George Floyd Died At The Hospital Not On The Street

George Floyd died at the hospital not on the street. His autopsy shows blood drawn antemortem at 9:00 PM. Floyd died 25 minutes later at 9:25 PM. The media has been lying about this.

People don’t die of asphyxiation hours after the event, after having a breathing tube inserted.

Intuitively, if one knows only the first selective video clip of the cop with his knee on Floyd's neck as he struggles to breathe, it is hard to see the cop and his two colleagues as anything other than guilty, guilty, guilty. Yet the defense also gets to develop and put on evidence at trial. And the standard of proof in criminal cases -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- is virtually impossible to overcome when the defense offers a reasonable explanation grounded in established facts.

What facts? The full videos of the police interaction with Floyd show that he was cuffed and in the police cruiser but resisted arrest and got out of the cruiser even as the police were reasonable and solicitous of his well-being. Why did Floyd resist? On parole, Floyd was likely anxious that a relatively minor arrest could send him back to prison. He was also beginning to show signs of medical distress.

What kind of medical distress? Plausibly, as Officer Chauvin said during the arrest, Floyd was suffering from extreme delirium, a poorly understood condition in which the heart goes haywire, blood pressure and body temp spike, and the victim becomes agitated and acts odd and aggressive. Death is the common outcome, with physical restraint seen as a life-saving measure.

A stressful event in the context of heart disease, drug use, and other ailments are implicated in most cases of extreme delerium. Across the country, police bump into cases of it often enough that they have begun to train for it.

As the official autopsy report shows, Floyd had advanced heart disease, fentanyl and other drugs in his system, and apparent sickle cell trait. Notably, even on careful dissection, there was no sign of forcible trauma to Floyd's neck. This suggests that Officer Chauvin used an approved and trained for technique for physical restraint in which an arrestee's neck is pinned but without pressure being applied. The same might well be done by hospital ER orderlies dealing with extreme delerium.

At trial, these points will be adduced by ordinary fact witnesses and by expert testimony. This will provide Chauvin and his fellow officers with a potentially persuasive defense that Floyd died of the effects of extreme delirium, with him feeling genuinely short of breath because his heart was malfunctioning and no longer reliably delivering blood to his lungs for oxygenation.

Although Officer Chauvin's neck retraint looked bad, it does not seem to have been responsible for George Floyd's death. Or at least that is what the defense will show, with the prosecution hard put to refute such a claim to the exclusion of all reasonable doubt. Months or years from now, a judge or jury seems likely to find that to be so.

I talked to a local cop in my town — our little town has its own little FULLY-FUNDED-UNLIKE-IN-BLUE-CITIES police dept. — and he told me he worked 20+ years in Balmer, including during the Freddy Gray riots, and he was never trained to use a hold like that. He was appalled at what Chauvin did, but also appalled at the riots that sprang up afterward.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: most cops are fundamentally decent people in my view. The ones in the Bleu cities following awful leftist orders to avoid being canceled, however, should turn to the Book of Matthew. Something in there about putting your treasures in Heaven, so that rust, moths, Antifa and Democrats can’t destroy them. Also, something about gaining the whole world and losing your soul in the process, although that might be in another Gospel.

“the fact of the matter is that he would be likely walking around today except for the way the cop handled him.”

The recently released body cam footage (from all four officers) shows that George Floyd’s breathing difficulty and breathing complaints started well before he was on the ground. He was so big and strong, and resisting so strongly, that the four officers could not get him into the back of the police car - only after failing to get him in the car, did they try to restrain him on the ground. Before that, he was clearly incoherent, and the police were discussing his apparent state of excited delirium.

The autopsy showed that his blood level of fentanyl was 11 ng/ml - higher than the average for a fatal overdose (9.96 ng/mL, people have died from as little as 1/15th of George Floyd’s blood level 0.75 ng/mL, but about 3 ng/ml is a more typical low range for a fatal overdose). He also had an additional 5.6 ng/mL of the fentanyl metabolite Norfentanyl, as well as 0.65 ng/mL of the fentanyl pre-cursor 4-ANPP, and 65 ng/ml of free morphine in his blood at death.

His blood level of methamphetamine was 19 ng/mL, and he was also strongly positive for THC its metabolites, and the nicotine metabolite Cotinine.

Additional fentanyl and methamphetamine were found hidden in his rectum.

George Floyd’s breathing was further under pressure by several severe conditions. At 46 years old and overweight, he had chronic high blood pressure, advanced arteriosclerosis (75-90% narrowing of the arteries to the heart), was a smoker with sickle cell disease and positive for COVID-19.

But just his blood level of fentanyl alone would fatally shut off the breathing (the mechanism by which fentanyl kills) of most people.

He fatally overdosed on fentanyl, before the cop started handling him. It takes a while to die, and he clearly (on four cameras) evidenced the behavior of a heavy drug user in the irrational, excited throes of a major bodily system failure.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.