News Desk :
She was the teenager whose video of George Floyd’s final moments rippled across the globe. And in a courtroom on Tuesday, Darnella Frazier, now 18, shared her story publicly for the first time, testifying that she remained haunted by Mr. Floyd’s cries for help as she watched a police officer kneel on his neck.
Ms. Frazier, at times crying, spoke softly during emotional testimony on the second day of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former officer facing murder charges. As her voice cracked, Ms. Frazier described how what she witnessed that day last May had changed her life. She sometimes lies awake at night, she said, “apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life.”
“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad,” she added. “I look at my brothers. I look at my cousins, my uncles because they are all Black. I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends. And I look at that, and I look at how that could have been one of them.”
Ms. Frazier was among a diverse group of bystanders who by accident became eyewitnesses to one of the most high-profile police brutality cases of recent decades. They were Black and white. There was a firefighter, high school students and a mixed martial artist.
Their stories were an expression of the trauma of a city that is still struggling to rebuild physically and emotionally from last summer’s unrest.
Most of Tuesday’s witnesses were children and teenagers at the time of the fatal arrest, and they painted a harrowing, consistent picture of what transpired at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. They all said they have struggled with what they saw.
“It seemed like he knew it was over for him,” Ms. Frazier said in her testimony, referring to Mr. Floyd. “He was terrified. He was suffering. This was a cry for help, definitely.”
The bystanders offered accounts of converging outside of a convenience store for the most mundane of reasons – getting a phone cord, buying snacks, taking a walk – only to end up becoming central players in a drama that would grip much of the country.
They urged the police to render aid to Mr. Floyd to no avail. They excoriated Mr. Chauvin and the three other officers on the scene, and said they felt scared that the police would harm them, including in one instance when Mr. Chauvin put his hand on his mace.
The defense has said that the crowd influenced the way the police responded after arriving on the scene. It has become a crucial point of contention between the prosecution and the defense.
Mr. Chauvin’s lawyer said that the officers felt threatened at what they saw as a growing and increasingly hostile crowd, which diverted their attention from caring for Mr. Floyd. The prosecution has attempted to portray the bystanders as ordinary people who were scared and presented no danger to the officers.
Those different views reflect longstanding tensions between Black residents in Minneapolis and the police who patrol their neighborhoods.
Mr. Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric J. Nelson, did little to press most of the young witnesses or challenge their accounts.
Ms. Frazier’s 9-year-old cousin, who was with her outside the convenience store, Cup Foods, testified to the trauma of seeing Mr. Floyd struggle as Mr. Chauvin knelt on his neck.
“I was sad and kind of mad,” said the young girl, Judeah Reynolds, who, like the other minors who testified, was not shown on camera during her testimony. “It felt like he was stopping his breathing and it was kind of like hurting him.”
(Courtes: The New York Times)
