It was the cops
Medical examiner: Floyd died because neck was compressed
The medical examiner who conducted George Floyd’s autopsy stood by his homicide ruling Friday, telling jurors police restraint and neck compression caused Floyd’s heart to stop.
Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker said it was true Floyd had “severe underlying heart disease,” high blood pressure and drugs in his system when he died in police custody May 25, but those factors “didn’t directly cause the death.”
“In my opinion, the law enforcement subdual restraint and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take,” he testified at former police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial in Minneapolis.
“Mr. Floyd’s use of fentanyl did not cause the subdual or neck restraint. His heart disease did not cause the subdual or the neck restraint,” Baker said.
“It was the stress of [the police] interaction that tipped him over the edge,” he said.
Prosecutors say Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds until the handcuffed Black man turned unresponsive and died. Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter in the case.
In his detailed 20-page autopsy report released shortly after Floyd’s death, Baker said Floyd’s official cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.”
According to Baker, Floyd, 46, “became unresponsive while being restrained by law enforcement officers” and “could not be resuscitated” despite lengthy attempts by paramedics in the field and then hospital staff.
Since the report’s release, Chauvin’s defense has seized on Baker’s findings that Floyd had an enlarged heart, signs of heart disease and both fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system when he died.
Defense lawyer Eric Nelson argued during his opening statement last week that Floyd died from a “cardiac arrhythmia that occurred as a result of hypertension, his coronary disease, the ingestion of methamphetamine and fentanyl and the adrenaline flowing through his body.”
Prosecutors have worked hard to dispel this claim by calling several medical experts who all agreed a lack of oxygen led to Floyd’s cardiac arrest.
“In this case, I believe the primary mechanism of death is asphyxia, or low oxygen,” one of the experts, retired Hennepin County medical examiner Dr. Lindsey Thomas testified Friday morning.
“The activities of the law enforcement officers resulted in Mr. Floyd’s death and, specifically, those activities were the subdual restraint and the neck compression,” she said.
During his afternoon testimony, Baker also mentioned oxygen multiple times, but he took pains to stress he wasn’t a breathing expert.
He described Floyd as someone “who already needs more oxygen” due to his enlarged heart and narrowed coronary arteries, so “in the context of an altercation with other people” involving the “pain that you would incur from having your cheek up against the asphalt,” Floyd’s body was one that might flood with adrenaline in the hope of getting “more oxygen.”
Under cross-examination by Nelson, Baker was adamant Floyd did not die from a drug overdose, but he conceded such a ruling might have resulted if Floyd’s body had been found alone in a residence with no other context or signs of foul play.
He also said specific abrasions or bruises are typically visible in cases ruled strangulation, but he said the “lack of bruising” on Floyd’s neck and back didn’t necessarily exclude asphyxia.
Asked if he saw any evidence of asphyxia in Floyd’s brain examination, he said “a person has to survive for many hours” for medical examiners to be able to see asphyxia-related brain damage.
He said his examination simply found a “lack of anatomical findings” to support asphyxia as a cause of death, so he would refer to an expert pulmonologist to make a final determination on the exact “mechanism” of Floyd’s cardiopulmonary arrest.