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The Story of an African-American That Shook the World: My Name is George Floyd; This is How I Died

I’m confused, I’m scared, I made a mistake.
I shouldn’t have used that fake money, but I was desperate.
I’m sitting in my car, I know I’m in trouble. I can see them approaching from my rearview mirror.
I can’t move.
Four of them pulled me out of my car, pushed me against a wall, and I fell to the ground.
When I get up, they pull at me, they tell me I have to get in their car. I resist, they drag me, I fall again.
I’m nervous, three of them are on me.
One of them pushes his knee on my neck. He’s crushing my neck, I can’t breathe.
Slowly, my lungs push out the little air left in them.
I’m scared, but mostly I need air and I start to beg…
Stop, stop.
I didn’t do nothing serious man.
… Please
please,
please I can’t breathe
please, man
please somebody
I can’t breathe
I can’t breathe
please
man can’t breathe, my face
just get up
I can’t breathe
Please
I can’t breathe sh*t
I can’t move
Mama…
I’m through.
I’m claustrophobic
my stomach hurts
my neck hurts
everything hurts
please
please
don’t kill me
they gon’ kill me.

In my last gasps of life, I try with all my might to breathe in a little air.
But I can’t. My heartrate is out of control, my heart is pounding in my ears. My blood is filled with carbon dioxide, my pupils are smaller and smaller…
It’s dark. Maybe I’m dead, maybe not… No I’m not because I can feel a hot liquid wetting my pants and trickling down my leg. While trying to get that last milligram of oxygen into my lungs made my heart burst.
My brain slowly, too slowly, starts shutting down.
Even though I tried all I could to resist, I’m dead.
Darkness and emptiness swallowed me up…
Forever.

Above being a victim of abuse of power and the violence of an officer of the law, George Floyd was a human being, a son, a brother, a husband, a father.

Whether he died of asphyxia, or because of the combined effects of being restrained on the ground by the officer accused of his homicide, his underlying medical problems (coronary heart disease and hypertensive heart disease) and any potential intoxicants in his system, his death was caused by the officer kneeling on his neck.

It takes four to six minutes for an adult male in good health to die of suffocation and suffer irreparable damage. George Floyd, a large man almost six feet tall, resisted for eight minutes and forty-six seconds with a knee pressed against his neck as he desperately and repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.

And his murderer wasn’t an ordinary criminal. No.
He was a police officer. Or at least that’s what his badge said.
The individual, who had already been cited for 12 acts of violence, including a homicide while in service, witnessed his death and did nothing.
Yet, the man he watched die was not a stranger to him but someone with whom he had worked before putting on a uniform.
A white police officer killing a black man, smirking while looking into the smartphone lens that would immortalize the horror forever.

 

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