Daunte Wright and George Floyd: another chapter in America’s recurring tragedy
It was shortly after midday on Thursday at the New Salem Missionary Baptist church in Minneapolis. In front of a towering stone facade, Katie Wright stood at the pulpit, almost dwarfed by the plexiglass lectern and mass of microphones in front of her. She shuddered with grief, held by members of her family.
Five days earlier, her son, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old father of one, had been shot and killed by a single bullet fired by a white police officer in the city suburb of Brooklyn Center. Four nights of unrest had followed with hundreds of protesters clashing with police dressed in riot gear, pelting crowds with teargas and rubber bullets.
The police shooting had occurred at a pivotal moment in the city’s history as another white officer, Derek Chauvin, stood trial over the death of another Black man, George Floyd, in a courthouse just a few miles down the road.
One city. Two fatalities. And another chapter in a recurring American tragedy.
As Katie Wright spoke before the assembled press, she said that her family and George Floyd’s were not just tied together by mourning and trauma. In an astounding revelation, she said that Daunte had been taught at Edison high school by George Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, who just two weeks ago had testified for the prosecution in Chauvin’s murder trial.
“It was very emotional,” she said of meeting Floyd’s family for the first time. “She [Ross] remembered him [Wright] playing basketball. And she remembered him just being that smiley, goofy kid. It was so sad that we had to meet that way, and that our families connected in that way.”
The city of Minneapolis had been on edge before the shooting of Daunte Wright, with National Guard troops lining the downtown area and the county courthouse encased in a mesh of concrete barriers and barbed wire, but Wright’s death tipped tensions over the edge.
“This just added gasoline to the fire,” said Quinn Redeemed, a 46-year-old protester, stood outside the Brooklyn Center police department on Monday after the first night of unrest. Her Black Lives Matter flag swayed in the wind, pounded by icy rain. “We are tired and fired up.”
Now, with closing arguments in the Chauvin murder trial set for Monday, perhaps the most significant murder trial in the history of American policing seems set to conclude within days as the prosecution of another officer merely begins. The fate of Derek Chauvin will soon lie in the hands of 12 jurors, and their decision will have ramifications not just in this American midwestern city, but around the world.
‘Murder, it was murder’
It was 12.15 on Monday afternoon when police in Brooklyn Center released body camera footage showing the moment Daunte Wright was killed. Officer Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran of the force, took part in a traffic stop, which police say started because Wright’s car had an expired license plate.
The blurry footage shows a brief scuffle between Wright and two officers. She pulls out her Glock handgun and shouts “Taser!” three times, before firing a bullet. “Oh shit, I shot him,” she says as the car speeds away.
At a media briefing in the police department headquarters to mark release of the footage, police chief Tim Gannon argued the shooting was “an accidental discharge” with officer Potter mistaking her gun for a Taser. But in a waiting area next door, where a small group of activists had assembled and watched on their phones with the Guardian present, the reaction was more visceral.
“Murder, it was murder,” Jonathan Mason, a community organizer, shouted over and over again after watching the fatal shot, disbelieving it was possible for a seasoned officer to mistake a bright yellow Taser electroshock weapon for a black pistol.
Two hours later, and nine miles down the road at the Hennepin county courthouse, George Floyd’s younger brother Philonise was among the last of 38 witnesses to testify for the prosecution against Derek Chauvin.
Through tears he told the jury how his brother had led their household as a child, how much he had loved his mother, and how much he was missed.
“He just was like a person everybody loved around the community. He just knew how to make people feel better,” Floyd said in the sterile courtroom, broadcast live across the world. That afternoon the prosecution concluded, with many observers describing it as the most overwhelming case against a former police officer they had ever seen.
A number of senior Minneapolis police officers, including the chief of police, had testified against their former colleague, numerous medical experts attested that Chauvin’s use of a nine-minute and 29-second kneeto-neck restraint had been the primary cause of Floyd’s death, and many eyewitnesses spoke powerfully about their ongoing trauma having watched George Floyd die.
But as the prosecution in the Chauvin case rested on Monday, the fate of officer Potter remained distinctly unclear.
‘Police officers don’t have to fight fair’
Police in the United States kill roughly 1,100 people a year with only a tiny proportion of those cases resulting in criminal prosecution for the officers involved. Between 2005 and 2019, according to research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, 104 police officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter with just 35 convicted of a crime.
The statistics reflect the difficulty that prosecutors face in convicting American police officers, who often benefit from significant union protection, different legal standards over the use of fatal force and implicit bias borne of conflicts of interest within the US criminal justice system.
The concern around securing a conviction in the Chauvin case was evident when Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison announced charges against the four officers involved in Floyd’s death, who cautioned it would take months to bring the case to court.
“The reason thoroughness is important is because every single link in the prosecutorial chain needs to be strong. Trying this case will not be an easy thing. Winning a conviction will be hard,” he said in June last year.
Chauvin’s defence began after another night of unrest on the streets of Minneapolis. A phalanx of officers beat their riot shields and fired volleys of teargas into the crowds who chanted Daunte Wright’s name. Keith Ellison himself appeared on the streets as police cleared most demonstrators shortly before midnight.
He spoke directly to those who remained. “This thing [Wright’s death] is not going to be swept under the rug. We’re going to deal with it in a real way,” he assured them.
On Tuesday morning, shortly after 9am, the defence began calling its first witnesses. Their argument throughout has essentially been to blame Floyd’s death on his own heart problems and drug use, and suggest that Chauvin’s use of a prolonged restraint was a justifiable use of force. They need only one juror to side with them to force a mistrial, as any conviction must be a unanimous decision.
The defence called a use of force expert, Barry Brodd, a former California officer with a notorious past. Brodd previously testified in defence of the white officer, Jason Van Dyke, who shot and killed black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014. Van Dyke opened fire 16 times and Brodd told the jury in that case that each shot was a justified use of force. Many were fired while McDonald lay dying on the floor.
Throughout his testimony on Tuesday, Brodd argued that Chauvin’s use of restraint had been proportionate to the threat that the unarmed man, unconscious for more than four minutes, posed to officers.
“I felt that Derek Chauvin was justified, and was acting with objective reasonableness,” he told jurors. “Police officers don’t have to fight fair. They’re allowed to overcome your resistance by going up a level.”
During a break in Brodd’s testimony, as a snow storm pounded the grounds of the courthouse, the Floyd and Wright family met for the first time, embracing in tears. Naisha Wright, Daunte’s aunt, chanted her nephew’s name as she wore a T-shirt with George Floyd’s image.
“My nephew’s blood is on your hands …,” she said, her body shaking. “Hold her [Potter] accountable. Hold her higher than accountable.”
As she was speaking, news came that both Kim Potter and police chief Tim Gannon had resigned from the force.
‘Can we get a conviction?’
The death of George Floyd prompted significant police reform efforts in the city of Minneapolis. The city council voted for police budget cuts and to redirect significant funds, $8m, to create new mental health teams that will be able to respond to certain 911 calls. The city also approved a landmark settlement with the Floyd family of $27m.
Asked if Daunte Wright’s death had set these reform efforts back, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey was frank: “It’s impossible to course-correct 400 years of systemic oppression in one single policy, or in any one single effort,” he said in a statement to the Guardian.
It was the middle of Wednesday morning when prosecutors announced that Kim Potter would face manslaughter charges over the death of Daunte Wright, less than four days after he was killed.
The defence in the Chauvin case had called their final witness: forensic pathologist David Fowler. He told the jury that it was George Floyd’s heart conditions, his drug use and potentially carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust of a patrol car that had killed him.
Fowler, who trained in apartheid South Africa, is being sued by the family of a Black teenager, Anton Black, in Maryland, who died after three police officers held him face down in 2018. Fowler ruled that Black had died from “natural causes” prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to accuse him of being “complicit in creating false narratives about what kills Black people in police encounters”.
On the stand, the pathologist cast doubt on Floyd’s official autopsy, which ruled his death a homicide, stating he had, in fact, determined it was “undetermined”.
Chauvin’s defence announced they intended to call no further witnesses on Thursday, bringing the trial into its closing stages.
Hours after the court went into recess, Daunte Wright’s family emerged into the public once more, the beginning of their legal journey just starting.
The family’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, who also represents the Floyd family, expressed frustration that prosecutors had not charged Potter with third degree murder. But he reeled off a list of other unarmed Black men and boys, killed by police in recent years with the officers never criminally charged.
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Eric Garner in New York City. Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio.
“It’s a long journey to justice,” Crump said. “We have to remember, not so long ago they weren’t charging any police officer for killing a Black person. So we’re making progress in America. Are we at a point where we can say it’s equality? Oh, we’re a long way from that.”
Naisha Wright could not contain her anger.
“Justice? What is justice? Will we get to see Daunte’s smile? We don’t get to see that,” she said. “The highest accountability? I know the highest is going to be judged by God. But can we get a conviction?”
Both families will still have to wait and see.
that is the foundation of his mother’s standing: her silence on nearly every question of controversy, a fastidious neutrality that has made her acceptable to almost everyone.
Behind him in the procession was his brother Andrew, shielded by his father’s coffin from the opprobrium that would on any other day surely greet his appearance in public. Anne is respected, Edward is inoffensive, William and Harry have their fans – but none have the stature of the man they buried. That’s partly because their military records are weaker than Philip’s was and partly for a reason that none of them can help: they do not have the connection to the second world war which serves as the bedrock event of modern Britain.
The Queen and her husband embodied that link. He fought for his country in the Royal Navy; she was on the balcony, in uniform, alongside Winston Churchill on VE Day. That has helped tie the monarchy to the country for the entire postwar era: witness the instant power of the Queen’s message in the first weeks of Covid, invoking a wartime anthem to say, “We will meet again.” The death of Prince Philip has loosened that connection; one day it will be gone.
It is not sacrilegious to talk like this, nor disrespectful of the prince himself. On the contrary, few were more keenly aware of the fragility of monarchy than him. His grandfather was the king of Greece, but his father was chased out of the country, banished for life. His greataunt was murdered along with the Russian tsar in the bloodshed of the Bolshevik revolution. He saw once-solid thrones pushed over and long-rooted royal dynasties collapse.
The Queen herself hardly needs to be told that no law of nature says a monarchy must exist for ever. The defining fact of her own life may well be the abdication of her uncle, after serving just eight months as King Edward VIII. She knows that royal stability and continuity are far from automatic, but take persistence, perseverance and deft personnel. She and her late husband fitted the bill perfectly. But from that couple, from that generation, there is now just her, alone.
Few were more keenly aware of the fragility of monarchy than Philip … He saw thrones pushed over and dynasties collapse
velop new behavioral habits that might contribute to a peppier mindset – something that apps and courses can perhaps encourage.
Even so, perspective is needed to see past the smoke and mirrors, and aspirational marketing speak. We’re forever hopeful we might become a bit cheerier if we buy this product or attend that class, and plenty of entrepreneurs are only too happy to indulge us. Like its self-help cousin, the happiness sector “is populated with some charismatic individuals who possibly over-sell the promise of everlasting happiness,” says Hood.
A lot of the information given, even from respected experts, is obvious. “I wish there was a silver bullet, but that’s not the case,” says Wiking. “I think you know a lot of the things I’m telling you: that your relationships matter, having a short commute and a fulfilling job matters, having enough money to get by matters, comparisons to others matter.” Yet even if people do already know, he says, we “need to be reminded of things – such as the fact that more money does not always translate to more happiness.”
His advice, if you feel your happiness level is jammed on a five out of 10, is to ask yourself: what would lift you to a six? If you’re lonely it might mean joining a club (they’re a big thing in Denmark) to see if you can strike up new friendships. “The secret is that there’s no secret,” says Wiking. The mere act of consciously turning our mind to what could make us sunnier is a start. Happy Moments by Meik Wiking is published by Penguin at £9.99. Buy it for £9.29 at guardianbookshop.com
What the pandemic has done is ‘decouple wealth from happiness’
be a life of my own design, so I had this sense of purpose, I guess.”
* * *
Jones eventually gravitated to Venice Beach in California, working menial jobs and singing in local bands to pay the rent. It was there in 1976 that she began writing her own songs, the likes of Easy Money and Weasel and the White Boys Cool, peopling them with characters based on the maverick souls she had met along the way. She first encountered Waits at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1977, where he watched from the shadows as she sang a handful of songs to a nearempty club. Soon afterwards, they had a one-night stand that ended abruptly with Waits cold-shouldering her the following morning. “I was still standing on the step when he closed the door and walked away,” she writes. “The sun was up and it was already too hot. I was wearing high heels. I wanted to hide in a bush. I may have hidden in a bush.”
A few months later, she signed to Warner Brothers and, as she puts it, “things started warming up again with Tom Waits”. Their romance was all-consuming. “We fed a craving so sharp that we wanted to become each other,” she writes. It lasted barely a year, and his departure left her devastated just as her sudden celebrity swept her along in its tidal sway. In his absence, she drifted into the orbit of other wayward creative mavericks, including the supremely gifted songwriter and guitarist Lowell George, lead singer of Little Feat.
“It’s hard to say what he was really like, because I never knew him when he was not on cocaine,” she says. “He was out there all night long taking drugs. He didn’t seem to be making any head road into hanging around.” A year after they met, George collapsed and died of a heart attack, aged 34.
For a time, too, she became friends with the talismanic Mac Rebennack, AKA Dr John, whom she refers to as “a dubious character in my life; a creator and a destroyer”. In his company, she began using heroin, which she had tried just once before as a young hippy drifter. I ask her why she was drawn to the drug. She ponders this for a long moment. “It’s not good to blame everything on my relationship with love, but, when I was younger, love was everything to me. I didn’t really have a self to hold on to when things turned bad. So, back then if a boyfriend said, ‘I don’t love you any more,’ I might go hurt myself. I wouldn’t try to kill myself, but I might go take drugs.” She pauses. “I think that we construct our personalities out of our family environment and mine was pretty unsettled. I was very loved, but that was probably the only healthy thing going on, but it’s possible that was not enough to keep me from being curious about the bad things in life, the forbidden things.”
Does she regret what she calls “the dark compressed days” of her addiction, which lasted around two years. “Well, with heroin, people just want you to say, ‘Oh, it’s so terrible’ and condemn it outright, but I think it’s wrong somehow to do that. There’s a reason why people get addicted to heroin. There is something there that they like, some kind of solace, some kind of numbing. In order to recover, I really think a person has to somehow acknowledge why they did it in the first place, maybe by saying: ‘I liked the drug and it almost killed me.’ Otherwise they are just pretending.”
Ever the survivor, Jones wrote the songs that ended up on her second album, 1981’s ambitious Pirates, as she emerged out of her addiction. Ever since, she has gone her own sometimes unpredictable, but always intriguing, way, recording several albums of covers, briefly embracing electronica (on 1997’s Ghostyhead) and making an angry protest album (2003’s The Evening of My Best Day). Between the two, she disappeared from public view to raise her daughter, Charlotte, whom she had with her former husband, Pascal Nabet-Meyer, a musician she met and married while living for a time in Paris in the late 1980s.
Listening again to Rickie Lee Jones’s great songs, which are scattered across her many albums, her otherness is striking. No one sounds quite like her, or goes to the places she goes to when the spirit moves her. She is a mercurial presence, impossible to pigeonhole or pin down, her songs as restless as her spirit. Reading her wild and wonderful book, one senses that, in a very real way, music was a calling that saved her life. “I guess so,” she says, “but something else I learned from writing the book is that I’m an optimistic person. In spite of my recklessness and throwing myself on the fire, my nature is to make something good out of what happens. I really didn’t know that until I laid it out in writing.”
Book extract: Last Chance Texaco by Rickie Lee Jones
When I was 23 years old I drove around LA with Tom Waits. We’d cruise along Highway 1 in his new 1963 Thunderbird. With my blond hair flying out the window and both of us sweating in the summer sun, the alcohol seeped from our pores and the sex smell still soaked our clothes and our hair. We liked our smell. We did not bathe as often as we might have. We were in love and I for one was not interested in washing any of that off. By the end of summer we were exchanging song ideas. We were also exchanging something deeper. Each other.
Tom had two tattoos on his bicep. He liked to don the vintage accoutrements of masculinity: sailor hats and pointed shoes. The more he tried to conceal his tenderness, the more he revealed a chafed and childlike nature. I adored him. He was my king. In bed he was the greatest performing lion in the world. I mean to say that Tom was never not performing.
Then quite suddenly, in November we were no longer seeing each other.
I spent the fall driving around with Lowell George, the charismatic guitarist from Little Feat, a local hero who kept his little feet “in the street” as it were. He found me there in my squalid basement encampment and we went drivin’ around in his Range Rover, seated high above the street studying various motels and apartments where he had spent time with past girlfriends. He showed me the hotel I would live in one day – the Chateau Marmont – and we sat in the living rooms of managers who would load him up with drugs for the chance to put his signature on paper. He flirted with them all like a child flirts with the devil, toying with their furious drugged-up machinations and escaping, like a child called home by his mother, just before he signed his soul away. Lowell seemed unconcerned about his own mortality. The play was the thing, and that boy could play the guitar.
In bed Lowell was a fat man in a bathtub. I mean to say that something about him was in another room, laughing, singing to himself. He was a handsome man, unhealthy, kind to a fault.
By June we did not speak much any more. He’d tried to obtain the publishing rights to Easy Money and Warner Brothers intervened. It left a very bad taste on both our tongues. I learned that lesson out of the gate; when push comes to shove, money trumps friendship.
The next summer I drove around with Dr John. It was a very different car, a station wagon used to take his kids to school and bring groceries home to his wife, Libby. He had been married a couple times and had a number of “sprouts”. He also had a ghost he kept with him, a thing that followed him, watched from behind the curtains in the hotel rooms and the plastic-backed chairs in the diners we visited. I mean to say it was his addiction. By the end of summer, he left his companion with me and I drove alone for the rest of the year…
The apex of my love life corresponds to my career success, and unfortunately my success corresponded with my drug use. My drug career was shortlived – three years from 1980 to 1983. I quit and headed to France. But the damage was done. I did drugs like I did everything else. On fire, with no back door.
• Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour by Rickie Lee Jones is published by Atlantic (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Families are complex. Parents can do a bad job here and be triumphant and wonderful there. That’s just how it is