Out of air & out of life: doc
Grim Floyd testimony counters ‘drug’ defense
George Floyd died from a lack of oxygen — not a drug overdose or heart disease — as Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes, two doctors testified Thursday at Chauvin’s murder trial.
“Mr. Floyd died from positional asphyxia, which is a fancy way of saying he died because he had no oxygen left in his body,” said Bill Smock, director of forensic medicine for the Louisville Metro Police Department.
He said Floyd showed telltale signs of “air hunger” akin to drowning when he repeated over and over, “I can’t breathe.”
“That is not a fentanyl overdose. That is somebody begging to breathe,” said Smock, an emergency medicine physician who teaches medical residents at the University of Louisville.
“He gradually succumbed to lower and lower levels of oxygen until it was gone and he died,” Smock said, calling it a “myth” that “you have to have bruises to prove strangulation.”
Smock’s testimony followed after Martin Tobin, a lung and critical care doctor from Chicago, who said on the stand earlier Thursday that he also believed Floyd died from asphyxia.
Both doctors contradicted the defense argument that illegal drugs and Floyd’s heart disease contributed to his death as Chauvin arrested him May 25 in Minneapolis.
“A healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to would have died as a result of what he was subjected to,” Tobin told the jury.
Asked why Floyd’s autopsy didn’t list the lack of oxygen, or asphyxia, as his cause of death, Tobin said low oxygen levels don’t “leave a fingerprint” — which he compared to suffocating someone with a pillow.
In another crucial moment for the prosecution, Tobin pointed to the exact second in the viral bystander video of Floyd’s arrest where he believes the handcuffed and unarmed Black man had lost all of his oxygen and was essentially dead.
“You can see his eyes. He’s conscious and then, you see that he isn’t,” the doctor said as the graphic video played in the
courtroom.
“That’s the moment the life goes out of his body,” he said.
Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for about three minutes after that.
Tobin, who works at the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Hospital in Illinois and at Loyola University’s medical school, is the author of a 1,500-page textbook on mechanical ventilation that has been described as the “bible” on the topic.
A Hennepin County, Minn., medical examiner ruled Floyd’s cause of death as cardiac arrest with heart disease and drug use as “other significant conditions.”
Defense attorney Eric Nelson has relied on those extra factors to argue that Chauvin’s knee did not cause Floyd’s death.
The cop-turned-murder suspect is the first of four ex-officers to face trial in the case. Two of them helped Chauvin hold Floyd facedown on the pavement as the 46-year-old repeatedly pleaded for air.
Tobin said the officers’ actions “enormously” reduced Floyd’s oxygen levels, ultimately resulting in brain damage and causing his heart to stop.
“The cause of the low level of oxygen was shallow breathing … shallow breaths that weren’t able to carry the air through his lungs down to the essential areas of the lungs,” Tobin told the court.
The doctor said the four key factors contributing to Floyd’s asphyxia were that he was “turned prone on the street, that he has the handcuffs in place combined with the street, that he has a knee on his neck, and he has a knee on his back and on his side.”
During his lengthy testimony, Tobin pointed to how Chauvin and fellow officer J. Alexander Kueng “manipulated” Floyd’s handcuffs by “pushing them into his back and pushing them high,” saying the move was “extremely important” in interfering with Floyd’s ability to breathe.
As Floyd struggled to breathe through an increasingly narrow airway, he was trying to use his fingers and knuckles “to try to crank up his chest,” Tobin said.
“To most people, this doesn’t look terribly significant, but to a physiologist, this is extraordinarily significant because this tells you that he has used up all his resources and he is now literally trying to breathe with his fingers and knuckles,” Tobin said.