- A video of Floyd’s arrest sparked off protests against racial injustice and police brutality in the United States and around the world
A respiratory doctor testified on Thursday that George Floyd died from a lack of oxygen and that police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee was on his neck almost all the time he was facedown in the street with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Martin Tobin, a pulmonologist, told the jury at Chauvin’s murder and manslaughter trial that he had watched videos of Floyd’s May 25, 2020 arrest “hundreds of times.”
“Mr. Floyd died from a low level of oxygen,” Tobin told the nine-woman, five-man jury hearing the high-profile case in a heavily guarded Minneapolis courtroom.
“This caused damage to his brain,” he said, and arrhythmia — an irregular heartbeat — which “caused his heart to stop.”
Read also: Paramedics Testify George Floyd Had No Pulse When They Arrived
The 45-year-old Chauvin, who is white, was seen in a video taken by a bystander kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as the 46-year-old African-American man gasped and complained repeatedly that he “can’t breathe.”
Tobin said Floyd’s breathing weakened because he was “squeezed” face down on the street, handcuffed and with Chauvin and other police officers on his neck and back.
Tobin said that as a doctor in an intensive care unit in a busy Chicago hospital he is “extremely familiar with seeing people die, unfortunately.”
He provided commentary as a graphic video of what he said was the moment of Floyd’s death was shown to an attentive jury.
“You can see his eyes, he’s conscious, and then you see that he isn’t,” he said. “One second he’s alive and one second he is no longer.
“That’s the moment the life goes out of his body.”
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