George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on October 14th, 1973, and raised in a public housing complex (Cuney Homes) in the 3rd Ward of Houston, one of poorest area of the city (recognized as Bricks). He had 6 siblings. People came to call him “Big Floyd” because he was over 6 feet tall in middle school; he saw sports as a method of social mobility.
Floyd became an automotive customizer and played club basketball after he returned from college in Kingsville, in 1995. He went to prison for armed robbery in 2008 and was paroled in 2013. After he was released, he mentored young men at a church called Resurrection Houston. He delivered meals and assisted on other projects with Angel By Nature Foundation, a charity founded by rapper Trae the Truth. Later he became involved with a ministry that brought men from the Third Ward to Minnesota in a church-work program with drug rehabilitation and job placement services.
Floyd moved to Minneapolis in 2014, and was a truck driver and bouncer. He worked as a security guard for the Salvation Army from 2017-2018. From 2019 up until the COVID-19 Pandemic, he worked as a security guard at a club and a bar. He lost his job security then, and contracted COVID-19, recovering from it a few weeks later.
Murder of Floyd
He died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes during the arrest. Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street, while two other officers further restrained Floyd, and a fourth prevented onlookers from intervening. For the last three of those minutes Floyd was motionless and had no pulse, but officers made no attempt to revive him. Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck as arriving emergency medical technicians attempted to treat him.
The initial police autopsy stated that he died of a methamphetamine overdose, unrelated to Chauvin, but after a private autopsy stated that it was due to asphyxiation and after the fall of the 3rd Precinct, the autopsy was corrected to asphyxiation, with methamphetamine as an underlying cause as well as cardiac disease. The day after his death, protests and riots began in Minneapolis, and 2 days after his death, protests became global, with a riot in Athens, protests in New York, Sacramento, San Francisco, and other regions.
Memorial Fund & Petition
Floyd’s memorial fund broke records for individual donors, with over 500,000. You can donate to his GoFundMe here:
A Change.org peition filed on behalf of George Floyd to arrest the officers that murdered him has the most signatures ever signed on one single petition.
The petition can be found here: Justice for George Floyd