George Floyd: Nine Minutes and Twenty-Nine Seconds
Near Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota
The call to Minneapolis police on the evening of May twenty-fifth, twenty twenty, was about a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store. A store clerk had flagged it. George Floyd, forty-six years old, had come to Minneapolis from Houston. He had moved here to start over. He was outside in the parking lot.
Officer Derek Chauvin arrived and eventually pinned Floyd to the asphalt at the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue, his knee across Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. That figure, nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, is the Hennepin County District Attorney's corrected number from the trial, replacing the initial eight minutes and forty-six seconds that had circulated in the first days. Three other officers were present. A seventeen-year-old named Darnella Frazier filmed the encounter on her phone. Floyd said he could not breathe more than twenty times.
He died at the scene.
The video Frazier shot reached every corner of the world within hours. In the weeks that followed, protests occurred in all fifty states and in countries on six continents. The United States Department of Defense estimated it was the largest sustained protest movement in American history by participant count. Some estimates placed total participation in the tens of millions.
On April twentieth, twenty twenty-one, a jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years. The three other officers were convicted on separate federal charges and in a subsequent state trial.
The intersection at Thirty-eighth and Chicago became a community memorial called George Floyd Square almost immediately after the killing. The murals, flowers, and political markers that accumulated there are a living archive of the summer that followed. Darnella Frazier received a Pulitzer Prize special citation in twenty twenty-one for her presence of mind in filming what she filmed.
