NOT MY JOB

Cop Charged in George Floyd’s Death: I Thought the Others Were Taking Care of Him

Former officer Tou Thao said he was busy doing crowd control.

An ex-police officer charged in the death of George Floyd said that he had been occupied with his role as “a human traffic cone,” as he put it Tuesday, while three of his colleagues fatally restrained the 46-year-old Black man. Tou Thao testified that he had presumed fellow officers Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane were attending to Floyd’s medical needs. The former Minneapolis law enforcement officer, who said his job had been to hold back the roughly 15 bystanders on the scene, said that he had heard Floyd say multiple times that he couldn’t breathe, but hadn’t been sure the man was being honest. Like Thao, Chauvin, Kueng, and Lane are accused of violating Floyd’s constitutional rights during the May 2020 incident. Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes, was convicted of state murder and manslaughter last year. According to prosecutors, who rested their case Monday, Thao, Kueng, and Lane deprived Floyd of medical care. The trio will be tried in separate proceedings this summer over allegations they aided and abetted murder and manslaughter.