9-Year-Old Witness To George Floyd's Murder Gives Heartbreaking Testimony

The child witness said Derek Chauvin ignored medic requests to remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck

The trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer responsible for the death of George Floyd last summer, is underway in Minneapolis. On Tuesday, a bevy of witnesses to the crime came forward with their testimony, but perhaps the most heartbreaking of the day was that of a 9-year-old child.

The witness testified Tuesday in the trial, saying that Chauvin ignored requests by medics to remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck in the moments leading up to Floyd’s death last May. The child, who was not publicly identified in the courtroom, said she witnessed firsthand the moment Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, where it remained for nine minutes.

After buying snacks at a nearby store with her cousin, 18-year-old Darnella Frazier, she said she saw an “officer put his knee on the neck of George Floyd” as she walked out of the store.

The young girl told prosecutor Jerry Blackwell that she saw Chauvin with his knee pressed into Floyd’s neck even after emergency medics arrived on the scene.

“They asked him nicely to get off of him,” she said, saying Chauvin “still stayed on him.”

After asking a few more times, the girl said Chauvin eventually complied with the medics’ request. Blackwell asked the girl how she felt after witnessing the incident, to which she replied, “I was sad and kind of mad. It felt like he was stopping his breathing and it was kind of hurting him.”

Four witnesses were called to the stand Tuesday morning, the second full day of Derek Chauvin’s trial.

Genevieve Hansen, a 27-year-old Minneapolis firefighter, was off-duty at the time of the incident. When she took the stand, she became visibly emotional and broke down several times while testifying as a witness to Floyd’s death. In videos recorded from the scene, Hansen can be heard repeatedly yelling at the officers involved and begging them to let her check his pulse.

She said she approached the scene because she could see “a handcuffed man who was not moving with officers with their whole body weight on their back and a crowd that was stressed out.” She said his face was “smooshed into the ground” and that it looked “puffy and swollen, which would happen if you were putting a grown man’s weight on someone’s neck.”

After identifying herself as an off-duty officer, she attempted to help Floyd in any way she could. She said she begged the officers to help Floyd, but they would not allow her on the scene. She called 911 and in the recording, Hansen can be heard telling the dispatcher, “I literally watched police officers not take a pulse and not do anything to save a man.”

Chauvin’s trial continues this week.