One of three former Minneapolis police officers currently facing charges in connection with the death of George Floyd testified on Tuesday that he did not realize Floyd was dying when he was at the scene, The Associated Press reported.
Floyd, a Black man, was killed in May 2020 after police responded to a call from a Minneapolis store owner, who alleged that Floyd used a counterfeit $20 bill.
Tou Thao testified that after arriving on the scene he served as “a human traffic cone” on a roadway for crowd control while other police officers were engaged with Floyd, the AP reported.
Thao said that he presumed Floyd was not in cardiac arrest while he was being held down because he said he had not seen any officers try to perform CPR on him, though he noted that some onlookers wanted Floyd’s pulse to be checked by officers and were concerned about his condition.
He acknowledged that he had heard Floyd say “I can’t breathe,” but he said that from his vantage point he could not see anything that would have blocked Floyd physically from breathing, according to the AP.
The former officer also testified that he believed it was clear “that [Floyd] was under the influence of some type of drugs” while officers tried to put him in a squad car, the AP reported.
Thao is among three police officers who face federal charges for allegedly denying medical care to Floyd and violating his civil rights. The other two charged are former Minneapolis officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane.
Floyd died after another former Minneapolis officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes. His killing reignited a national reckoning over criminal justice and the treatment of Black Americans in the United States.
Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison last year after being convicted by a jury of second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder.