Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis says he was the one who sparked criticism by posting “I can breathe” on the team’s verified Twitter account in the wake of the guilty verdict against the former Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd. Despite backlash for what some saw as a tone deaf tweet, Davis said he would not delete the post. “That’s my tweet,” Davis told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I take full responsibility for that,” he said, explaining that he’d heard George Floyd’s brother, Philonise, speaking on the radio after the verdict came in. “And he said, ‘Today, we are able to breathe again.’ I took my lead from him. In my mind, that was all I needed to say—‘I can breathe,’” Davis said. In separate comments to The Athletic, he said he was “deeply, deeply disappointed” if his comment hurt the Floyd family but added that he would not delete the tweet. As for parallels that some saw between the “I can breathe” tweet and NYPD supporters donning “I can breathe” t-shirts after the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner, Davis told The Athletic: “Let me say this right off the bat: I was not aware of that. … I can see where there could be some negativity towards what I said based on that.”
