and over again Tuesday. Hutchins says that even if the verdict went Chauvin’s way, that Floyd still wouldn’t have wanted violence.
“He would say, ‘Put it in God’s hands,’” Hutchins said.
After Chauvin was pronounced guilty on all counts, the calls and texts began. Third Ward residents were on their phones, on Instagram Live, sharing the news that justice prevailed. Cars drove by, with left hands balled into fists and thrust out of rolled down windows as right hands honked their horns. They wanted the maximum sentence for Chauvin, they wanted police to know that they couldn’t get away with murdering unarmed Black men anymore.
Masked media members swarmed the corner where that famous mural of Floyd’s face sits, the red lights of their cameras were on and their microphones were ready to catch the intense emotion of the afternoon.
As they recorded on Nalle Street, parachuting in, they missed the reality of what it feels like to lose someone so close to you in such a public way.
Away from the frenzy, Wayne sat on a stoop and picked up call after call. He listened, nodded and talked about his best friend, Floyd.
An older man spotted him, walked up and gave Wayne a fierce hug. As Wayne pulled away, he grabbed the hem of his shirt and wiped tears from his eyes, revealing a tattoo of Floyd’s face on his torso.