On the afternoon of May 25, George Floyd was in a good mood. Before the video that shows him dying with three police officers on him, the African American bought tobacco with a seemingly fake $ 20 bill at the Cup Foods store in south Minneapolis. While there, he moved with ease and seemed sociable. Once in the car, with a gun pointed at his head, an agent orders him to get out and Floyd, terrified, replies: “Don’t shoot me.” On the third day of the trial against the former agent Derek Chauvin, accused of murdering the symbol of the racial movement, they showed for the first time the images of the interior of the store and those of the police body cameras, allowing the jury to have a context of how the brutal eight minutes and 46 seconds were reached.
Christopher Martin, 19, was working as a cashier for Cup Foods on May 25 of last year. In his testimony, released Wednesday in the Hennepin County courthouse, he said he quickly recognized that the $ 20 bill Floyd used could be a fake. According to store policy, accepting counterfeit money meant it would be taken out of his pay, but Martin accepted it anyway. “I thought George didn’t really know it was a counterfeit bill, so I thought he was doing him a favor,” Martin told Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson. After the transaction, the head cashier told him to fetch Floyd from the car to discuss what had happened at the store. The 46-year-old African-American father of five refused to return. The owner of Cup Food sent his employee to look for him again, but there was no luck either and that was when he ordered the police to be called.
The young man said that he witnessed with “disbelief” the scene of agent Chauvin nailing his knee in Floyd’s neck and felt “guilt”. “If he had simply not accepted the ticket, this could have been avoided,” lamented Martin, adding to the narrative of witnesses to the event, haunted by not having done something to prevent or stop the arrest that ended in Floyd’s death. Until now, the 14 members of the jury -12 will deliberate- had seen the case from the perspective of passers-by who recorded with their mobile phones, but on Wednesday afternoon they were able to observe everything that happened from “the eyes” of the police officers involved thanks to the videos from the body cameras.
As soon as the interaction between the forces of order and Floyd, who was sitting in his car, started, you can see the aggressiveness of the agents and the nervousness of the African American. Pointed with a gun, Floyd pleads for nothing to be done to him and breaks down in tears. The first two officers who arrest and handcuff him, then try to calm him down. “You make me nervous,” says one, to which Floyd responds: “I’m terrified.” The cameras give a clear picture of how the detainee insistently resisted getting into the police car, although, handcuffed, he is not perceived as a real threat to the officers.
This Wednesday, the images captured by the former agent Chauvin’s camera came to light for the first time. The police officer arrived on the scene when Floyd tried to stop two officers from getting him into the car, claiming he suffered from claustrophobia. Chauvin grabs Floyd’s neck from behind which apparently causes his camera to detach from his uniform and end up under the police vehicle. Of the four officers on the scene, the only camera that records a few seconds of the arrest is that of the accused.
With the material offered by the other policemen, you can see how they chat with each other calmly while Floyd claims that he cannot breathe and in front of a dozen increasingly upset witnesses who order the agents to check his pulse, especially when the detainee remains silent. “I think he has fainted,” says a policeman. Another informs Chauvin that he cannot find his pulse. Neither of these statements nor the clamor of the witnesses make the accused change his body posture. Even when the ambulance arrives, Chauvin waits a moment before removing his knee from Floyd’s neck, who lies unconscious on the asphalt.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/the-30-minutes-leading-up-to-george-floyds-deadly-arrest-come-to-light-at-trial/
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