Judges called the coverage of the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath "outstanding" and applauded the team for “helping readers understand that trauma doesn’t end easily or soon, but when addressed properly, it can become a catalyst for major change.” They described the long-form narrative, “George Floyd’s Search for Salvation” as “gripping” and “powerful” “where a symbol and a martyr became a man,” and called it “the definitive George Floyd story.” Originally published by The Star Tribune between May and December, 2020.
Everybody knew him as a popular athlete with a gentle spirit. But opportunities for George Floyd were few in the impoverished Third Ward of Houston, and racism a constant barrier.After years of struggles, he joined a pipeline of men from the neighborhood seeking redemption in Minneapolis.Floyd didn’t come to change the world. He thought he was saving his life.
PART I
Looking for hope up north
Robert Fonteno was calling on God.
He had found his way out of the darkness into a life of Christian faith upon moving to Minneapolis from Houston. Over the years he tried to aid the passage of fellow Texans riding on the same prayers.
But he no longer paid the way of anybody who asked. After seeing some fumble the chance to better their lives here, Fonteno came to rely on divine guidance over several days when answering requests for help.
This time, the call had come at the end of a long day hauling freight, as he was retiring for the night at a truck stop. The Houston man on the line needed Fonteno to buy his bus ticket for the journey 1,200 miles north.
His name was George Floyd, and he was a legend in their old neighborhood. Fonteno once thought his friend was destined for stardom. Now, Floyd claimed to have no money.
“If I stay down here,” he told Fonteno, “I’m going to die … I’m pretty much all out of options.”
BOTH MEN CAME OF age in a metropolis steeped in segregation and inequality, a city where, as Fonteno saw it, there was always a distinct sense of knowing one’s place and staying there.
The hospital where Fonteno was born was named after the president of the Confederacy. That year of 1967 saw uprisings over racial injustice across America, and in Houston, police shot 3,000 rounds into a dormitory where students from the historically Black Texas Southern University had barricaded themselves.
Houston’s Third Ward erupted again three years later when a Black man died in police custody after fleeing a traffic stop. The two officers were acquitted of murder charges. During protests over police brutality, a shootout between cops and a group of activists modeled after the Black Panthers led to the killing of a Black leader, and a jury declined to indict the officers.
Fonteno was too young to understand, but he grew up listening. Listening to his parents question the police side of the story in that gun battle. Listening to his elders’ tales of sharecropping in Louisiana, where they talked of living in shacks with no running water and scrambling to survive when the farm’s owner refused to pay them for their cotton crop one year. “Those were hard times, boy,” his grandpa said.
Houston voted to desegregate schools over the protests of white parents in 1970, and Fonteno was bused for several years to a white school. He learned to temper his mannerisms as a tall Black boy, lowering his voice and not patting white acquaintances on the back when he spoke.
The racial order could be as unforgiving as the sun that blazed over the flatlands of Houston, but the football field was a place of refuge.
Robert Fonteno found a second chance at Turning Point in north Minneapolis. He grew up in the same Houston neighborhood as Floyd, who sought his help in making a new start in Minnesota.
FONTENO STARTED PLAYING FOOTBALL when he was 7, his father pushing him to secure an athletic scholarship to college. Fonteno knew that he had to go to Jack Yates High School if he wanted to play among kings.
The Jack Yates Lions twice came close to winning a state championship during Fonteno’s teen years. He made the team and by 1985, when he was a junior, the Lions were overwhelming their competition, triumphing over the lesser resources of their neighborhood with athletic force and grueling drills.
Players lifted weights in a wood shack with no air conditioning, using hand-me-down equipment donated from local gyms. Coaches made them run 2 miles after each practice, calling out from the sidelines to pick up the pace.
The Lions were 15-0 when they played for the state championship. Their opponents, the Permian Panthers from the booming oil town of Odessa, were four-time champions with much fancier facilities. Their exploits would later be chronicled in the book “Friday Night Lights,” which was adapted into a movie and television series.
Rapper LL Cool J had just released “Radio,” his first album, and Fonteno and his friends on the bus sang along the whole way to the Dallas suburbs, where the game would be played at Texas Stadium several days before Christmas. The lyrics of “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” matched the mission of the team dressed in crimson and gold:
My story is rough, my neighborhood is tough
But I still sport gold, and I’m out to crush
Yates routed Permian 37-0, becoming the first historically Black school to triumph in the state championship’s large-school division since competition was integrated in 1967. Texans raved about the game for decades, deeming the 1985 Yates Lions one of the best high school football teams in state history, and a handful of players went on to the NFL.
Fonteno never got a college scholarship. His parents split up, and he, his sisters and their mother moved back to the Third Ward. During his senior year, Fonteno got arrested for car theft, and he spiraled into disillusionment.
He still attended his alma mater’s football games over the years and was impressed by a new star athlete’s prowess one Friday night at Barnett Stadium in the early ’90s.
A week later, Fonteno ran into him at the corner store. The player’s sturdy, 6-foot-6 frame was unforgettable, and he stood a good 5 inches above Fonteno.
“You’re Number 88? Big Floyd, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Floyd said.
“You played a big game last week. All you’ve got to do is stay out of the streets and stay focused, and you’ll make it.”
Fonteno, six years older than Floyd, believed he had already missed his chance. Crack cocaine was ravaging urban neighborhoods across America and Fonteno had “jumped off the porch,” as the neighborhood guys put it, hustling drugs in the streets.
He knew Floyd’s athletic talent far surpassed his own, and the young man struck Fonteno as humble.
Fonteno was sure he would go far.
Floyd grew up in Cuney Homes, Houston’s first public housing project. His mom, known as Miss Cissy, was a beloved fixture in the complex.
LARCENIA “CISSY” FLOYD GREW up in North Carolina in “an old, raggedy, broke-down shack,” as her younger sister Angela Harrelson described it. They were raised in a family of 14 children by parents who toiled as sharecroppers in the tobacco fields for $2.50 an hour, pausing only for a lunch of crackers and honey buns and peanuts, laboring through aches and hunger until dusk.
Their father landed a job at a barbecue restaurant that kept whites in the front and Black employees in the back, wearing the scent of smoke home from working the hog pit. The children encountered hostile white teachers and classmates in the newly desegregated schools and in establishments labeled “whites only.” When they went to the grocery store for potatoes, they were given the worst ones.
Racism shadowed their lives, but their mother imparted love and hope and Christian faith, encouraging them to do their best with what they were given. Cissy carried that legacy with her when she moved the family from North Carolina to Houston in 1977 after splitting with her children’s father.
George Floyd, her first son, was 4 years old.
They settled in Cuney Homes, the city’s first public housing project, a plain brick complex that opened in 1938. The Third Ward was home to a rich African American cultural and musical tradition, with a bustling commercial corridor. It was also a font of civil rights activism: Texas Southern University students in the ward staged Houston’s first sit-in at a lunch counter in 1960.
But when legal segregation ended and middle-class and well-to-do residents moved out, the community sank into poverty and decline. The neighborhood was so rough that Harrelson grew a little nervous when she visited her sister. She felt Cissy Floyd couldn’t seem to catch a break, and she sent toys and money for the kids over the years.
Children in the Floyd home crowded into the same beds. They washed their socks and underwear in the bathroom sink and dried them on the water heater or inside the oven. Cafeteria workers gave Floyd and his friends extra plates of food. The boys on occasion would visit the hamburger stand where Cissy worked and get free meals, but they sometimes went to bed hungry. Senior classmates handed down tennis shoes and clothes. Floyd and his buddies often borrowed and lent one another a few dollars to get by.
Miss Cissy, as she was often called, was a beloved fixture of Cuney Homes. For all her struggles, she was known as lively and funny and generous, with a wide-open heart. When the mother of Floyd’s friend went to prison, Cissy took him in for several years, as she did for a series of neighborhood youth. When the boy cut his foot, Cissy applied a homespun remedy of a spiderweb and sugar.
Floyd attended Jack Yates High School. Photo provided by Lynn Gallien.
People always said George Floyd was just like Mama.
His family called him Perry, his middle name, and friends knew him as Floyd or Big Floyd. Floyd was the middle of his mother’s five children — he had two older sisters and two younger brothers — but he was regarded in some ways as the man of the house. He looked the part early on, standing 6 feet tall by middle school.
Floyd didn’t seem to walk through the world with the wariness one might expect of a boy carrying great responsibility. Those close to him recalled that his humor, kindness and magnetism won him friends and admirers everywhere he went; younger boys looked up to him, and older boys looked out for him. His brother Philonise described Floyd as a general: A line of people waited to greet him every time he went outside, and he made them feel important no matter their stature.
Floyd’s tall, skinny frame favored the basketball court, and he played on the high school team. But Yates was best known for football, and friends talked him into trying out.
At the start of high school, a tall, skinny Floyd favored basketball. But football was king at Yates, and friends persuaded him to try out for the team. He made varsity his freshman year. Yates football coach Maurice McGowan was impressed with Floyd’s athleticism and moved him up to varsity his freshman year. Still, he could not figure out where to play him at first. Floyd seemed too tall to be a wide receiver, and he lacked the naturally aggressive attitude of his best defenders. The coach tried him at tight end, but found that Floyd did not like blocking people, either. During one practice, Floyd had his teammates falling down laughing when, after catching a pass, he threw the ball at the linebacker to avoid getting tackled.
Floyd’s biggest strength was his ability to catch a football and run deep; because of his height, McGowan believed, other players did not realize how fast he was.
Just before the start of their junior year, a star athlete on the team, Carl Owens, was shot to death in an apparent case of mistaken identity. He was a well-liked resident of Cuney Homes who was a grade above Floyd. His killing cast a somber mood over the team. “We’re doing this for Carl,” the players said before each game.
The last day of their junior year, Floyd and some friends gathered at a spot they called “the hill,” sprawling on the grass near some trees to find respite on a sweltering afternoon. They talked about their dreams in life. Some planned to join the military; others talked of college. Jonathan Veal recalled Floyd vowing, “I’m going to be big — I’m going to touch the world.”
That fall of 1992, Floyd and the Lions stormed their way to the state championship game for the first time since 1985, playing the Temple Wildcats in front of 22,500 people in Austin.
“There’s pressure at Yates when you line up and put on that crimson and gold,” McGowan told the Houston Chronicle days before the big game. “There’s pressure to win at Yates. We must win.”
Floyd made three catches for 18 yards. It was his senior year, his last chance to claim the crown.
Yates lost 38-20.
In Floyd’s senior year, the football team made it to the state championship. “There’s pressure at Yates when you line up and put on that crimson and gold,” said coach Maurice McGowan.
“Man, it’s over,” Floyd and Veal said to one another again and again after the buzzer sounded.
Floyd and his teammates sobbed in the locker room. But on the bus ride back to Houston, Floyd was already cracking jokes, trying to cheer up his fellow Lions.
The Houston Chronicle still praised him for making a mark on local football that season. Floyd also remained a force on the basketball court, and South Florida Community College recruited him to play power forward. After completing the two-year program, Floyd enrolled at Texas A&M in Kingsville, but he dropped out before completing his degree and returned home.
Friends thought Floyd grew overwhelmed by the need to help out his family, all while having little guidance on how to advance beyond the world he knew. By then, Harrelson, his aunt, was living in Eagan. She would see Floyd over the years at Thanksgiving dinners in Houston, when the family would dance and reminisce over soul food.
She wondered if the pressure had begun to consume him: striving for athletic stardom while trying to climb out of poverty, having so many people looking up to him even as he felt like he was falling short. He was trying to find his way as a young Black man beset with disadvantages in a neighborhood overrun with drugs.
“Sometimes that community can swallow you that you’re trying to help,” Harrelson said. “It can swallow you if you’re not strong enough because that’s what you’re surrounded by and you’re looking for an easy way out, and I think he got caught up with that struggle.”
Yates players stood for the national anthem at the inaugural George Floyd Classic in Houston, held at Delmar Fieldhouse in early December.
AT FIRST THE BUYERS would be well-groomed, sporting neat haircuts and several rings. They worked jobs and drove respectable cars. Six months later, Fonteno saw them walking the streets on the backs of their shoes, wearing wrinkled clothes, living out of old, broken-down cars, everything they had gone.
Crack cocaine had arrived in the Third Ward, and Fonteno began selling it in 1987.
He started smoking excess crumbs; soon he was smoking rocks; then he was no longer dealing for profit but to support his long, mad chase of the euphoria of that first high. The crack trade grew so violent that when he saw men gun one another down steps away from him, scarcely anybody on the street broke their stride.
Cops frequently swept through the community, hollering, “You know what time it is, up against the wall!” Fonteno and a long line of men assumed “the position” — both hands on the wall, feet back, shoes off — so that police could pat them down.
Fonteno served two sentences in the early 1990s for selling crack. One judge demanded to know how a player on the 1985 championship winning team had ended up in his courtroom.
“What went wrong?” Fonteno recalled the judge asking.
He had to admit, privately, that at least part of his decline came from the regret of having blown his chance at a football scholarship, and once he was a “marked man” by the law — that is, a felon — his ambition fell away. Fonteno found some success as a truck driver during a long stretch of sobriety, but he fell back into addiction and pleaded guilty to evading arrest in 2007. He was sentenced to prison the following year for possession of less than a gram of cocaine.
When he got out in 2009, he called a high school friend, Reginal Smith, who had resettled in Minneapolis a year earlier to get sober. Smith had grown up down the street from Floyd and as a child helped Floyd’s family move in to Cuney Homes to make a few extra dollars.
How, Fonteno asked, could he get clean in Minnesota?
The answer: Go see Pastor Riles.
Inspired by the parable of the good Samaritan, Pastor John Riles ran a “people rescue” out of his church in the Third Ward of Houston.
John Riles moved to the Third Ward from the Houston suburbs in 1999 to minister to those with the greatest need. As a pastor, he drew inspiration from the biblical parable of the good Samaritan to start what he called a “people rescue” for the legions of addicts he saw on the streets.
His modest church occupied the same street where Fonteno got his start dealing drugs. The sign out front said, “Your changing station.”
Texas offered limited addiction rehab services for patients who were poor and lacking health insurance, so Riles had established informal partnerships with facilities in other states, including Minnesota, that offered longer-term and more comprehensive treatment under publicly funded insurance. Many of these states also offered more extensive job training for ex-offenders.
Sending people away had the added benefit of keeping them far from their drug hookups and other disreputable influences back in Houston. The help-seekers were so broke that Riles was always looking for donated suitcases.
Riles knew society viewed the folks who came to see him as a waste, and that the men themselves felt like they were in a chasm so deep they could not escape. He offered them a way out but stressed that he had no interest in sponsoring failure. Riles believed in moving quickly. If people waited too long to leave, they might go back to their old ways.
Riles was on a mission to save lives.
Pastor Riles’ church in the Third Ward is in the same area where Robert Fonteno got his start dealing drugs in the 1980s.
“PLEASE, HELP ME GET out of here.”
Fonteno stood before Riles on his last tendril of hope, pleading for a Greyhound bus ticket to Minneapolis.
“I’m going to try,” the pastor vowed.
Riles was a well-dressed gentleman in an apple cap who punctuated their conversation in his office with a loud “Hey!” whenever Fonteno nodded off. Fonteno’s own jeans and shirt were rumpled from wearing them for a few days, and he needed a haircut, not to mention a good night’s sleep.
Fonteno was dozing on a pew when Riles burst into the sanctuary and announced that his bus to Minneapolis was leaving in an hour. The pastor invoked Psalm 37 as he clasped Fonteno’s hands and prayed, asking the Lord to order his steps and direct his path. Riles drove him to the bus station and gave him $20 to carry him through the ride.
Fonteno’s heart floundered as he watched Texas fade through the window. He was speeding far into the unknown, lost in sleep, prayer and yearning as the bus carried him past the hickory and oak forests of the Ozarks and the art deco high-rises of Kansas City and the five-domed Capitol of Iowa and the prairieland all the way up I-35 through downtown Minneapolis.
Snow was on the ground. He had not brought a coat.
Minnesota was a nationally known destination for people seeking treatment for alcohol and drug addiction, but most of its recovery community was white. Turning Point, where Riles knew some of the staff, was different. The rehab center opened in north Minneapolis in 1976 to treat addiction in African Americans. While it embraced the 12-step model of recovery, the staff acknowledged and treated different factors that contributed to Black chemical dependency, especially the stresses caused by poverty, racism and the criminal justice system.
Fonteno enrolled in Turning Point’s 90-day program. He appreciated that the Black men who counseled him did not see him as a statistic; many had overcome what he was trying to overcome. Under their wing, he finally emerged from the murk of addiction.
He fostered connections at a Bloomington church recommended by Riles. Smith, his old friend from high school, invited him to spend the holidays with his family. He returned to his career as a truck driver.
Fonteno assumed he would one day move back to Texas. After he finished treatment. Then after he took a few college courses. But years passed, and one day he realized he did not miss Houston.
Fonteno sent money to the pastor on occasion to support the journey for others. He also paid directly for some Texans to travel here over the years, greeting them with snacks, toiletries and pocket money. He never doubted Riles’ mission, but grew more discerning about who he helped personally after seeing that a few newcomers had no intention of reformation. Others were just here to hide out from some dope-dealer looking for them down South, and would return to Houston in a month or two.
Fonteno and Floyd had run in overlapping crowds in the streets, and Fonteno encountered him on one visit to Houston years later.
“Font, you’re looking good, man,” Floyd said. “You’ve got a glow about yourself.” Floyd asked if he, too, could make a turnaround up north.
“You can change if you want to,” Fonteno said. “But … wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
Floyd was sent to Bartlett State Jail in 2009 after he pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Several friends said Floyd wasn’t guilty but took a plea deal to avoid an even longer sentence.
FLOYD DID NOT GO out seeking attention, but his physical bearing demanded it — people looked at him wherever he went. He was easy to like and often surprised people with his gentle demeanor, but he could seem intimidating at first glance.
Friends believed that Floyd’s appearance made him an easy target for the police, who could not miss the large Black man on the corner when they rolled through the Third Ward.
Texas’ prison population tripled in the 1990s and the state led the nation in locking people up by the end of the decade, according to a report by the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the use of incarceration. Tough enforcement of drug laws ensnared Floyd, Fonteno and other Black people — long before the opioid crisis involving mostly white users led to a push for treatment, not imprisonment.
Travis Cains, who grew up with Floyd in Cuney Homes, recalled that police pulled them over with no explanation in 1996 after they left a gas station with snacks. Officers ordered them out of the car and onto the ground, then searched the car in a frenzy, sending their new tub of ice cream flying onto the street. Finding nothing, cops let them go. It was so typical of the neighborhood that Cains and Floyd laughed it off.
Floyd’s journey through the criminal justice system began the following year, when he was sentenced to six months in prison after pleading guilty at age 24 to selling less than a gram of cocaine. Over the next few years, he pleaded guilty to theft and possession of less than a gram of cocaine.
At first, Floyd tried to make the best of it. Smith, his childhood friend, recalled that Floyd kept him laughing every day when they bunked together at Larry Gist State Jail from March to July 2003. Floyd was in on another charge of possessing less than a gram of cocaine, while Smith was doing time for the unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. The pair did 500 pushups every morning and worked in the kitchen.
Floyd served another six months in prison after pleading guilty to making a $10 crack sale in 2004. The Harris County District Attorney is now reviewing that case and others after the arresting officer was charged with murder and prosecutors accused him of lying to obtain a search warrant that led to the killing of two people in a police raid.
As Floyd went in and out of lockup, some worried that he was not careful enough about his associations.
“I would always express to [Floyd] that you have to be conscientious of the company you keep … but he would always try to help people, and that can be a blessing and a curse,” said Becky Sue Johnson, a longtime friend who was dating Floyd at the time.
In 2007, two people were at home with a 1-year-old in the northern outskirts of Houston when a large man pretending to be a water department worker forced his way inside, and a group of intruders followed. The big suspect pointed a pistol at resident Aracely Henriquez’s stomach and directed her into the living room. He joined the others in searching the home as they demanded money and drugs. Henriquez said she had neither. A second man hit her with a pistol when she screamed for help. The robbers fled in a black Ford Explorer with her jewelry and phone.
Three months later, authorities came across Floyd in the same vehicle. It was not his, but the victims identified Floyd in a photo array as the large suspect. He pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to five years.
Rapper Cal Wayne grew up in Cuney Homes and was taken in by Floyd’s mother for a time.
Floyd had not had a reputation for violence, and several friends, including rapper Cal Wayne, said men in the neighborhood knew that Floyd was not one of the guys who participated in the crime. Floyd grew up under the “no snitching” code, according to Wayne, and took the rap because he lacked the money to fight the case and couldn’t risk an even longer prison term.
A handful of Floyd’s friends said it was common to take a plea deal to avoid longer sentences. They could not pay top lawyers, and did not think judges or juries would put much stock in the word of a felon. That’s what Fonteno said he did in 2008, when he said that a cop planted a crack pipe on him. He pleaded guilty to possession of less than a gram of cocaine and served nearly a year in jail to avoid a harsher sentence as a repeat offender.
Facing his longest prison term by far, Floyd lost his usual cool.
Wayne, who was serving an unrelated sentence, rode with Floyd to Bartlett State Jail in 2009. The dozen or so inmates were shackled at the wrist, waist and ankles, constrained, as Wayne put it, “like a serial killer or something.”
As the hours in the cramped van passed, Floyd began to panic. He became convinced that he could no longer move his head up or down.
“Calm down, man,” said Wayne, whom Floyd’s mother took in for a time when he was a child. “Calm down, bro. Calm down!” At Bartlett, Wayne recalled how Floyd crumbled whenever the guards kept the inmates in their cells for long periods. “How long are we going to be in lockdown?” he said to Wayne. “How long are we going to be in lockdown?”
Cal Wayne, tending to his dog, remembers riding to Bartlett State Jail with Floyd as they both began their sentences. As the hours in the cramped van passed, Floyd began to panic. “Calm down, bro, calm down,” Wayne told him.
FLOYD TURNED TO JESUS Christ in prison, and upon his parole in 2013 was determined to remain a man of God.
When Resurrection Houston held church services on the basketball court at Cuney Homes, Floyd rose early to lay out the chairs, carry equipment and haul out the baptism tub. He helped set up hip-hop outreach concerts and basketball games on behalf of the ministry, encouraging Third Ward youth to attend.
He accompanied church members and vouched for them to skeptical residents as they knocked on doors with offers to pray, bring groceries and give rides to doctor’s appointments.
As bullets ripped through the streets, Floyd tried to broker peace, leveraging the clout he had from his days as an athlete and his legacy in the ’90s rapping with a hip-hop collective led by the storied DJ Screw. Ronnie Lillard, a Christian rapper who performs under the name Reconcile, recalled Floyd’s thinking as, “I’m about change at this point in my life and I’m not just going to flex it from a church pew standpoint, but I’m going to try to be as Jesus as I can from a street standpoint.”
Floyd brimmed with Christian colloquialisms, often saying, “God is good, all the time” and “God bless you, brother.” He joined hands with others in prayer circles on the street as gang members renounced their life of sin. Floyd impressed people with his authenticity. He spoke often of how he had grown from his past troubles and wanted the Third Ward’s next generation to pursue a different way.
Floyd had worked as a security guard and at chemical plants, but steady employment was getting hard to come by. He had several children over the years and particularly worried about supporting his youngest, a little girl named Gianna, who was born after he left prison. He called her Buttercup and liked to playfully pull her around in a wagon outside.
As he contemplated his prospects in Minnesota, Floyd was anxious about leaving his mother, who was then approaching 70 and relied on a wheelchair after suffering a series of strokes. He helped her stretch so that her muscles would not atrophy, moving her legs up and down at the knee while they watched football on TV. Sometimes, he’d lean down and pick her up for a minute.
“Mama, I’m going to help you get out of this wheelchair so we can dance,” Floyd would say.
Then he’d hold her up and twirl her around.
Aubrey Rhodes, outside the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, impressed Floyd with how he had changed his life in Minnesota.
FONTENO STILL RETURNED TO the Third Ward from time to time, though he was careful not to leave the house after sundown or frequent his old haunts. One day he ran into Aubrey Rhodes, an affable man from the neighborhood who asked how he could follow Fonteno’s path.
Turning Point had emphasized that by healing their own lives, participants could one day become a leader of many, reaching back to pull others out of addiction. Fonteno embraced that responsibility but did not understate the difficulties ahead.
“You have to be completely sold,” he said, “on changing your life.”
Rhodes had met Floyd playing basketball when they were teenagers. He was a year younger and not the athlete that Floyd and Fonteno had been. Nor was he fond of school. His father died when he was 5 and Rhodes watched his mother struggle to provide for their family while working as a housekeeper.
Rhodes started selling drugs to support himself, but was not, by his own admission, very skilled at that, either. He kept getting sent to prison — mostly on drug possession charges — off and on from 1995 to 2016.
By July of that year, Rhodes planned to depart for Turning Point as soon as he got paid from his scaffolding job. He gambled away his paycheck on a dice game and sheepishly called Fonteno for help. Fonteno directed him to Riles, who paid for his plane ticket to Minneapolis; Fonteno covered the luggage fees.
Rhodes found relief and recovery in his new environs. When he graduated from Turning Point, he posted a picture on Facebook of himself standing in front of a whiteboard with a list of praise: Worked his program, good person, not selfish, see changes, courageous, working man, a giver, go getter.
He found a job in a kitchen at U.S. Bank Stadium during the Vikings’ first season playing there. Months later, Rhodes would look out over the empty stadium’s more than 66,000 seats and say to himself, “Thank you, Jesus … Yes, Lord, thank you.” The day he saw his first northern snowfall, he excitedly jumped out of the car on the way home from work to take a picture.
That Thanksgiving, Rhodes joined his brethren in sobriety for dinner in Minneapolis. As they bowed their heads, a preacher said: “We pray, God, that you will give them the strength that they will able to make a full recovery and then [reach] back and help someone along the way.”
Seeing how Rhodes had changed his life in Minnesota moved Floyd deeply. He told Pastor Riles that he wanted to make the same journey.
Riles knew Floyd’s mother and sisters from the neighborhood, and was impressed with Floyd’s humble, God-fearing demeanor during their meeting. The pastor suggested that Floyd enroll in a longer-term rehab program at the Salvation Army in Minneapolis.
He bought Floyd a bus ticket, but Floyd never showed up at the station. Riles surmised that his charge had “chickened out.” Weeks later, Floyd asked Rhodes for help. Having no money, Rhodes told him to call Fonteno.
Floyd did, and laid out the stakes: If he did not leave, he would die in the streets or go to prison, and die there. After several days of prayer, Fonteno determined that it was God’s will that he help Floyd. He was, however, firm.
“If you’re going to come, come,” Fonteno told Floyd. “If not, you can’t ask me again to do this. I’ve done my part.”
Floyd spent his last weekend in Houston hosting a community event in the Third Ward, handing out donated produce and chicken and chatting up the children playing in a bouncy house. He cheered on a “slab parade” of souped-up, old-school cars colored as brightly as lollipops, rolling by with their “swangas,” or protruding wire wheels.
The city was still dark when Floyd left everything behind one morning in February 2017.
In Minneapolis, Rhodes, Fonteno and several other H-Town transplants gathered at the bus station to greet him. Rhodes would always remember the sight of that towering figure walking through the crowd in a white pullover beneath an olive-green jacket, brimming with hope, the latest traveler to cross the plains and prairies on the mantle of redemption.
Floyd looked thinner after the hardships of recent years, and he had pulled the hood of his sweater over his head as the temperature fell below freezing.
The men crowded around with hugs and welcomes.
“I told you I was coming,” Floyd said, smiling.
PART II
‘Minneapolis has been good to me’
George Floyd breathed in the frigid air as he smoked a cigarette outside the bus station.
Standing on the northwest edge of downtown, he could see the gleaming glass panels of a luxury apartment tower and the classic brick high-rises of Loring Park beyond parking ramps and slabs of asphalt to the south. Target Center sat to the east and the Basilica of St. Mary beckoned on the western horizon, its 13-foot bronze cross rising from a majestic dome.
Floyd’s destiny lay north, toward the red shield over the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center. The largest homeless shelter in Minnesota stood just around the corner from the clamor of the bus depot, but it seemed like an urban island, hidden between a wall of parking ramps and an interstate.
That block would soon become a steady backdrop of Floyd’s life in Minneapolis. But first, in communion with other men, he would learn that he was greater than his mistakes.
Floyd worked as a security guard at the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center after he arrived here from Houston.
“I AM LOVABLE!” FLOYD exclaimed. “I am important! I am valuable! I am empowered!”
He and other newly sober men at Turning Point were learning that their lives held worth no matter what happened during the inevitable swings of early sobriety. At the behest of a visiting speaker, the men repeated affirmations, louder and louder, until they were bellowing like fans at a football game.
“I AM LOVABLE! I AM IMPORTANT! I AM VALUABLE! I AM EMPOWERED!”
Floyd had tried rehabat the Salvation Army but did not like the program. With the help of his Houston friend Aubrey Rhodes, he switched after a week to Turning Point in north Minneapolis.
Like Floyd, most of the men who arrived at Turning Point were Black and poor and accustomed to using chemicals as a salve for the economic hardship, violence, incarceration and racism they had encountered much of their lives.
Woodrow Jefferson, one of Turning Point’s counselors, believed that people picked up a bottle or a needle or a pipe because they had lost hope. He told Floyd and the other new arrivals that he was their hope dealer.
While Blacks and whites used drugs at about the same rates, the former were more likely to be charged with drug offenses. Jefferson taught them about the systems funneling crack cocaine and other drugs into Black neighborhoods and sending Black people to prisons. But the Black community must lift itself up, he told them. No one else was coming to save them. The men needed to get off drugs, then help their brothers who were still selling understand that they were poisoning their own.
Completing the first 90 days of Turning Point’s program was only a first step, Jefferson cautioned. He himself had been through rehab four times before sobriety stuck. He advised them to seek therapy to understand the emotions they had suppressed for so long, find a sponsor, serve their community, and take life slow for a while.
Robert Fonteno, right, got his life back on track through Turning Point, where Woodrow Jefferson worked. Jefferson told Floyd and other new arrivals that he was their hope dealer.
Floyd moved into Miss Bea’s House, a nearby lodge affiliated with Turning Point that had 32 beds for sober men. He and the other guys played cards at home and basketball at North Commons Park. Floyd and fellow resident Wallace White cruised the city in a green Pontiac Bonneville, listening to old-school R&B — Maze and Frankie Beverly, the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers — and talking about the sober life. Sometimes they circled Bde Maka Ska and walked out to sit by the cool blue expanse.
Rhodes visited Miss Bea’s House regularly from his home in Fridley, once bringing Floyd and another friend to the lake to ride a paddle boat.
“See that turn? I got a license!” Floyd cracked as he paddled slowly, wearing a life jacket that was comically small on his long torso. He held up sneakers that had gotten wet. “Brand new!” he said. Rhodes cheered them on from the dock.
“We’re just doing it day by day, taking it one day at a time,” Rhodes said into his phone camera.
Floyd’s childhood friend Reginal Smith, who had gone to Turning Point and lived in Minneapolis between 2008 and 2016, encouraged Floyd not to focus so much on making money right away.
“Chill for a while, bro,” Smith, who was back in Houston, told him. “If you chill, you’ll be all right. Let yourself get a chance to heal.”
“I need a job, Reg-o,” Floyd insisted. “I need a job.”
Rhodes had just begun working as a security guard at the Harbor Light Center and introduced Floyd to his boss when another position opened up. Smith, who had worked there years before, called to put in a good word, and Floyd was hired as a full-time security guard months after arriving in Minneapolis.
Floyd was a security guard at the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center.
EARLY IN FLOYD’S NEW job, homeless advocate Richard Bahr saw him in the lobby ordering a drunk man to leave. The man shouted and resisted, but Floyd pressed ahead, taking his belongings and pushing open the door.
Later, Bahr found Floyd sitting alone in the dark, empty dining hall. He was crying.
“Hey man, what’s with the tears? What’s going on?”
“I was too hard on that guy,” Floyd lamented. “I’ve struggled with issues in my life too, and I’m not that different than that guy.”
They prayed. Bahr attended to other business inside the center, and by the time he walked outside, Floyd was sitting at the curb consoling the man he had kicked out.
Four hundred and fifty people a night stayed at the Harbor Light Center in emergency and longer-term transitional housing. Many dealt with mental illness, disabilities and chemical dependency, and some arrived from other states that gave them one-way bus tickets to Minneapolis because the city offered better social services.
Once, Pastor Harding Smith (no relation to Reginal Smith) saw Floyd help a man who had just arrived at the shelter by bus from Montana. He looked to be about 19 years old and less than 100 pounds, and was giving away his hats, jerseys and other belongings to appease the bullies towering over him.
Floyd would not stand for it.
“You give him back everything,” Floyd ordered the others. “You give it back now!”
Then he called over the Montana youth, who looked bewildered.
“Listen,” said Floyd, speaking loudly so the others would hear. “As long as I’m here, you don’t have to be afraid of anybody. You are safe in this place. Nobody is going to do anything to you, and if anybody intimidates you, we will … kick them out.”
Smith believed that he and Floyd bonded because their hearts lay with those who carried a sense of loss. The pastor visited the Harbor Light Center regularly to take residents to the movies, athletic games and other events, and Floyd joined Smith’s outings frequently.
When someone got unruly at a Timberwolves game, Floyd would say, “Hey, knock it off.” When Smith and other volunteers arranged for homeless people to have their blood pressure checked, get haircuts or go out to eat, Floyd was usually there to help out.
He told Smith that he was looking for a better way of life.
“Well, if you’re looking to make changes ... this is the best start you can have, here in Minnesota,” Smith replied.
“Regardless of what I’m going through,” Floyd said, “I want to make my mark.”
From the entrance of the Harbor Light Center, Floyd could see glimpses of the city’s prosperity soaring from beyond the long wall of a parking ramp. He could make out the tower and blue-gray glass of the IDS Center and the top of the LaSalle Plaza, crowned with icons of wheat pointed toward the heavens.
Across from the center, on Currie Avenue, stood an empty building that said “$50/month unlimited nationwide talk, text & web” on the battered door. The boarded shop next to it advertised: “Instruments Tools Gold Diamonds Guns Licensed Pawn Broker.” Floyd constantly heard the roar and whistle of traffic on I-394 just to the west — the sound of the city literally passing them by.
Working security was not easy duty at the Harbor Light Center, one of the city’s most-frequented locations by police. In 2017, Minneapolis officers made 1,580 visits to deal with “unwanted and suspicious people,” disturbances, assaults, fights, drunks and thefts.
On New Year’s Eve, with windchills 30 to 45 below, a man went inside the shelter’s chapel and shouted and shoved a homeless person. Then he threatened to kill the crowd of 30 to 40 people. Floyd stepped in to kick the intruder out for the night, having evicted him for aggressive behavior a week before. When police showed up to take the man away, Floyd said he didn’t want the assailant to be charged.
Three weeks later, Floyd tried to expel a man who was waving a 6-inch knife while arguing with a shelter resident and kicking over garbage cans. He came at Floyd, swinging the blade. By the time police arrived, the attacker had escaped.
Despite the hazards, Floyd believed he was doing God’s work at the shelter. He was always ready to dole out a cigarette, find a used jacket, fix people a plate of food after the kitchen closed, and let them make a call from his own phone. His generosity was so well-known that inhabitants of the center would inquire at the front desk, “Where’s big boy?”
Months after buying Floyd’s bus ticket to Minneapolis, Robert Fonteno was leaving an AA meeting near the center when he spotted his friend.
“Floyd!” Fonteno called out. “What’s up, bro?”
He thought Floyd looked better than he ever had. He had been lifting weights again and had regained his power and assurance.
“You’re looking like the old big Floyd,” Fonteno said.
“Yeah, man — I feel like the old big Floyd.”
Alvin Manago, Floyd’s roommate, showed a photo of a day they spent on the water with friends. Floyd listened to old-style R&B, and struck him as an old soul.
NOT LONG AFTER ARRIVING in Minnesota, Floyd answered a Craigslist ad for a security guard at Conga Latin Bistro, a popular nightclub and restaurant in northeast Minneapolis.
Owner Jovanni Thunstrom was looking for a security guard who could make customers feel welcome while maintaining order on weekend nights that drew several hundred people to the dance floor. He had fired some security employees for being too aggressive, for always trying to play the tough guy. Floyd seemed just the opposite, and Thunstrom hired him immediately.
Floyd soon demonstrated a gift for knowing customers’ names, often remembering people whom Thunstrom did not. He walked around greeting patrons, clasping a hand with both of his own. When women complained about an aggressive man, Floyd stepped in to protect them. When dancers drank too much, Floyd said, “You’ve got to leave,” and nobody argued. Even on subzero nights, he was known to stand outside for 5 or 10 minutes in a T-shirt, cheerfully chatting up the people he had just ejected.
Bartender Cintya Canales bonded with Floyd over their interest in the Vikings and spirituality. She saw that he tried to lift up those around him, saying, “Life is good. Trust in it. Trust in God. We got this.”
One night, Canales noticed two men fighting by the bar.
“Hey, hey, let’s calm down, let’s just talk it out,” Floyd told them. “Why don’t we go outside and just talk about it?”
Soon the trio returned as if nothing happened, and the men caused no trouble for the rest of the night.
Floyd’s skill at defusing tensions did not seem to come from just his imposing stature. Tim Brostrom, a Black man about the same size who also worked security at Conga, said customers sometimes dawdled at last call even after he repeatedly asked them to leave. But it took only a look or a few words from Floyd to get them moving.
Even when manning the dark, rowdy downstairs dance floor, Floyd had fewer confrontations than the other security guards upstairs.
“There was something he had — I can’t put my finger on it,” said Brostrom. “It was just something he had.”
Thunstrom tried to teach Floyd how to dance to bachata, a style of music that originated in the Dominican Republic, but he could not master the turns. He showed him how to dance to merengue, but Floyd could not loosen his hips enough. People thought he was a goofy dancer — his limbs were too long, his rhythm not quite right — but they found his willingness to try endearing.
When the staff gathered for beers after the club closed, Thunstrom noticed that Floyd didn’t drink. He stayed later than everyone else, too, helping clean up and walking staff to their cars. He often waited outside with drunk bargoers to ensure they got a ride home.
Thunstrom considered Floyd the best employee he had had in his 20 years at the club. And he thought no differently after Floyd opened up about his past.
“Floyd, you’re a good person,” he said. “You deserve to start all over.”
“Are you OK, sis?” Courteney Ross said she fell in love with Floyd when he comforted her during a tough time.
BY THE TIME SHE met Floyd, Courteney Ross had all but lost faith in God and forgotten about love entirely. She was lonely and tired, worried about her debts, stressed from her job working with special education students.
One evening in summer 2017, she hurried to the Harbor Light Center from her second job at a cafe, smelling of coffee and Lysol. Her children’s father lived at the shelter. They had broken up a few years earlier, and he became homeless as his health suffered.
She asked the security desk to let him know that she needed to talk, but he didn’t come down. Ross waited, distraught. Floyd walked over and put his arm around her.
“Are you OK, sis?” he asked.
No, she told him. “He’s just not coming down and I don’t know what to do.”
Floyd offered to pray with her. Ross was not so sure about God anymore, so she let him say the words.
“Please help this young lady,” Floyd said. “She’s having a hard time. Please give her the strength to get through the night.”
In Floyd’s embrace, Ross felt protected from life’s calamities for the first time since her father’s death four years earlier. Her worries fell away as this funny, generous man looked into her blue-gray eyes, still red from tears, and tried to make her smile.
“Can I call you sometime?” he asked.
She believed they fell in love that very evening, in the Harbor Light Center’s lobby.
Ross had grown up a churchgoing Catholic with a father who was active in Alcoholics Anonymous and spoke of a higher power. Still, as she and Floyd began dating, she was taken aback by his unyielding faith and his determination to live what he preached.
He liked the people nobody liked and saw the people nobody saw; he offered a dollar and a handshake to the guys holding cardboard signs outside; he hugged homeless derelicts and asked how they were doing.
She could never tell if he was talking on the phone to one of his big-league friends, like retired NBA star Stephen Jackson, or some guy off the street — Floyd treated them all the same. When she saw how Floyd lived God’s word, it made her want to believe.
Floyd was so sanguine that it was impossible to dwell in darkness around him. If she tried, he would say, “Don’t let the devil in your head.”
They explored the Twin Cities, visiting the Como Zoo, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Minnehaha Falls, and the since-closed hip-hop store Fifth Element. Floyd pumped gas for her, opened doors and carried her groceries — things she had done herself for so long that it took time to accept his overtures. He would gently tease her for being too tough to accept help.
Ross’ teenage biracial Black son, Gavin, took a liking to Floyd, who returned the sentiment. Floyd always told him, “I got you,” and advised him not to make the mistakes he had. Floyd confided disappointment at not having gone further with sports and encouraged Gavin’s interest in soccer. When Gavin visited the Harbor Light Center with his high school chess trophy, Floyd talked his success up to everybody. “That’s my Gav-man,” he said. “He’s a smart one.”
During one of Floyd’s shifts, Gavin’s dad had an epileptic seizure and collapsed, striking his head. Blood poured from the wound. Floyd looked after him. He picked him up when the thrashing stopped and took him outside for the ambulance.
Floyd lived for a time at Miss Bea’s House, a lodge affiliated with Turning Point that had 32 beds for sober men.
FLOYD COULD BE EVASIVE with his new girlfriend about getting home in the evenings, and finally admitted that he was staying at Miss Bea’s House and had a nightly curfew. He was trying to find a place of his own, but landlords kept turning him down due to his criminal record.
One day he mentioned it to some Houston friends, saying, “It’s really messed up — nobody wants to deal with me because of that.”
They commiserated. Rhodes had paid many apartment application fees only to be rejected, and finally had to put down extra money to reserve a place. Fonteno had been frustrated to find that even with his good trucking income, he was rejected by landlords who discovered his old drug charges and acted like he was going to turn the place into New Jack City, the 1991 movie about the crack trade.
Thunstrom owned a home in St. Louis Park, just west of Bde Maka Ska, and offered to rent it to Floyd after some of the bartenders at work moved out. A fellow alumnus of Turning Point, Eric “Big E” Cornley, worked security with Floyd at Conga Latin Bistro and agreed to room with him.
In September 2017, both moved in. Rather than spend their first nights alone in separate bedrooms, the men moved their mattresses into the dining room and both slept there.
Weeks later, Cornley didn’t show up for his shift at the nightclub. Floyd returned home from work at 4 in the morning and found his roommate dead in the basement. Floyd covered him with a green blanket and called 911. St. Louis Park police officers found Floyd crying in the front yard. He led them downstairs.
Floyd told authorities that he had seen Cornley use crack before and complain of a racing heart. At 6:30 a.m., a transport unit from the Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to take the body away.
“Floyd appeared devastated by the death of his friend … and was just trying to wrap his head around it,” wrote officer Dana Hegman in the police report.
The cause of death was ruled a cocaine overdose.
Floyd struggled to accept the loss. He felt uneasy every time he came home, sensing his friend’s spirit lingering.
“Why?” he kept asking Rhodes, who had roomed with Cornley at Turning Point. “Why, man? Why?”
DESPITE HIS ROOMMATE’S PASSING, Floyd felt that Minnesota was becoming his home, and didn’t even mind the looming winter.
He instructed Rhodes in the proper way to use the snowblower at the Harbor Light Center.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Floyd said, showing Rhodes that he was improperly blowing the snow toward the building instead of the street, where the plows could remove it.
They had seen snow in Houston, but it usually didn’t stick, and the aura of a thick, white blanket was novel. Rhodes shot a video in front of the center to show their friends back in H-Town. He called over Floyd, who wore only sweatpants and a hoodie.
“I’m loving it though, baby, you know what I’m saying? The snow been good to me,” said Floyd, laughing amid the big, woolly snowflakes.
Rhodes knew what his friend was really saying.
Minnesota been good to me.
Floyd loved his new state, even telling Rhodes, “If you can’t get right in Minnesota, you can’t get right anywhere.” Several friends from home came up to see him show off his new life during the 2018 Super Bowl at U.S. Bank Stadium.
Back in Houston, Cissy’s health worsened.
Floyd’s friend Tiffany Cofield warned him that his mother's health was declining.
“Georgie, you need to come see about Mama,” Tiffany Cofield, who was close to Floyd and his mother, said over the phone from Houston.
Floyd kept putting off his return, immersed in making it in a new city.
“I just can’t come right now,” he replied. “I got a lot going on.”
Money was always tight, and Floyd often spoke to friends of providing for his little girl Gianna in Houston. He hoped one day to gain custody and bring her to Minnesota.
But he lost his job at the Harbor Light Center, and he took it hard. (The shelter would not release details about his employment.) He worked for a while at a metal plating facility but left because the chemicals ate away at his hands. Ross noticed Floyd constantly scratching them, and the irritation became so aggravated that he visited the doctor for treatment. He also loaded furniture, worked in packaging and distributing televisions, built houses and did carpentry jobs.
Floyd applied to the YWCA’s Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) program in St. Paul, hoping to become a truck driver. He passed the drug test and administrators concluded that his criminal record was not recent or severe enough to pose a problem. For students willing and able to put in the work, the payoff would be jobs that paid up to $30 an hour.
Ray Richardson, then a career pathways coordinator at the YWCA, recalled Floyd as a polite student who could have been a “really good” truck driver. But he found it hard to make the early morning classes if he had worked the previous night at Conga Latin Bistro. Richardson called a few times to check on him, but Floyd dropped out of the program. He was under pressure to earn money right away.
Rhodes, his friend from Houston, sometimes urged Floyd to slow down. Set small goals and see them through, he said. Find a balance.
“You can’t do everything in one day,” Rhodes would say.
By then, a co-worker named Alvin Manago had moved into the St. Louis Park duplex with Floyd, and Manago’s girlfriend soon followed. Floyd had found him a dishwashing job at Conga Latin Bistro after they met while watching a softball game in North Commons Park.
Almost a decade older, Manago chuckled as he heard his new roommate singing songs by Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, R&B musicians that he figured Floyd would be too young to appreciate. But Floyd struck him as an old soul.
Alvin Manago looked through letters of support he has received after the death of his roommate and friend.
Floyd watched a lot of sports on TV, sometimes moving the coffee table forward so he could stretch his legs to ease the pain of old athletic injuries. He lifted weights and did pushups in the basement. He told Manago how good he felt these days: healthy, alert, buffed up.
Floyd was always scribbling verses of rap on scraps of paper in his room. One undated writing showed a glimpse of his striving:
Let me share something witcha Give u a piece of my mind Destruction come wit a warning With a piece a mind Seem like I can’t do enough/Still want a piece of whats mine.
In another, he celebrated his new start:
Oh my what a day to be black Plan come together beautiful we back.
Floyd constantly read aloud from his Bible. He highlighted some verses from Proverbs:
“Death is waiting for anyone who wanders away from good sense. … Be kind and honest and you will live a long life; others will respect you and treat you fairly. … Lazy people who refuse to work are only killing themselves; all they do is think about what they would like to have. The righteous, however, can give, and give generously.”
Floyd had listened to a church sermon about Ephesians, Chapter 2, one morning in summer 2015 when Resurrection Houston held a service on the Cuney Homes basketball court. The beginning of that passage was one of a handful that Floyd marked in his Bible with a white Post-it:
“In the past you were spiritually dead because of your disobedience and sins. … But God’s mercy is so abundant, and his love for us is so great, that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience he brought us to life with Christ.”
The message is, “You are loved through Christ and you can rest in that,” said Justin Bouldin, a visiting pastor who attended the service and got to know Floyd. “You don’t have to try to make up for all the bad you did, just walk in this new life I’m giving you … that’s what George was trying to do.”
Floyd's Bible, kept by his roommate Alvin Manago, was marked with Post-it notes, and he often read aloud from it.
FLOYD’S FIRST TRIP BACK to Houston was in June 2018, for his mother’s funeral.
He was so distraught he could barely bring himself to go. Floyd rebuffed an offer from his aunt Angela Harrelson in Eagan to accompany her on the trip down south, and when she greeted her nephew in Houston, she did not see the usual smile in his eyes. He would not look directly at her, and struggled to keep his composure.
“He lost what kept him centered,” Cofield said.
For days after the service, she saw Floyd lying on the couch, grieving.
He had been gone only 16 months, but Floyd was spooked by the gunfire tearing apart the Third Ward. A friend’s 8-year-old son had been killed and his 5-year-old daughter was wounded in a drive-by shooting. “I need to go back to Minnesota,” Floyd told his friend Cal Wayne.
He spent more time alone in his room when he returned to Minneapolis, not wanting to burden others with his anguish. But death became a grim chorus in Floyd’s life as news kept coming about the shootings of old neighbors and friends in Houston.
Ross had seen Floyd disappear for days when his roommate Cornley died. Now, when she saw him withdraw, she learned to ask, “Did you lose somebody? What’s going on? ... You can’t just shut down!”
He and Ross began relapsing in the first half of 2018 on Percocet and other opioids. They used partly to ease their physical pain — the strain of old sports injuries and hard labor jobs for Floyd, the neck and back ailments that had long plagued Ross. But they also sought to escape the private agonies they carried. Ross was not sure, exactly, what could keep a person sober or not from one day to the next.
Floyd began revealing to her more about his time in prison. He had been free since 2013 but evoked his suffering in confinement as if it were in the near reaches of his mind. Everything felt too small for him in prison — even his feet hung off the bed. Sometimes Floyd curled into a shell and Ross would hold him as he described how the walls seemed to close in on him in his cell. She could feel his heart racing, his body trembling, and wondered if Floyd suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for which he never found counseling.
Ross felt, after listening to Floyd, that prison cells weren’t made for someone like him. Sometimes she felt the whole world wasn’t made for someone like him.
Like Floyd, Ross had also sold and used drugs over the years. Addiction ran in both their families. It bothered her that Floyd had a criminal record while she, a white woman, did not.
They would stop using for long periods. Relapse — stop — relapse — stop. “We both suffered with that together and we both got sober together,” Ross said. “Addiction is funny like that … it comes and goes and it can trap you.”
But Floyd never fully surrendered. He never stopped trying.
He always came back to sobriety.
Courteney Ross and her goddaughter Ireony Farmer, 20, visited one of the murals at the intersection of Chicago and 38th in south Minneapolis.
“KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE I can f — ing see them!”
Floyd panicked. He stammered. He fumbled. A Minneapolis police officer had just approached him at the passenger side of an unlicensed Ford Explorer during a traffic stop on May 6, 2019. Now the cop was ordering him to put his hands on the dashboard.
“Open your mouth! Spit out what you got! Spit out what you got! I’m going to tase you! Spit it out!”
Two officers maneuvered Floyd out of the car and handcuffed him.
“I apologize for it, man,” Floyd said. “I apologize, man. I apologize … Why y’all doing me like that? … Please, man … Please, somebody help me, man.”
The cops patted Floyd down and found pain pills. Police ultimately never forwarded the case to prosecutors for possible charges, but Floyd whimpered fearfully as a third officer drove him to the police station and tried to calm him down.
“George,” she said. “Will you listen to me? Will you relax, please? Just relax.”
At the station, officers sat Floyd down for questioning.
“I heard you’re high? ... Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Floyd told them he had taken Percocets that day, and — without specifying the kind — that he took eight or nine pills daily.
An officer asked if he usually sold them.
“No, I’m — well, the reason why I don’t get involved with that [is] because Minneapolis has been good to me. And regardless of my addiction, I never wanted to see the penitentiary again.”
Worried about Floyd’s condition, authorities called an ambulance.
“I’m getting f — ed over, man,” Floyd said. “Every time, man, every time. Oh man, every f — ing time, man. Every f — ing time, man.”
A medical professional named Shelley took his blood pressure and voiced alarm at the reading: 216 over 160. Floyd told her that he had not been taking his medication for high blood pressure, a condition that ran in his family.
She asked if he felt sick if he didn’t take pain pills.
“Yeah … People prey on the weak, man.”
Shelley tried to comfort Floyd as they waited for help to arrive.
“We’re not judging you, we just want to make sure you’re OK, all right? Maybe … this is what it takes to get you taken care of. … Maybe this was meant to be.”
PART III
Losing Big Floyd
George Floyd looked around the Anoka duplex that his friend Aubrey Rhodes had just bought.
Like Floyd, Rhodes had left Houston’s Third Ward in search of a new life in Minnesota. He had gone through treatment, found a job and saved for a down payment.
Now, in these closing weeks of 2019, Rhodes was moving into his own home, and Floyd was there to help.
“I like this,” he said.
Floyd admired the friend he called “lil’ bro.” He wanted Rhodes to show him how to buy a house once he “got all this stuff together,” hopeful that his friend’s success presaged his own.
In the new year, Floyd found another way of claiming his place as a Minnesotan: He changed the area code on his replacement cellphone from 832 — Houston — to 612. Then he and his girlfriend, Courteney Ross, ran out of the Metro PCS store, holding hands and laughing as they jumped over snowbanks with giddy elation. They bought pizza slices across the street to celebrate.
MINNESOTA, WITH ONE-TENTH THE Black population of Texas, seemed an unlikely place for Black men from Houston to affix their hopes.
The gulf between the state’s mostly white residents and its Black ones — in education, income and homeownership — was among the largest in the nation. Twenty-seven percent of Black Minnesotans lived in poverty, far higher than the 18% of similarly struggling Black Texans.
Law enforcement agencies across the state — especially in Minneapolis — had been dogged for years by accusations of biased policing. Officers rarely faced serious consequences for their actions, but the city had paid out millions of dollars in legal settlements to Black victims of police abuse.
Months after Floyd moved here in 2017, a jury acquitted police officer Jeronimo Yanez of manslaughter for fatally shooting Philando Castile, a Black man, during a traffic stop. Thousands of people marched to the State Capitol to protest the verdict.
“There has always been a systemic problem in the state of Minnesota,” his mother, Valerie Castile, declared outside the Ramsey County Courthouse after the decision. “ … The system continues to fail Black people and it will continue to fail you all.”
The following year, Castile met Floyd at an event serving the homeless outside the Harbor Light Center.
“What happened to Philando never should have happened,” Floyd told her, and Castile could feel the kindness in his embrace.
Pastor John Riles in Houston and some of the men who followed the path he laid out for them did not dwell on racism in Minnesota. They were heartened by the tranquillity of the landscape and the friendly people; how residents of different cultures seemed to get along, compared to the segregated and punishing milieu of Houston.
Rhodes brightened when describing his first visit to the Minnesota State Fair, where he saw such an impressive mingling of citizens. He felt at peace at the Salvation Army Northwoods Camp in Finlayson, where he strolled the forest at night and prayed, basking in the quiet.
Floyd’s friend Reginal Smith, when he moved to the Twin Cities from Houston, had heard that the Minneapolis police were quick to shoot. Yet he never felt that he drew their scrutiny, and when he moved back to Texas with his partner in 2016, he did not pass on any warning to Floyd. He wanted him to experience Minnesota as he had: a place where a Black man would be judged for who he was, not his past.
Floyd voiced surprise to his white girlfriend about how pleasant people were here. She told him to be leery; Ross knew how they could be in private. Sometimes, when she harshly criticized the police, he would suggest they were only doing their job.
Still, they agreed that Ross should drive whenever they were together, knowing that cops were less likely to pull over a white woman than a Black man.
Once she took Floyd to an auto shop in northeast Minneapolis to repair a tire. The staff had always treated her well when she came on her own, but with a Black man at her side, she found workers dismissive and rude. Ross was furious.
Floyd told her that they would find another shop. He believed that Minnesota had a heart for him — for everybody. He often urged her to be thankful for the state’s abundance.
Ross considered herself far more pessimistic about Minnesota, about white people.
“Well, we’re not equitable enough,” Ross told him. “We need more.”
LAST YEAR, FLOYD TRIED again to become a licensed truck driver. He completed the training but told Robert Fonteno, the Houston native who paid for his bus ticket to Minnesota, that he failed the road test and needed to save some money in order to retake it.
Floyd was still working part-time at Conga Latin Bistro when he began another job as a delivery driver, traveling rural roads late into the winter nights. In January, police in western Minnesota ticketed him for speeding and driving without a valid endorsement for his noncommercial truck. He was cited again less than a week later for falling asleep and hitting a car at a red light. No one was injured, but Floyd lost his job.
Courteney Ross saves photos, notes and other memories of George Floyd on a shelf at her apartment.
He sought to discipline himself. Floyd wrote a series of affirmations on the back of a February document related to his blood pressure medicine, and taped the list to his bedroom wall:
•Let this be the day I claim victory over this dark situation through the Holy Spirit. •Always know u are wright here with me. •No matter the time you can always grab you some word. •You get up & gather yaself in da morning & feed your spirit. •Follow that with your workout.
Floyd was still looking for another job when the pandemic struck in March. Then he tested positive for COVID-19. Though hypertension put him at higher risk, Floyd appeared to recover quickly. But his finances worsened after the state ordered the shutdown of restaurants to slow the spread of the virus. He worked his last day at Conga Latin Bistro on March 15.
Floyd tried not to let his misfortunes darken his resolve at first, writing on a piece of paper:
Look into my eyes & tell me what u see You cant miss my heart its so dam big A man of God u cant change me
But at some point he drew a line under that verse and penned another:
Man at dat point again. Back stuck all up in my addiction. It get worse got corona & 300 bucks Man life suck But life never ever sucked but I dam sho did.
Further down the page, Floyd wrote: Get addicted God.
He could not make rent that April, nor May. Floyd called his landlord and boss Jovanni Thunstrom with an offer to pay half and gradually catch up on the rest. When Thunstrom came to collect the $300, Floyd asked when he was reopening the club.
“I really miss working there, boss man,” Floyd said.
At home, Floyd often prayed with one of his roommates, Theresa Scott. One day in May, they stood together at the top of the stairs and prayed much longer than usual. Alvin Manago, his other roommate, would hold onto the image of Floyd closing his eyes and saying, “Amen,” because it was the last time he ever saw him.
And for months afterward, Manago would ask himself, what was happening that day?
The enforced isolation of the pandemic was sapping Floyd, who derived much of his light from the company of others. He spent the next two weeks crashing with friends in north Minneapolis.
Floyd’s friend Tiffany Cofield spoke with him by phone from Houston in mid-May. Something seemed to be weighing on him, and he was stressed. He could not figure out why Texas had denied the renewal of his driver’s license — records show it was for an unspecified outstanding violation — which posed another barrier to earning his truck driving credentials.
“I don’t know what you got going on in Minnesota, but you need to come back home,” Cofield said. “I can’t help you. I’m too far away.”
“I got so much going on up here,” Floyd said. “I just can’t move now.”
Floyd lost his job providing security at the Harbor Light Center but had hoped to become a licensed truck driver.
FLOYD ALWAYS HAD A heart for people from his hometown, and in recent years he had begun spending more time with Houston transplant Maurice Hall.
Hall had moved to Minneapolis in 2011, also with the help of Pastor Riles. Smith said Hall did well at first, going to Turning Point, working at a slaughterhouse and vowing “to get my life right.” He was supposed to spend the 2012 holidays with Smith’s family, but borrowed his car and was arrested for burglary two days before Christmas.
“I really thought he was going to do the right thing,” Smith said.
Hall served four years in prison until 2017 and was sent back the following year for not complying with the conditions of his release. He was out in months and began staying at the Harbor Light Center. The homeless shelter had remained Floyd’s hangout long after he stopped working there — he liked to visit Rhodes and others — and Hall and Floyd became friends.
Minneapolis police kept the block in front of the shelter under surveillance because they considered it a hub of drugs, assaults and other crimes. On a sweltering afternoon in August 2019, officers watching a safe zone camera said they saw suspicious activity involving Hall’s Ford Crown Victoria in the parking lot.
Ross said that she, Floyd, Hall and another woman were sitting near Hall’s sedan when several squad cars came screeching up. “Get your hands against the wall, get your hands against the wall!” police yelled, according to Ross.
She watched as authorities briefly questioned Floyd in the back of a police vehicle. It had been three months since police had caught Floyd with pills but not charged him, and she feared that he would have another panic attack.
They asked his name and he said Floyd; they asked his last name and he said Floyd. He cried, barely able to speak.
Ross told the officer his first name was George and that he was nervous. Police let Floyd and the others go. A search of Hall’s car yielded nothing.
Two weeks later, authorities apprehended Hall outside the Harbor Light Center and found 23 grams combined of cocaine and meth in his backpack. Officers also discovered a gun — which Hall was barred from carrying due to his criminal convictions — in his locker at the shelter.
By then, several men in the Houston crowd had backed away from Hall. Floyd would not. He was known to befriend those who faced struggles, and referred to Hall as “my boy.”
Earlier this year, the center hired anti-violence outreach group MAD DADS to patrol the block and ward off drug dealers. One of the supervisors was Wallace White, Floyd’s friend from Turning Point and Miss Bea’s House.
White invited Floyd to join MAD DADS, figuring he would be an ideal outreach worker to patrol Currie Avenue, Nicollet Mall or the North Side. White saw a dapper-looking Floyd on May 24 at the Harbor Light Center and urged him to come to his office the next day to finalize his hiring.
“OK, I’m going to come up there, Wally man,” Floyd replied. “I’m going to be up there tomorrow.”
Floyd never showed up.
That afternoon of May 25, Floyd invited Rhodes to a Memorial Day barbecue, but Rhodes was working a double shift. As the day waned, Floyd, Hall and another friend named Shawanda Hill drove in a Mercedes-Benz to Cup Foods in south Minneapolis, where Floyd had gone to pay his phone bill over the last two years.
Hall went inside first and a clerk rejected his $20 bill as counterfeit, according to Cup Foods spokesman Jamar Nelson. A short time later, Floyd walked in and paid for cigarettes with a bill the clerk also believed was fake. Floyd returned to the car and was sitting in it with Hall and Hill when the police arrived.
Wallace White of MAD DADS worked security outside the Harbor Light Center. He’d offered Floyd a job the day before Floyd died.
FLOYD LOOKED UP, STARTLED.
Officer Thomas Lane was rapping on the window of the Mercedes with his flashlight.
He screamed and cursed at Floyd to put his hands on the steering wheel. He briefly flashed his gun.
Floyd said he was sorry, Mr. Officer. He cried.
“Please, please, please, man. Please, please, I didn’t know, man.”
Lane and officer J. Alexander Kueng pulled Floyd out to handcuff him. They walked Floyd across the street. They tried to maneuver him into the back of a squad car. Floyd panicked. He said he had anxiety and claustrophobia.
“Man, I’m scared as f —, man,” Floyd said. He asked to be put on the ground. “I’m going down, I’m going down, I’m going down.” He said over and over that he could not breathe.
Finally, Floyd tumbled onto Chicago Avenue. Lane held down his legs. Kueng applied pressure on his back.
Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck.
Floyd begged for help. He called out, “Mama! Mama! Mama!”
“My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. Need some water or something. Please. Please. I can’t breathe, officer.”
“Then stop talking, stop yelling,” said Chauvin.
“They will kill me. They will kill me, man.”
“It takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.”
“Come on, man. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Please, sir. Please, please, please …”
Floyd went silent.
Chauvin did not lift his knee.
A crowd of onlookers, kept back by officer Tou Thao, shouted at the cops.
“Get the f — off of him! … He’s dying, bro!”
Floyd’s friends grieve over how a man who had worked so hard to build a new life died over so little, in the city that he hoped would save him.
FONTENO WAS DRIVING HIS truck when a friend called to tell him.
“You know they killed Big Floyd?”
Fonteno was distraught. Then he was angry. He thought of how little had changed since his parents told him a half-century earlier about the Houston police killing of a Black activist, shortly after a Black man’s death in officers’ custody stirred a neighborhood uproar.
How brutality against Black people even today seemed to be the accepted order of things.
How a Third Ward hero who had worked so hard to build a new life died over so little, in the city that he hoped would save him.
Fonteno kept running down the varied trails of fate in his mind, imagining: What if Floyd had stayed in Houston? Even as he believed that all the world’s happenings were divinely inspired — even as he believed that Floyd’s death was a racist murder — his conscience felt unsettled.
After some time, Fonteno called the pastor.
“You know, Pastor Riles,” he said, “if I had never brought him up here, would he still be alive?”
Riles had been asking himself the same question. He had gone numb in those days after Floyd’s death, sleeping fitfully as he imagined the anguish of Floyd’s final moments.
But he told Fonteno that he believed God had chosen him to influence Floyd’s passage in that moment. He convinced him that Floyd’s death had not been fruitless, that it was already changing lives.
When Fonteno thought of Floyd’s fate — that of a Black man who had passed through so many of the same doors, overcoming the heavy hand of criminal justice in Texas only to meet a more oppressive one here — he also realized that it just as easily could have happened to him.
Life suddenly seemed finite, and Fonteno decided to do more to help people, much like others had aided him and members of the Houston-to-Minneapolis pipeline. He returned to college to pursue degrees in psychology and addiction counseling, with plans to become a licensed master social worker and to open a center to serve addicts, ex-offenders and the mentally disabled.
During his last conversation with Floyd, they mourned a high school friend of the H-Town crowd nicknamed Big Dood, who died in Minneapolis in mid-May of meningitis. Floyd called for their Houston brethren to band together.
Aubrey Rhodes integrated a tribute for two recently departed friends into his car stereo system.
“We have to hold on,” Floyd told Fonteno. “We need to get together more often. We need to become … more like family, because we’re all we have up here.”
The sentiment stayed with Fonteno. He began talking to Rhodes more often and visiting him at work.
Rhodes, privately, was grappling with his own guilt.
“I actually told him how to get here,” said Rhodes. “That really messes with me. … I was trying to guide him but I didn’t know that it would come down to that.”
One of the biggest mysteries to Rhodes and other friends was that the clerk’s 911 call began over suspicions of Floyd using a fake bill — something they did not believe he would do knowingly. He had many friends who had helped him out with money before and would have done so again.
Ross, for her part, was surprised to hear that some friends from Houston were haunted by the question of whether Floyd would have been better off in Texas. She believed there should be no regret, because Floyd lived a series of beautiful years here.
She still feels Floyd’s spirit, hears him talking to her all the time. She once asked him for a 24-hour sobriety medallion he received from Alcoholics Anonymous, because she used to love the ones her father gave her. Sometimes she still holds Floyd’s in remembrance.
The medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide, and the four officers were fired and charged in his killing. The autopsy showed fentanyl and meth in Floyd’s system. Ross and others were distressed and angry that some blamed him for his own death.
Then maybe I should be out there too, she thought. Put me on the ground and put a knee on my neck and take my life, because I’ve done it.
Courteney Ross paused as she talked about her memories of Floyd.
FOR MONTHS AFTERWARD, RHODES assumed his usual post behind the security desk of the Harbor Light Center and looked toward the door. He kept waiting for a smiling Floyd to walk in and greet him. “What’s up, Deuce?” he’d say, calling Rhodes by his nickname.
Everybody was talking about Floyd when Rhodes went to work on May 26, the day his death became widely known. “We came here to better our life not to be killed by wicked cops,” Rhodes posted on Facebook, still stunned. He kept reporting for duty as protesters stormed the streets. He kept reporting for duty as the city burned. “Work,” he said, “helps me stay on my square.”
He missed only a few days to attend Floyd’s funeral in Houston. When he returned, a crowd gathered in front of the Harbor Light Center with red and white balloons. They stayed silent for the close to 9 minutes that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, and a friend from Houston finally said, “That shows us our brother’s suffering, but he shall suffer no more.”
Everybody cheered as the balloons they released became wisps twirling toward the sky. The Harbor Light Center meant so much to Floyd that the George Floyd Memorial Foundation would later make its first donation of $5,000 there.
A Floyd tombstone stands at a memorial for those killed by police, not far from where he took his last breaths in May.
Rhodes started wearing Black Lives Matter bracelets. Though he’d had his share of run-ins with the police in Texas, Rhodes had not felt bound to the movement until the loss of one of his closest friends. He joined protesters at the Mall of America, where he once surprised Floyd with a birthday shopping trip, and they walked to Cup Foods to demand justice. He attended the March on Washington and stood before the Lincoln Memorial wearing a T-shirt bearing Floyd’s image, raising his fist.
The cops could kill you in Houston. The cops could kill you anywhere. This, he knew. So Rhodes did not see Floyd’s loss as a reason to leave Minnesota, nor would he dissuade other Third Ward residents from moving here.
He stayed.
Rhodes found tenants for the other half of his duplex and decorated his living room with mementos of the North and the South. On a shelf on one side of the fireplace, he displayed a cake tin in the shape of a 3 to represent the Third Ward; on the other, he positioned a Houston Rockets cap between two Timberwolves caps.
Rhodes bought a pickup truck to start a side business delivering equipment. He marked his fourth year of sobriety. He had charted a strange confluence of promise and loss all year, and some days, in the midst of his gratitude, Rhodes broke down and cried.
Hall, who has publicly maintained that Floyd did not resist arrest, is expected to be a witness in the trial against the four former officers. He declined to speak to the Star Tribune, but Hall’s attorney said he is back in the Twin Cities after being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder at the Menninger Clinic, a leading psychiatric hospital in Houston.
Rhodes received a call from Hall in November seeking a ride, but Rhodes was in Minnetonka picking up a red kettle for the Salvation Army’s fundraising drive and declined to meet him. He held nothing against Hall but had tried to help him a few years back and believed there was only so much he could do for the time being.
Aubrey Rhodes headed out to work. He’s haunted by his role in bringing Floyd to Minnesota. “I actually told him how to get here,” said Rhodes. “That really messes with me.”
RHODES STEPPED OUTSIDE THE Harbor Light Center one recent afternoon, the fierce chill foreshadowing his fifth northern winter. He walked east along Currie Avenue, past the bright swirls on a mural that read Come in she said I’ll give ya shelter from the storm. He turned the corner and stopped at the Greyhound bus station, now quiet, and recalled the moment Floyd appeared after his long journey from Houston.
“I remember this like the back of my hand; he walked out that door,” Rhodes said. “It’s just shocking every time I think of it. Shocking that he’s gone.”
He is determined these days, as he puts it, to “live a normal Christian life.” Even if it would be easy to use Floyd’s death as a reason to give up.
Rhodes refuses.
He knows what Floyd would say.
Man, this just a hurdle. Just go do what you do.
He pictures Floyd smiling down, urging him onward.
Keep striving, lil’ bro. Keep striving.
So he does. For himself. For Floyd. For the next weary Texan who steps off the bus praying for a whole new life.
ABOUT THIS STORY
This story is based on interviews with 38 people about Floyd and his world, and draws on court records, police reports, videos and photos. Courteney Ross shared some of Floyd’s writings. Quotes attributed to Floyd were heard directly by people who spoke with the Star Tribune.
CREDITS
Reporting Maya Rao
Photography Carlos Gonzalez
Photo editing Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Deb Pastner
Videography Carlos Gonzalez, Mark Vancleave
Video editing Mark Vancleave, Jenni Pinkley
Editing James Eli Shiffer, Baird Helgeson, Eric Wieffering, Catherine Preus, Holly Willmarth, Amy Kuebelbeck
Illustration Charles Chaisson
Art Direction Greg Mees, Josh Penrod, Anna Boone
Design Anna Boone, Josh Penrod
Development Anna Boone, Jamie Hutt
Audience engagement Tom Horgen, Alexis Allston, Colleen Kelly
Everybody knew him as a popular athlete with a gentle spirit. But opportunities for George Floyd were few in the impoverished Third Ward of Houston, and racism a constant barrier.After years of struggles, he joined a pipeline of men from the neighborhood seeking redemption in Minneapolis.Floyd didn’t come to change the world. He thought he was saving his life.
PART I
Looking for hope up north
Robert Fonteno was calling on God.
He had found his way out of the darkness into a life of Christian faith upon moving to Minneapolis from Houston. Over the years he tried to aid the passage of fellow Texans riding on the same prayers.
But he no longer paid the way of anybody who asked. After seeing some fumble the chance to better their lives here, Fonteno came to rely on divine guidance over several days when answering requests for help.
This time, the call had come at the end of a long day hauling freight, as he was retiring for the night at a truck stop. The Houston man on the line needed Fonteno to buy his bus ticket for the journey 1,200 miles north.
His name was George Floyd, and he was a legend in their old neighborhood. Fonteno once thought his friend was destined for stardom. Now, Floyd claimed to have no money.
“If I stay down here,” he told Fonteno, “I’m going to die … I’m pretty much all out of options.”
BOTH MEN CAME OF age in a metropolis steeped in segregation and inequality, a city where, as Fonteno saw it, there was always a distinct sense of knowing one’s place and staying there.
The hospital where Fonteno was born was named after the president of the Confederacy. That year of 1967 saw uprisings over racial injustice across America, and in Houston, police shot 3,000 rounds into a dormitory where students from the historically Black Texas Southern University had barricaded themselves.
Houston’s Third Ward erupted again three years later when a Black man died in police custody after fleeing a traffic stop. The two officers were acquitted of murder charges. During protests over police brutality, a shootout between cops and a group of activists modeled after the Black Panthers led to the killing of a Black leader, and a jury declined to indict the officers.
Fonteno was too young to understand, but he grew up listening. Listening to his parents question the police side of the story in that gun battle. Listening to his elders’ tales of sharecropping in Louisiana, where they talked of living in shacks with no running water and scrambling to survive when the farm’s owner refused to pay them for their cotton crop one year. “Those were hard times, boy,” his grandpa said.
Houston voted to desegregate schools over the protests of white parents in 1970, and Fonteno was bused for several years to a white school. He learned to temper his mannerisms as a tall Black boy, lowering his voice and not patting white acquaintances on the back when he spoke.
The racial order could be as unforgiving as the sun that blazed over the flatlands of Houston, but the football field was a place of refuge.
Robert Fonteno found a second chance at Turning Point in north Minneapolis. He grew up in the same Houston neighborhood as Floyd, who sought his help in making a new start in Minnesota.
FONTENO STARTED PLAYING FOOTBALL when he was 7, his father pushing him to secure an athletic scholarship to college. Fonteno knew that he had to go to Jack Yates High School if he wanted to play among kings.
The Jack Yates Lions twice came close to winning a state championship during Fonteno’s teen years. He made the team and by 1985, when he was a junior, the Lions were overwhelming their competition, triumphing over the lesser resources of their neighborhood with athletic force and grueling drills.
Players lifted weights in a wood shack with no air conditioning, using hand-me-down equipment donated from local gyms. Coaches made them run 2 miles after each practice, calling out from the sidelines to pick up the pace.
The Lions were 15-0 when they played for the state championship. Their opponents, the Permian Panthers from the booming oil town of Odessa, were four-time champions with much fancier facilities. Their exploits would later be chronicled in the book “Friday Night Lights,” which was adapted into a movie and television series.
Rapper LL Cool J had just released “Radio,” his first album, and Fonteno and his friends on the bus sang along the whole way to the Dallas suburbs, where the game would be played at Texas Stadium several days before Christmas. The lyrics of “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” matched the mission of the team dressed in crimson and gold:
My story is rough, my neighborhood is tough
But I still sport gold, and I’m out to crush
Yates routed Permian 37-0, becoming the first historically Black school to triumph in the state championship’s large-school division since competition was integrated in 1967. Texans raved about the game for decades, deeming the 1985 Yates Lions one of the best high school football teams in state history, and a handful of players went on to the NFL.
Fonteno never got a college scholarship. His parents split up, and he, his sisters and their mother moved back to the Third Ward. During his senior year, Fonteno got arrested for car theft, and he spiraled into disillusionment.
He still attended his alma mater’s football games over the years and was impressed by a new star athlete’s prowess one Friday night at Barnett Stadium in the early ’90s.
A week later, Fonteno ran into him at the corner store. The player’s sturdy, 6-foot-6 frame was unforgettable, and he stood a good 5 inches above Fonteno.
“You’re Number 88? Big Floyd, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Floyd said.
“You played a big game last week. All you’ve got to do is stay out of the streets and stay focused, and you’ll make it.”
Fonteno, six years older than Floyd, believed he had already missed his chance. Crack cocaine was ravaging urban neighborhoods across America and Fonteno had “jumped off the porch,” as the neighborhood guys put it, hustling drugs in the streets.
He knew Floyd’s athletic talent far surpassed his own, and the young man struck Fonteno as humble.
Fonteno was sure he would go far.
Floyd grew up in Cuney Homes, Houston’s first public housing project. His mom, known as Miss Cissy, was a beloved fixture in the complex.
LARCENIA “CISSY” FLOYD GREW up in North Carolina in “an old, raggedy, broke-down shack,” as her younger sister Angela Harrelson described it. They were raised in a family of 14 children by parents who toiled as sharecroppers in the tobacco fields for $2.50 an hour, pausing only for a lunch of crackers and honey buns and peanuts, laboring through aches and hunger until dusk.
Their father landed a job at a barbecue restaurant that kept whites in the front and Black employees in the back, wearing the scent of smoke home from working the hog pit. The children encountered hostile white teachers and classmates in the newly desegregated schools and in establishments labeled “whites only.” When they went to the grocery store for potatoes, they were given the worst ones.
Racism shadowed their lives, but their mother imparted love and hope and Christian faith, encouraging them to do their best with what they were given. Cissy carried that legacy with her when she moved the family from North Carolina to Houston in 1977 after splitting with her children’s father.
George Floyd, her first son, was 4 years old.
They settled in Cuney Homes, the city’s first public housing project, a plain brick complex that opened in 1938. The Third Ward was home to a rich African American cultural and musical tradition, with a bustling commercial corridor. It was also a font of civil rights activism: Texas Southern University students in the ward staged Houston’s first sit-in at a lunch counter in 1960.
But when legal segregation ended and middle-class and well-to-do residents moved out, the community sank into poverty and decline. The neighborhood was so rough that Harrelson grew a little nervous when she visited her sister. She felt Cissy Floyd couldn’t seem to catch a break, and she sent toys and money for the kids over the years.
Children in the Floyd home crowded into the same beds. They washed their socks and underwear in the bathroom sink and dried them on the water heater or inside the oven. Cafeteria workers gave Floyd and his friends extra plates of food. The boys on occasion would visit the hamburger stand where Cissy worked and get free meals, but they sometimes went to bed hungry. Senior classmates handed down tennis shoes and clothes. Floyd and his buddies often borrowed and lent one another a few dollars to get by.
Miss Cissy, as she was often called, was a beloved fixture of Cuney Homes. For all her struggles, she was known as lively and funny and generous, with a wide-open heart. When the mother of Floyd’s friend went to prison, Cissy took him in for several years, as she did for a series of neighborhood youth. When the boy cut his foot, Cissy applied a homespun remedy of a spiderweb and sugar.
Floyd attended Jack Yates High School. Photo provided by Lynn Gallien.
People always said George Floyd was just like Mama.
His family called him Perry, his middle name, and friends knew him as Floyd or Big Floyd. Floyd was the middle of his mother’s five children — he had two older sisters and two younger brothers — but he was regarded in some ways as the man of the house. He looked the part early on, standing 6 feet tall by middle school.
Floyd didn’t seem to walk through the world with the wariness one might expect of a boy carrying great responsibility. Those close to him recalled that his humor, kindness and magnetism won him friends and admirers everywhere he went; younger boys looked up to him, and older boys looked out for him. His brother Philonise described Floyd as a general: A line of people waited to greet him every time he went outside, and he made them feel important no matter their stature.
Floyd’s tall, skinny frame favored the basketball court, and he played on the high school team. But Yates was best known for football, and friends talked him into trying out.
At the start of high school, a tall, skinny Floyd favored basketball. But football was king at Yates, and friends persuaded him to try out for the team. He made varsity his freshman year. Yates football coach Maurice McGowan was impressed with Floyd’s athleticism and moved him up to varsity his freshman year. Still, he could not figure out where to play him at first. Floyd seemed too tall to be a wide receiver, and he lacked the naturally aggressive attitude of his best defenders. The coach tried him at tight end, but found that Floyd did not like blocking people, either. During one practice, Floyd had his teammates falling down laughing when, after catching a pass, he threw the ball at the linebacker to avoid getting tackled.
Floyd’s biggest strength was his ability to catch a football and run deep; because of his height, McGowan believed, other players did not realize how fast he was.
Just before the start of their junior year, a star athlete on the team, Carl Owens, was shot to death in an apparent case of mistaken identity. He was a well-liked resident of Cuney Homes who was a grade above Floyd. His killing cast a somber mood over the team. “We’re doing this for Carl,” the players said before each game.
The last day of their junior year, Floyd and some friends gathered at a spot they called “the hill,” sprawling on the grass near some trees to find respite on a sweltering afternoon. They talked about their dreams in life. Some planned to join the military; others talked of college. Jonathan Veal recalled Floyd vowing, “I’m going to be big — I’m going to touch the world.”
That fall of 1992, Floyd and the Lions stormed their way to the state championship game for the first time since 1985, playing the Temple Wildcats in front of 22,500 people in Austin.
“There’s pressure at Yates when you line up and put on that crimson and gold,” McGowan told the Houston Chronicle days before the big game. “There’s pressure to win at Yates. We must win.”
Floyd made three catches for 18 yards. It was his senior year, his last chance to claim the crown.
Yates lost 38-20.
In Floyd’s senior year, the football team made it to the state championship. “There’s pressure at Yates when you line up and put on that crimson and gold,” said coach Maurice McGowan.
“Man, it’s over,” Floyd and Veal said to one another again and again after the buzzer sounded.
Floyd and his teammates sobbed in the locker room. But on the bus ride back to Houston, Floyd was already cracking jokes, trying to cheer up his fellow Lions.
The Houston Chronicle still praised him for making a mark on local football that season. Floyd also remained a force on the basketball court, and South Florida Community College recruited him to play power forward. After completing the two-year program, Floyd enrolled at Texas A&M in Kingsville, but he dropped out before completing his degree and returned home.
Friends thought Floyd grew overwhelmed by the need to help out his family, all while having little guidance on how to advance beyond the world he knew. By then, Harrelson, his aunt, was living in Eagan. She would see Floyd over the years at Thanksgiving dinners in Houston, when the family would dance and reminisce over soul food.
She wondered if the pressure had begun to consume him: striving for athletic stardom while trying to climb out of poverty, having so many people looking up to him even as he felt like he was falling short. He was trying to find his way as a young Black man beset with disadvantages in a neighborhood overrun with drugs.
“Sometimes that community can swallow you that you’re trying to help,” Harrelson said. “It can swallow you if you’re not strong enough because that’s what you’re surrounded by and you’re looking for an easy way out, and I think he got caught up with that struggle.”
Yates players stood for the national anthem at the inaugural George Floyd Classic in Houston, held at Delmar Fieldhouse in early December.
AT FIRST THE BUYERS would be well-groomed, sporting neat haircuts and several rings. They worked jobs and drove respectable cars. Six months later, Fonteno saw them walking the streets on the backs of their shoes, wearing wrinkled clothes, living out of old, broken-down cars, everything they had gone.
Crack cocaine had arrived in the Third Ward, and Fonteno began selling it in 1987.
He started smoking excess crumbs; soon he was smoking rocks; then he was no longer dealing for profit but to support his long, mad chase of the euphoria of that first high. The crack trade grew so violent that when he saw men gun one another down steps away from him, scarcely anybody on the street broke their stride.
Cops frequently swept through the community, hollering, “You know what time it is, up against the wall!” Fonteno and a long line of men assumed “the position” — both hands on the wall, feet back, shoes off — so that police could pat them down.
Fonteno served two sentences in the early 1990s for selling crack. One judge demanded to know how a player on the 1985 championship winning team had ended up in his courtroom.
“What went wrong?” Fonteno recalled the judge asking.
He had to admit, privately, that at least part of his decline came from the regret of having blown his chance at a football scholarship, and once he was a “marked man” by the law — that is, a felon — his ambition fell away. Fonteno found some success as a truck driver during a long stretch of sobriety, but he fell back into addiction and pleaded guilty to evading arrest in 2007. He was sentenced to prison the following year for possession of less than a gram of cocaine.
When he got out in 2009, he called a high school friend, Reginal Smith, who had resettled in Minneapolis a year earlier to get sober. Smith had grown up down the street from Floyd and as a child helped Floyd’s family move in to Cuney Homes to make a few extra dollars.
How, Fonteno asked, could he get clean in Minnesota?
The answer: Go see Pastor Riles.
Inspired by the parable of the good Samaritan, Pastor John Riles ran a “people rescue” out of his church in the Third Ward of Houston.
John Riles moved to the Third Ward from the Houston suburbs in 1999 to minister to those with the greatest need. As a pastor, he drew inspiration from the biblical parable of the good Samaritan to start what he called a “people rescue” for the legions of addicts he saw on the streets.
His modest church occupied the same street where Fonteno got his start dealing drugs. The sign out front said, “Your changing station.”
Texas offered limited addiction rehab services for patients who were poor and lacking health insurance, so Riles had established informal partnerships with facilities in other states, including Minnesota, that offered longer-term and more comprehensive treatment under publicly funded insurance. Many of these states also offered more extensive job training for ex-offenders.
Sending people away had the added benefit of keeping them far from their drug hookups and other disreputable influences back in Houston. The help-seekers were so broke that Riles was always looking for donated suitcases.
Riles knew society viewed the folks who came to see him as a waste, and that the men themselves felt like they were in a chasm so deep they could not escape. He offered them a way out but stressed that he had no interest in sponsoring failure. Riles believed in moving quickly. If people waited too long to leave, they might go back to their old ways.
Riles was on a mission to save lives.
Pastor Riles’ church in the Third Ward is in the same area where Robert Fonteno got his start dealing drugs in the 1980s.
“PLEASE, HELP ME GET out of here.”
Fonteno stood before Riles on his last tendril of hope, pleading for a Greyhound bus ticket to Minneapolis.
“I’m going to try,” the pastor vowed.
Riles was a well-dressed gentleman in an apple cap who punctuated their conversation in his office with a loud “Hey!” whenever Fonteno nodded off. Fonteno’s own jeans and shirt were rumpled from wearing them for a few days, and he needed a haircut, not to mention a good night’s sleep.
Fonteno was dozing on a pew when Riles burst into the sanctuary and announced that his bus to Minneapolis was leaving in an hour. The pastor invoked Psalm 37 as he clasped Fonteno’s hands and prayed, asking the Lord to order his steps and direct his path. Riles drove him to the bus station and gave him $20 to carry him through the ride.
Fonteno’s heart floundered as he watched Texas fade through the window. He was speeding far into the unknown, lost in sleep, prayer and yearning as the bus carried him past the hickory and oak forests of the Ozarks and the art deco high-rises of Kansas City and the five-domed Capitol of Iowa and the prairieland all the way up I-35 through downtown Minneapolis.
Snow was on the ground. He had not brought a coat.
Minnesota was a nationally known destination for people seeking treatment for alcohol and drug addiction, but most of its recovery community was white. Turning Point, where Riles knew some of the staff, was different. The rehab center opened in north Minneapolis in 1976 to treat addiction in African Americans. While it embraced the 12-step model of recovery, the staff acknowledged and treated different factors that contributed to Black chemical dependency, especially the stresses caused by poverty, racism and the criminal justice system.
Fonteno enrolled in Turning Point’s 90-day program. He appreciated that the Black men who counseled him did not see him as a statistic; many had overcome what he was trying to overcome. Under their wing, he finally emerged from the murk of addiction.
He fostered connections at a Bloomington church recommended by Riles. Smith, his old friend from high school, invited him to spend the holidays with his family. He returned to his career as a truck driver.
Fonteno assumed he would one day move back to Texas. After he finished treatment. Then after he took a few college courses. But years passed, and one day he realized he did not miss Houston.
Fonteno sent money to the pastor on occasion to support the journey for others. He also paid directly for some Texans to travel here over the years, greeting them with snacks, toiletries and pocket money. He never doubted Riles’ mission, but grew more discerning about who he helped personally after seeing that a few newcomers had no intention of reformation. Others were just here to hide out from some dope-dealer looking for them down South, and would return to Houston in a month or two.
Fonteno and Floyd had run in overlapping crowds in the streets, and Fonteno encountered him on one visit to Houston years later.
“Font, you’re looking good, man,” Floyd said. “You’ve got a glow about yourself.” Floyd asked if he, too, could make a turnaround up north.
“You can change if you want to,” Fonteno said. “But … wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
Floyd was sent to Bartlett State Jail in 2009 after he pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Several friends said Floyd wasn’t guilty but took a plea deal to avoid an even longer sentence.
FLOYD DID NOT GO out seeking attention, but his physical bearing demanded it — people looked at him wherever he went. He was easy to like and often surprised people with his gentle demeanor, but he could seem intimidating at first glance.
Friends believed that Floyd’s appearance made him an easy target for the police, who could not miss the large Black man on the corner when they rolled through the Third Ward.
Texas’ prison population tripled in the 1990s and the state led the nation in locking people up by the end of the decade, according to a report by the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the use of incarceration. Tough enforcement of drug laws ensnared Floyd, Fonteno and other Black people — long before the opioid crisis involving mostly white users led to a push for treatment, not imprisonment.
Travis Cains, who grew up with Floyd in Cuney Homes, recalled that police pulled them over with no explanation in 1996 after they left a gas station with snacks. Officers ordered them out of the car and onto the ground, then searched the car in a frenzy, sending their new tub of ice cream flying onto the street. Finding nothing, cops let them go. It was so typical of the neighborhood that Cains and Floyd laughed it off.
Floyd’s journey through the criminal justice system began the following year, when he was sentenced to six months in prison after pleading guilty at age 24 to selling less than a gram of cocaine. Over the next few years, he pleaded guilty to theft and possession of less than a gram of cocaine.
At first, Floyd tried to make the best of it. Smith, his childhood friend, recalled that Floyd kept him laughing every day when they bunked together at Larry Gist State Jail from March to July 2003. Floyd was in on another charge of possessing less than a gram of cocaine, while Smith was doing time for the unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. The pair did 500 pushups every morning and worked in the kitchen.
Floyd served another six months in prison after pleading guilty to making a $10 crack sale in 2004. The Harris County District Attorney is now reviewing that case and others after the arresting officer was charged with murder and prosecutors accused him of lying to obtain a search warrant that led to the killing of two people in a police raid.
As Floyd went in and out of lockup, some worried that he was not careful enough about his associations.
“I would always express to [Floyd] that you have to be conscientious of the company you keep … but he would always try to help people, and that can be a blessing and a curse,” said Becky Sue Johnson, a longtime friend who was dating Floyd at the time.
In 2007, two people were at home with a 1-year-old in the northern outskirts of Houston when a large man pretending to be a water department worker forced his way inside, and a group of intruders followed. The big suspect pointed a pistol at resident Aracely Henriquez’s stomach and directed her into the living room. He joined the others in searching the home as they demanded money and drugs. Henriquez said she had neither. A second man hit her with a pistol when she screamed for help. The robbers fled in a black Ford Explorer with her jewelry and phone.
Three months later, authorities came across Floyd in the same vehicle. It was not his, but the victims identified Floyd in a photo array as the large suspect. He pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to five years.
Rapper Cal Wayne grew up in Cuney Homes and was taken in by Floyd’s mother for a time.
Floyd had not had a reputation for violence, and several friends, including rapper Cal Wayne, said men in the neighborhood knew that Floyd was not one of the guys who participated in the crime. Floyd grew up under the “no snitching” code, according to Wayne, and took the rap because he lacked the money to fight the case and couldn’t risk an even longer prison term.
A handful of Floyd’s friends said it was common to take a plea deal to avoid longer sentences. They could not pay top lawyers, and did not think judges or juries would put much stock in the word of a felon. That’s what Fonteno said he did in 2008, when he said that a cop planted a crack pipe on him. He pleaded guilty to possession of less than a gram of cocaine and served nearly a year in jail to avoid a harsher sentence as a repeat offender.
Facing his longest prison term by far, Floyd lost his usual cool.
Wayne, who was serving an unrelated sentence, rode with Floyd to Bartlett State Jail in 2009. The dozen or so inmates were shackled at the wrist, waist and ankles, constrained, as Wayne put it, “like a serial killer or something.”
As the hours in the cramped van passed, Floyd began to panic. He became convinced that he could no longer move his head up or down.
“Calm down, man,” said Wayne, whom Floyd’s mother took in for a time when he was a child. “Calm down, bro. Calm down!” At Bartlett, Wayne recalled how Floyd crumbled whenever the guards kept the inmates in their cells for long periods. “How long are we going to be in lockdown?” he said to Wayne. “How long are we going to be in lockdown?”
Cal Wayne, tending to his dog, remembers riding to Bartlett State Jail with Floyd as they both began their sentences. As the hours in the cramped van passed, Floyd began to panic. “Calm down, bro, calm down,” Wayne told him.
FLOYD TURNED TO JESUS Christ in prison, and upon his parole in 2013 was determined to remain a man of God.
When Resurrection Houston held church services on the basketball court at Cuney Homes, Floyd rose early to lay out the chairs, carry equipment and haul out the baptism tub. He helped set up hip-hop outreach concerts and basketball games on behalf of the ministry, encouraging Third Ward youth to attend.
He accompanied church members and vouched for them to skeptical residents as they knocked on doors with offers to pray, bring groceries and give rides to doctor’s appointments.
As bullets ripped through the streets, Floyd tried to broker peace, leveraging the clout he had from his days as an athlete and his legacy in the ’90s rapping with a hip-hop collective led by the storied DJ Screw. Ronnie Lillard, a Christian rapper who performs under the name Reconcile, recalled Floyd’s thinking as, “I’m about change at this point in my life and I’m not just going to flex it from a church pew standpoint, but I’m going to try to be as Jesus as I can from a street standpoint.”
Floyd brimmed with Christian colloquialisms, often saying, “God is good, all the time” and “God bless you, brother.” He joined hands with others in prayer circles on the street as gang members renounced their life of sin. Floyd impressed people with his authenticity. He spoke often of how he had grown from his past troubles and wanted the Third Ward’s next generation to pursue a different way.
Floyd had worked as a security guard and at chemical plants, but steady employment was getting hard to come by. He had several children over the years and particularly worried about supporting his youngest, a little girl named Gianna, who was born after he left prison. He called her Buttercup and liked to playfully pull her around in a wagon outside.
As he contemplated his prospects in Minnesota, Floyd was anxious about leaving his mother, who was then approaching 70 and relied on a wheelchair after suffering a series of strokes. He helped her stretch so that her muscles would not atrophy, moving her legs up and down at the knee while they watched football on TV. Sometimes, he’d lean down and pick her up for a minute.
“Mama, I’m going to help you get out of this wheelchair so we can dance,” Floyd would say.
Then he’d hold her up and twirl her around.
Aubrey Rhodes, outside the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, impressed Floyd with how he had changed his life in Minnesota.
FONTENO STILL RETURNED TO the Third Ward from time to time, though he was careful not to leave the house after sundown or frequent his old haunts. One day he ran into Aubrey Rhodes, an affable man from the neighborhood who asked how he could follow Fonteno’s path.
Turning Point had emphasized that by healing their own lives, participants could one day become a leader of many, reaching back to pull others out of addiction. Fonteno embraced that responsibility but did not understate the difficulties ahead.
“You have to be completely sold,” he said, “on changing your life.”
Rhodes had met Floyd playing basketball when they were teenagers. He was a year younger and not the athlete that Floyd and Fonteno had been. Nor was he fond of school. His father died when he was 5 and Rhodes watched his mother struggle to provide for their family while working as a housekeeper.
Rhodes started selling drugs to support himself, but was not, by his own admission, very skilled at that, either. He kept getting sent to prison — mostly on drug possession charges — off and on from 1995 to 2016.
By July of that year, Rhodes planned to depart for Turning Point as soon as he got paid from his scaffolding job. He gambled away his paycheck on a dice game and sheepishly called Fonteno for help. Fonteno directed him to Riles, who paid for his plane ticket to Minneapolis; Fonteno covered the luggage fees.
Rhodes found relief and recovery in his new environs. When he graduated from Turning Point, he posted a picture on Facebook of himself standing in front of a whiteboard with a list of praise: Worked his program, good person, not selfish, see changes, courageous, working man, a giver, go getter.
He found a job in a kitchen at U.S. Bank Stadium during the Vikings’ first season playing there. Months later, Rhodes would look out over the empty stadium’s more than 66,000 seats and say to himself, “Thank you, Jesus … Yes, Lord, thank you.” The day he saw his first northern snowfall, he excitedly jumped out of the car on the way home from work to take a picture.
That Thanksgiving, Rhodes joined his brethren in sobriety for dinner in Minneapolis. As they bowed their heads, a preacher said: “We pray, God, that you will give them the strength that they will able to make a full recovery and then [reach] back and help someone along the way.”
Seeing how Rhodes had changed his life in Minnesota moved Floyd deeply. He told Pastor Riles that he wanted to make the same journey.
Riles knew Floyd’s mother and sisters from the neighborhood, and was impressed with Floyd’s humble, God-fearing demeanor during their meeting. The pastor suggested that Floyd enroll in a longer-term rehab program at the Salvation Army in Minneapolis.
He bought Floyd a bus ticket, but Floyd never showed up at the station. Riles surmised that his charge had “chickened out.” Weeks later, Floyd asked Rhodes for help. Having no money, Rhodes told him to call Fonteno.
Floyd did, and laid out the stakes: If he did not leave, he would die in the streets or go to prison, and die there. After several days of prayer, Fonteno determined that it was God’s will that he help Floyd. He was, however, firm.
“If you’re going to come, come,” Fonteno told Floyd. “If not, you can’t ask me again to do this. I’ve done my part.”
Floyd spent his last weekend in Houston hosting a community event in the Third Ward, handing out donated produce and chicken and chatting up the children playing in a bouncy house. He cheered on a “slab parade” of souped-up, old-school cars colored as brightly as lollipops, rolling by with their “swangas,” or protruding wire wheels.
The city was still dark when Floyd left everything behind one morning in February 2017.
In Minneapolis, Rhodes, Fonteno and several other H-Town transplants gathered at the bus station to greet him. Rhodes would always remember the sight of that towering figure walking through the crowd in a white pullover beneath an olive-green jacket, brimming with hope, the latest traveler to cross the plains and prairies on the mantle of redemption.
Floyd looked thinner after the hardships of recent years, and he had pulled the hood of his sweater over his head as the temperature fell below freezing.
The men crowded around with hugs and welcomes.
“I told you I was coming,” Floyd said, smiling.
PART II
‘Minneapolis has been good to me’
George Floyd breathed in the frigid air as he smoked a cigarette outside the bus station.
Standing on the northwest edge of downtown, he could see the gleaming glass panels of a luxury apartment tower and the classic brick high-rises of Loring Park beyond parking ramps and slabs of asphalt to the south. Target Center sat to the east and the Basilica of St. Mary beckoned on the western horizon, its 13-foot bronze cross rising from a majestic dome.
Floyd’s destiny lay north, toward the red shield over the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center. The largest homeless shelter in Minnesota stood just around the corner from the clamor of the bus depot, but it seemed like an urban island, hidden between a wall of parking ramps and an interstate.
That block would soon become a steady backdrop of Floyd’s life in Minneapolis. But first, in communion with other men, he would learn that he was greater than his mistakes.
Floyd worked as a security guard at the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center after he arrived here from Houston.
“I AM LOVABLE!” FLOYD exclaimed. “I am important! I am valuable! I am empowered!”
He and other newly sober men at Turning Point were learning that their lives held worth no matter what happened during the inevitable swings of early sobriety. At the behest of a visiting speaker, the men repeated affirmations, louder and louder, until they were bellowing like fans at a football game.
“I AM LOVABLE! I AM IMPORTANT! I AM VALUABLE! I AM EMPOWERED!”
Floyd had tried rehabat the Salvation Army but did not like the program. With the help of his Houston friend Aubrey Rhodes, he switched after a week to Turning Point in north Minneapolis.
Like Floyd, most of the men who arrived at Turning Point were Black and poor and accustomed to using chemicals as a salve for the economic hardship, violence, incarceration and racism they had encountered much of their lives.
Woodrow Jefferson, one of Turning Point’s counselors, believed that people picked up a bottle or a needle or a pipe because they had lost hope. He told Floyd and the other new arrivals that he was their hope dealer.
While Blacks and whites used drugs at about the same rates, the former were more likely to be charged with drug offenses. Jefferson taught them about the systems funneling crack cocaine and other drugs into Black neighborhoods and sending Black people to prisons. But the Black community must lift itself up, he told them. No one else was coming to save them. The men needed to get off drugs, then help their brothers who were still selling understand that they were poisoning their own.
Completing the first 90 days of Turning Point’s program was only a first step, Jefferson cautioned. He himself had been through rehab four times before sobriety stuck. He advised them to seek therapy to understand the emotions they had suppressed for so long, find a sponsor, serve their community, and take life slow for a while.
Robert Fonteno, right, got his life back on track through Turning Point, where Woodrow Jefferson worked. Jefferson told Floyd and other new arrivals that he was their hope dealer.
Floyd moved into Miss Bea’s House, a nearby lodge affiliated with Turning Point that had 32 beds for sober men. He and the other guys played cards at home and basketball at North Commons Park. Floyd and fellow resident Wallace White cruised the city in a green Pontiac Bonneville, listening to old-school R&B — Maze and Frankie Beverly, the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers — and talking about the sober life. Sometimes they circled Bde Maka Ska and walked out to sit by the cool blue expanse.
Rhodes visited Miss Bea’s House regularly from his home in Fridley, once bringing Floyd and another friend to the lake to ride a paddle boat.
“See that turn? I got a license!” Floyd cracked as he paddled slowly, wearing a life jacket that was comically small on his long torso. He held up sneakers that had gotten wet. “Brand new!” he said. Rhodes cheered them on from the dock.
“We’re just doing it day by day, taking it one day at a time,” Rhodes said into his phone camera.
Floyd’s childhood friend Reginal Smith, who had gone to Turning Point and lived in Minneapolis between 2008 and 2016, encouraged Floyd not to focus so much on making money right away.
“Chill for a while, bro,” Smith, who was back in Houston, told him. “If you chill, you’ll be all right. Let yourself get a chance to heal.”
“I need a job, Reg-o,” Floyd insisted. “I need a job.”
Rhodes had just begun working as a security guard at the Harbor Light Center and introduced Floyd to his boss when another position opened up. Smith, who had worked there years before, called to put in a good word, and Floyd was hired as a full-time security guard months after arriving in Minneapolis.
Floyd was a security guard at the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center.
EARLY IN FLOYD’S NEW job, homeless advocate Richard Bahr saw him in the lobby ordering a drunk man to leave. The man shouted and resisted, but Floyd pressed ahead, taking his belongings and pushing open the door.
Later, Bahr found Floyd sitting alone in the dark, empty dining hall. He was crying.
“Hey man, what’s with the tears? What’s going on?”
“I was too hard on that guy,” Floyd lamented. “I’ve struggled with issues in my life too, and I’m not that different than that guy.”
They prayed. Bahr attended to other business inside the center, and by the time he walked outside, Floyd was sitting at the curb consoling the man he had kicked out.
Four hundred and fifty people a night stayed at the Harbor Light Center in emergency and longer-term transitional housing. Many dealt with mental illness, disabilities and chemical dependency, and some arrived from other states that gave them one-way bus tickets to Minneapolis because the city offered better social services.
Once, Pastor Harding Smith (no relation to Reginal Smith) saw Floyd help a man who had just arrived at the shelter by bus from Montana. He looked to be about 19 years old and less than 100 pounds, and was giving away his hats, jerseys and other belongings to appease the bullies towering over him.
Floyd would not stand for it.
“You give him back everything,” Floyd ordered the others. “You give it back now!”
Then he called over the Montana youth, who looked bewildered.
“Listen,” said Floyd, speaking loudly so the others would hear. “As long as I’m here, you don’t have to be afraid of anybody. You are safe in this place. Nobody is going to do anything to you, and if anybody intimidates you, we will … kick them out.”
Smith believed that he and Floyd bonded because their hearts lay with those who carried a sense of loss. The pastor visited the Harbor Light Center regularly to take residents to the movies, athletic games and other events, and Floyd joined Smith’s outings frequently.
When someone got unruly at a Timberwolves game, Floyd would say, “Hey, knock it off.” When Smith and other volunteers arranged for homeless people to have their blood pressure checked, get haircuts or go out to eat, Floyd was usually there to help out.
He told Smith that he was looking for a better way of life.
“Well, if you’re looking to make changes ... this is the best start you can have, here in Minnesota,” Smith replied.
“Regardless of what I’m going through,” Floyd said, “I want to make my mark.”
From the entrance of the Harbor Light Center, Floyd could see glimpses of the city’s prosperity soaring from beyond the long wall of a parking ramp. He could make out the tower and blue-gray glass of the IDS Center and the top of the LaSalle Plaza, crowned with icons of wheat pointed toward the heavens.
Across from the center, on Currie Avenue, stood an empty building that said “$50/month unlimited nationwide talk, text & web” on the battered door. The boarded shop next to it advertised: “Instruments Tools Gold Diamonds Guns Licensed Pawn Broker.” Floyd constantly heard the roar and whistle of traffic on I-394 just to the west — the sound of the city literally passing them by.
Working security was not easy duty at the Harbor Light Center, one of the city’s most-frequented locations by police. In 2017, Minneapolis officers made 1,580 visits to deal with “unwanted and suspicious people,” disturbances, assaults, fights, drunks and thefts.
On New Year’s Eve, with windchills 30 to 45 below, a man went inside the shelter’s chapel and shouted and shoved a homeless person. Then he threatened to kill the crowd of 30 to 40 people. Floyd stepped in to kick the intruder out for the night, having evicted him for aggressive behavior a week before. When police showed up to take the man away, Floyd said he didn’t want the assailant to be charged.
Three weeks later, Floyd tried to expel a man who was waving a 6-inch knife while arguing with a shelter resident and kicking over garbage cans. He came at Floyd, swinging the blade. By the time police arrived, the attacker had escaped.
Despite the hazards, Floyd believed he was doing God’s work at the shelter. He was always ready to dole out a cigarette, find a used jacket, fix people a plate of food after the kitchen closed, and let them make a call from his own phone. His generosity was so well-known that inhabitants of the center would inquire at the front desk, “Where’s big boy?”
Months after buying Floyd’s bus ticket to Minneapolis, Robert Fonteno was leaving an AA meeting near the center when he spotted his friend.
“Floyd!” Fonteno called out. “What’s up, bro?”
He thought Floyd looked better than he ever had. He had been lifting weights again and had regained his power and assurance.
“You’re looking like the old big Floyd,” Fonteno said.
“Yeah, man — I feel like the old big Floyd.”
Alvin Manago, Floyd’s roommate, showed a photo of a day they spent on the water with friends. Floyd listened to old-style R&B, and struck him as an old soul.
NOT LONG AFTER ARRIVING in Minnesota, Floyd answered a Craigslist ad for a security guard at Conga Latin Bistro, a popular nightclub and restaurant in northeast Minneapolis.
Owner Jovanni Thunstrom was looking for a security guard who could make customers feel welcome while maintaining order on weekend nights that drew several hundred people to the dance floor. He had fired some security employees for being too aggressive, for always trying to play the tough guy. Floyd seemed just the opposite, and Thunstrom hired him immediately.
Floyd soon demonstrated a gift for knowing customers’ names, often remembering people whom Thunstrom did not. He walked around greeting patrons, clasping a hand with both of his own. When women complained about an aggressive man, Floyd stepped in to protect them. When dancers drank too much, Floyd said, “You’ve got to leave,” and nobody argued. Even on subzero nights, he was known to stand outside for 5 or 10 minutes in a T-shirt, cheerfully chatting up the people he had just ejected.
Bartender Cintya Canales bonded with Floyd over their interest in the Vikings and spirituality. She saw that he tried to lift up those around him, saying, “Life is good. Trust in it. Trust in God. We got this.”
One night, Canales noticed two men fighting by the bar.
“Hey, hey, let’s calm down, let’s just talk it out,” Floyd told them. “Why don’t we go outside and just talk about it?”
Soon the trio returned as if nothing happened, and the men caused no trouble for the rest of the night.
Floyd’s skill at defusing tensions did not seem to come from just his imposing stature. Tim Brostrom, a Black man about the same size who also worked security at Conga, said customers sometimes dawdled at last call even after he repeatedly asked them to leave. But it took only a look or a few words from Floyd to get them moving.
Even when manning the dark, rowdy downstairs dance floor, Floyd had fewer confrontations than the other security guards upstairs.
“There was something he had — I can’t put my finger on it,” said Brostrom. “It was just something he had.”
Thunstrom tried to teach Floyd how to dance to bachata, a style of music that originated in the Dominican Republic, but he could not master the turns. He showed him how to dance to merengue, but Floyd could not loosen his hips enough. People thought he was a goofy dancer — his limbs were too long, his rhythm not quite right — but they found his willingness to try endearing.
When the staff gathered for beers after the club closed, Thunstrom noticed that Floyd didn’t drink. He stayed later than everyone else, too, helping clean up and walking staff to their cars. He often waited outside with drunk bargoers to ensure they got a ride home.
Thunstrom considered Floyd the best employee he had had in his 20 years at the club. And he thought no differently after Floyd opened up about his past.
“Floyd, you’re a good person,” he said. “You deserve to start all over.”
“Are you OK, sis?” Courteney Ross said she fell in love with Floyd when he comforted her during a tough time.
BY THE TIME SHE met Floyd, Courteney Ross had all but lost faith in God and forgotten about love entirely. She was lonely and tired, worried about her debts, stressed from her job working with special education students.
One evening in summer 2017, she hurried to the Harbor Light Center from her second job at a cafe, smelling of coffee and Lysol. Her children’s father lived at the shelter. They had broken up a few years earlier, and he became homeless as his health suffered.
She asked the security desk to let him know that she needed to talk, but he didn’t come down. Ross waited, distraught. Floyd walked over and put his arm around her.
“Are you OK, sis?” he asked.
No, she told him. “He’s just not coming down and I don’t know what to do.”
Floyd offered to pray with her. Ross was not so sure about God anymore, so she let him say the words.
“Please help this young lady,” Floyd said. “She’s having a hard time. Please give her the strength to get through the night.”
In Floyd’s embrace, Ross felt protected from life’s calamities for the first time since her father’s death four years earlier. Her worries fell away as this funny, generous man looked into her blue-gray eyes, still red from tears, and tried to make her smile.
“Can I call you sometime?” he asked.
She believed they fell in love that very evening, in the Harbor Light Center’s lobby.
Ross had grown up a churchgoing Catholic with a father who was active in Alcoholics Anonymous and spoke of a higher power. Still, as she and Floyd began dating, she was taken aback by his unyielding faith and his determination to live what he preached.
He liked the people nobody liked and saw the people nobody saw; he offered a dollar and a handshake to the guys holding cardboard signs outside; he hugged homeless derelicts and asked how they were doing.
She could never tell if he was talking on the phone to one of his big-league friends, like retired NBA star Stephen Jackson, or some guy off the street — Floyd treated them all the same. When she saw how Floyd lived God’s word, it made her want to believe.
Floyd was so sanguine that it was impossible to dwell in darkness around him. If she tried, he would say, “Don’t let the devil in your head.”
They explored the Twin Cities, visiting the Como Zoo, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Minnehaha Falls, and the since-closed hip-hop store Fifth Element. Floyd pumped gas for her, opened doors and carried her groceries — things she had done herself for so long that it took time to accept his overtures. He would gently tease her for being too tough to accept help.
Ross’ teenage biracial Black son, Gavin, took a liking to Floyd, who returned the sentiment. Floyd always told him, “I got you,” and advised him not to make the mistakes he had. Floyd confided disappointment at not having gone further with sports and encouraged Gavin’s interest in soccer. When Gavin visited the Harbor Light Center with his high school chess trophy, Floyd talked his success up to everybody. “That’s my Gav-man,” he said. “He’s a smart one.”
During one of Floyd’s shifts, Gavin’s dad had an epileptic seizure and collapsed, striking his head. Blood poured from the wound. Floyd looked after him. He picked him up when the thrashing stopped and took him outside for the ambulance.
Floyd lived for a time at Miss Bea’s House, a lodge affiliated with Turning Point that had 32 beds for sober men.
FLOYD COULD BE EVASIVE with his new girlfriend about getting home in the evenings, and finally admitted that he was staying at Miss Bea’s House and had a nightly curfew. He was trying to find a place of his own, but landlords kept turning him down due to his criminal record.
One day he mentioned it to some Houston friends, saying, “It’s really messed up — nobody wants to deal with me because of that.”
They commiserated. Rhodes had paid many apartment application fees only to be rejected, and finally had to put down extra money to reserve a place. Fonteno had been frustrated to find that even with his good trucking income, he was rejected by landlords who discovered his old drug charges and acted like he was going to turn the place into New Jack City, the 1991 movie about the crack trade.
Thunstrom owned a home in St. Louis Park, just west of Bde Maka Ska, and offered to rent it to Floyd after some of the bartenders at work moved out. A fellow alumnus of Turning Point, Eric “Big E” Cornley, worked security with Floyd at Conga Latin Bistro and agreed to room with him.
In September 2017, both moved in. Rather than spend their first nights alone in separate bedrooms, the men moved their mattresses into the dining room and both slept there.
Weeks later, Cornley didn’t show up for his shift at the nightclub. Floyd returned home from work at 4 in the morning and found his roommate dead in the basement. Floyd covered him with a green blanket and called 911. St. Louis Park police officers found Floyd crying in the front yard. He led them downstairs.
Floyd told authorities that he had seen Cornley use crack before and complain of a racing heart. At 6:30 a.m., a transport unit from the Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to take the body away.
“Floyd appeared devastated by the death of his friend … and was just trying to wrap his head around it,” wrote officer Dana Hegman in the police report.
The cause of death was ruled a cocaine overdose.
Floyd struggled to accept the loss. He felt uneasy every time he came home, sensing his friend’s spirit lingering.
“Why?” he kept asking Rhodes, who had roomed with Cornley at Turning Point. “Why, man? Why?”
DESPITE HIS ROOMMATE’S PASSING, Floyd felt that Minnesota was becoming his home, and didn’t even mind the looming winter.
He instructed Rhodes in the proper way to use the snowblower at the Harbor Light Center.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Floyd said, showing Rhodes that he was improperly blowing the snow toward the building instead of the street, where the plows could remove it.
They had seen snow in Houston, but it usually didn’t stick, and the aura of a thick, white blanket was novel. Rhodes shot a video in front of the center to show their friends back in H-Town. He called over Floyd, who wore only sweatpants and a hoodie.
“I’m loving it though, baby, you know what I’m saying? The snow been good to me,” said Floyd, laughing amid the big, woolly snowflakes.
Rhodes knew what his friend was really saying.
Minnesota been good to me.
Floyd loved his new state, even telling Rhodes, “If you can’t get right in Minnesota, you can’t get right anywhere.” Several friends from home came up to see him show off his new life during the 2018 Super Bowl at U.S. Bank Stadium.
Back in Houston, Cissy’s health worsened.
Floyd’s friend Tiffany Cofield warned him that his mother's health was declining.
“Georgie, you need to come see about Mama,” Tiffany Cofield, who was close to Floyd and his mother, said over the phone from Houston.
Floyd kept putting off his return, immersed in making it in a new city.
“I just can’t come right now,” he replied. “I got a lot going on.”
Money was always tight, and Floyd often spoke to friends of providing for his little girl Gianna in Houston. He hoped one day to gain custody and bring her to Minnesota.
But he lost his job at the Harbor Light Center, and he took it hard. (The shelter would not release details about his employment.) He worked for a while at a metal plating facility but left because the chemicals ate away at his hands. Ross noticed Floyd constantly scratching them, and the irritation became so aggravated that he visited the doctor for treatment. He also loaded furniture, worked in packaging and distributing televisions, built houses and did carpentry jobs.
Floyd applied to the YWCA’s Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) program in St. Paul, hoping to become a truck driver. He passed the drug test and administrators concluded that his criminal record was not recent or severe enough to pose a problem. For students willing and able to put in the work, the payoff would be jobs that paid up to $30 an hour.
Ray Richardson, then a career pathways coordinator at the YWCA, recalled Floyd as a polite student who could have been a “really good” truck driver. But he found it hard to make the early morning classes if he had worked the previous night at Conga Latin Bistro. Richardson called a few times to check on him, but Floyd dropped out of the program. He was under pressure to earn money right away.
Rhodes, his friend from Houston, sometimes urged Floyd to slow down. Set small goals and see them through, he said. Find a balance.
“You can’t do everything in one day,” Rhodes would say.
By then, a co-worker named Alvin Manago had moved into the St. Louis Park duplex with Floyd, and Manago’s girlfriend soon followed. Floyd had found him a dishwashing job at Conga Latin Bistro after they met while watching a softball game in North Commons Park.
Almost a decade older, Manago chuckled as he heard his new roommate singing songs by Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, R&B musicians that he figured Floyd would be too young to appreciate. But Floyd struck him as an old soul.
Alvin Manago looked through letters of support he has received after the death of his roommate and friend.
Floyd watched a lot of sports on TV, sometimes moving the coffee table forward so he could stretch his legs to ease the pain of old athletic injuries. He lifted weights and did pushups in the basement. He told Manago how good he felt these days: healthy, alert, buffed up.
Floyd was always scribbling verses of rap on scraps of paper in his room. One undated writing showed a glimpse of his striving:
Let me share something witcha Give u a piece of my mind Destruction come wit a warning With a piece a mind Seem like I can’t do enough/Still want a piece of whats mine.
In another, he celebrated his new start:
Oh my what a day to be black Plan come together beautiful we back.
Floyd constantly read aloud from his Bible. He highlighted some verses from Proverbs:
“Death is waiting for anyone who wanders away from good sense. … Be kind and honest and you will live a long life; others will respect you and treat you fairly. … Lazy people who refuse to work are only killing themselves; all they do is think about what they would like to have. The righteous, however, can give, and give generously.”
Floyd had listened to a church sermon about Ephesians, Chapter 2, one morning in summer 2015 when Resurrection Houston held a service on the Cuney Homes basketball court. The beginning of that passage was one of a handful that Floyd marked in his Bible with a white Post-it:
“In the past you were spiritually dead because of your disobedience and sins. … But God’s mercy is so abundant, and his love for us is so great, that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience he brought us to life with Christ.”
The message is, “You are loved through Christ and you can rest in that,” said Justin Bouldin, a visiting pastor who attended the service and got to know Floyd. “You don’t have to try to make up for all the bad you did, just walk in this new life I’m giving you … that’s what George was trying to do.”
Floyd's Bible, kept by his roommate Alvin Manago, was marked with Post-it notes, and he often read aloud from it.
FLOYD’S FIRST TRIP BACK to Houston was in June 2018, for his mother’s funeral.
He was so distraught he could barely bring himself to go. Floyd rebuffed an offer from his aunt Angela Harrelson in Eagan to accompany her on the trip down south, and when she greeted her nephew in Houston, she did not see the usual smile in his eyes. He would not look directly at her, and struggled to keep his composure.
“He lost what kept him centered,” Cofield said.
For days after the service, she saw Floyd lying on the couch, grieving.
He had been gone only 16 months, but Floyd was spooked by the gunfire tearing apart the Third Ward. A friend’s 8-year-old son had been killed and his 5-year-old daughter was wounded in a drive-by shooting. “I need to go back to Minnesota,” Floyd told his friend Cal Wayne.
He spent more time alone in his room when he returned to Minneapolis, not wanting to burden others with his anguish. But death became a grim chorus in Floyd’s life as news kept coming about the shootings of old neighbors and friends in Houston.
Ross had seen Floyd disappear for days when his roommate Cornley died. Now, when she saw him withdraw, she learned to ask, “Did you lose somebody? What’s going on? ... You can’t just shut down!”
He and Ross began relapsing in the first half of 2018 on Percocet and other opioids. They used partly to ease their physical pain — the strain of old sports injuries and hard labor jobs for Floyd, the neck and back ailments that had long plagued Ross. But they also sought to escape the private agonies they carried. Ross was not sure, exactly, what could keep a person sober or not from one day to the next.
Floyd began revealing to her more about his time in prison. He had been free since 2013 but evoked his suffering in confinement as if it were in the near reaches of his mind. Everything felt too small for him in prison — even his feet hung off the bed. Sometimes Floyd curled into a shell and Ross would hold him as he described how the walls seemed to close in on him in his cell. She could feel his heart racing, his body trembling, and wondered if Floyd suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for which he never found counseling.
Ross felt, after listening to Floyd, that prison cells weren’t made for someone like him. Sometimes she felt the whole world wasn’t made for someone like him.
Like Floyd, Ross had also sold and used drugs over the years. Addiction ran in both their families. It bothered her that Floyd had a criminal record while she, a white woman, did not.
They would stop using for long periods. Relapse — stop — relapse — stop. “We both suffered with that together and we both got sober together,” Ross said. “Addiction is funny like that … it comes and goes and it can trap you.”
But Floyd never fully surrendered. He never stopped trying.
He always came back to sobriety.
Courteney Ross and her goddaughter Ireony Farmer, 20, visited one of the murals at the intersection of Chicago and 38th in south Minneapolis.
“KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE I can f — ing see them!”
Floyd panicked. He stammered. He fumbled. A Minneapolis police officer had just approached him at the passenger side of an unlicensed Ford Explorer during a traffic stop on May 6, 2019. Now the cop was ordering him to put his hands on the dashboard.
“Open your mouth! Spit out what you got! Spit out what you got! I’m going to tase you! Spit it out!”
Two officers maneuvered Floyd out of the car and handcuffed him.
“I apologize for it, man,” Floyd said. “I apologize, man. I apologize … Why y’all doing me like that? … Please, man … Please, somebody help me, man.”
The cops patted Floyd down and found pain pills. Police ultimately never forwarded the case to prosecutors for possible charges, but Floyd whimpered fearfully as a third officer drove him to the police station and tried to calm him down.
“George,” she said. “Will you listen to me? Will you relax, please? Just relax.”
At the station, officers sat Floyd down for questioning.
“I heard you’re high? ... Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Floyd told them he had taken Percocets that day, and — without specifying the kind — that he took eight or nine pills daily.
An officer asked if he usually sold them.
“No, I’m — well, the reason why I don’t get involved with that [is] because Minneapolis has been good to me. And regardless of my addiction, I never wanted to see the penitentiary again.”
Worried about Floyd’s condition, authorities called an ambulance.
“I’m getting f — ed over, man,” Floyd said. “Every time, man, every time. Oh man, every f — ing time, man. Every f — ing time, man.”
A medical professional named Shelley took his blood pressure and voiced alarm at the reading: 216 over 160. Floyd told her that he had not been taking his medication for high blood pressure, a condition that ran in his family.
She asked if he felt sick if he didn’t take pain pills.
“Yeah … People prey on the weak, man.”
Shelley tried to comfort Floyd as they waited for help to arrive.
“We’re not judging you, we just want to make sure you’re OK, all right? Maybe … this is what it takes to get you taken care of. … Maybe this was meant to be.”
PART III
Losing Big Floyd
George Floyd looked around the Anoka duplex that his friend Aubrey Rhodes had just bought.
Like Floyd, Rhodes had left Houston’s Third Ward in search of a new life in Minnesota. He had gone through treatment, found a job and saved for a down payment.
Now, in these closing weeks of 2019, Rhodes was moving into his own home, and Floyd was there to help.
“I like this,” he said.
Floyd admired the friend he called “lil’ bro.” He wanted Rhodes to show him how to buy a house once he “got all this stuff together,” hopeful that his friend’s success presaged his own.
In the new year, Floyd found another way of claiming his place as a Minnesotan: He changed the area code on his replacement cellphone from 832 — Houston — to 612. Then he and his girlfriend, Courteney Ross, ran out of the Metro PCS store, holding hands and laughing as they jumped over snowbanks with giddy elation. They bought pizza slices across the street to celebrate.
MINNESOTA, WITH ONE-TENTH THE Black population of Texas, seemed an unlikely place for Black men from Houston to affix their hopes.
The gulf between the state’s mostly white residents and its Black ones — in education, income and homeownership — was among the largest in the nation. Twenty-seven percent of Black Minnesotans lived in poverty, far higher than the 18% of similarly struggling Black Texans.
Law enforcement agencies across the state — especially in Minneapolis — had been dogged for years by accusations of biased policing. Officers rarely faced serious consequences for their actions, but the city had paid out millions of dollars in legal settlements to Black victims of police abuse.
Months after Floyd moved here in 2017, a jury acquitted police officer Jeronimo Yanez of manslaughter for fatally shooting Philando Castile, a Black man, during a traffic stop. Thousands of people marched to the State Capitol to protest the verdict.
“There has always been a systemic problem in the state of Minnesota,” his mother, Valerie Castile, declared outside the Ramsey County Courthouse after the decision. “ … The system continues to fail Black people and it will continue to fail you all.”
The following year, Castile met Floyd at an event serving the homeless outside the Harbor Light Center.
“What happened to Philando never should have happened,” Floyd told her, and Castile could feel the kindness in his embrace.
Pastor John Riles in Houston and some of the men who followed the path he laid out for them did not dwell on racism in Minnesota. They were heartened by the tranquillity of the landscape and the friendly people; how residents of different cultures seemed to get along, compared to the segregated and punishing milieu of Houston.
Rhodes brightened when describing his first visit to the Minnesota State Fair, where he saw such an impressive mingling of citizens. He felt at peace at the Salvation Army Northwoods Camp in Finlayson, where he strolled the forest at night and prayed, basking in the quiet.
Floyd’s friend Reginal Smith, when he moved to the Twin Cities from Houston, had heard that the Minneapolis police were quick to shoot. Yet he never felt that he drew their scrutiny, and when he moved back to Texas with his partner in 2016, he did not pass on any warning to Floyd. He wanted him to experience Minnesota as he had: a place where a Black man would be judged for who he was, not his past.
Floyd voiced surprise to his white girlfriend about how pleasant people were here. She told him to be leery; Ross knew how they could be in private. Sometimes, when she harshly criticized the police, he would suggest they were only doing their job.
Still, they agreed that Ross should drive whenever they were together, knowing that cops were less likely to pull over a white woman than a Black man.
Once she took Floyd to an auto shop in northeast Minneapolis to repair a tire. The staff had always treated her well when she came on her own, but with a Black man at her side, she found workers dismissive and rude. Ross was furious.
Floyd told her that they would find another shop. He believed that Minnesota had a heart for him — for everybody. He often urged her to be thankful for the state’s abundance.
Ross considered herself far more pessimistic about Minnesota, about white people.
“Well, we’re not equitable enough,” Ross told him. “We need more.”
LAST YEAR, FLOYD TRIED again to become a licensed truck driver. He completed the training but told Robert Fonteno, the Houston native who paid for his bus ticket to Minnesota, that he failed the road test and needed to save some money in order to retake it.
Floyd was still working part-time at Conga Latin Bistro when he began another job as a delivery driver, traveling rural roads late into the winter nights. In January, police in western Minnesota ticketed him for speeding and driving without a valid endorsement for his noncommercial truck. He was cited again less than a week later for falling asleep and hitting a car at a red light. No one was injured, but Floyd lost his job.
Courteney Ross saves photos, notes and other memories of George Floyd on a shelf at her apartment.
He sought to discipline himself. Floyd wrote a series of affirmations on the back of a February document related to his blood pressure medicine, and taped the list to his bedroom wall:
•Let this be the day I claim victory over this dark situation through the Holy Spirit. •Always know u are wright here with me. •No matter the time you can always grab you some word. •You get up & gather yaself in da morning & feed your spirit. •Follow that with your workout.
Floyd was still looking for another job when the pandemic struck in March. Then he tested positive for COVID-19. Though hypertension put him at higher risk, Floyd appeared to recover quickly. But his finances worsened after the state ordered the shutdown of restaurants to slow the spread of the virus. He worked his last day at Conga Latin Bistro on March 15.
Floyd tried not to let his misfortunes darken his resolve at first, writing on a piece of paper:
Look into my eyes & tell me what u see You cant miss my heart its so dam big A man of God u cant change me
But at some point he drew a line under that verse and penned another:
Man at dat point again. Back stuck all up in my addiction. It get worse got corona & 300 bucks Man life suck But life never ever sucked but I dam sho did.
Further down the page, Floyd wrote: Get addicted God.
He could not make rent that April, nor May. Floyd called his landlord and boss Jovanni Thunstrom with an offer to pay half and gradually catch up on the rest. When Thunstrom came to collect the $300, Floyd asked when he was reopening the club.
“I really miss working there, boss man,” Floyd said.
At home, Floyd often prayed with one of his roommates, Theresa Scott. One day in May, they stood together at the top of the stairs and prayed much longer than usual. Alvin Manago, his other roommate, would hold onto the image of Floyd closing his eyes and saying, “Amen,” because it was the last time he ever saw him.
And for months afterward, Manago would ask himself, what was happening that day?
The enforced isolation of the pandemic was sapping Floyd, who derived much of his light from the company of others. He spent the next two weeks crashing with friends in north Minneapolis.
Floyd’s friend Tiffany Cofield spoke with him by phone from Houston in mid-May. Something seemed to be weighing on him, and he was stressed. He could not figure out why Texas had denied the renewal of his driver’s license — records show it was for an unspecified outstanding violation — which posed another barrier to earning his truck driving credentials.
“I don’t know what you got going on in Minnesota, but you need to come back home,” Cofield said. “I can’t help you. I’m too far away.”
“I got so much going on up here,” Floyd said. “I just can’t move now.”
Floyd lost his job providing security at the Harbor Light Center but had hoped to become a licensed truck driver.
FLOYD ALWAYS HAD A heart for people from his hometown, and in recent years he had begun spending more time with Houston transplant Maurice Hall.
Hall had moved to Minneapolis in 2011, also with the help of Pastor Riles. Smith said Hall did well at first, going to Turning Point, working at a slaughterhouse and vowing “to get my life right.” He was supposed to spend the 2012 holidays with Smith’s family, but borrowed his car and was arrested for burglary two days before Christmas.
“I really thought he was going to do the right thing,” Smith said.
Hall served four years in prison until 2017 and was sent back the following year for not complying with the conditions of his release. He was out in months and began staying at the Harbor Light Center. The homeless shelter had remained Floyd’s hangout long after he stopped working there — he liked to visit Rhodes and others — and Hall and Floyd became friends.
Minneapolis police kept the block in front of the shelter under surveillance because they considered it a hub of drugs, assaults and other crimes. On a sweltering afternoon in August 2019, officers watching a safe zone camera said they saw suspicious activity involving Hall’s Ford Crown Victoria in the parking lot.
Ross said that she, Floyd, Hall and another woman were sitting near Hall’s sedan when several squad cars came screeching up. “Get your hands against the wall, get your hands against the wall!” police yelled, according to Ross.
She watched as authorities briefly questioned Floyd in the back of a police vehicle. It had been three months since police had caught Floyd with pills but not charged him, and she feared that he would have another panic attack.
They asked his name and he said Floyd; they asked his last name and he said Floyd. He cried, barely able to speak.
Ross told the officer his first name was George and that he was nervous. Police let Floyd and the others go. A search of Hall’s car yielded nothing.
Two weeks later, authorities apprehended Hall outside the Harbor Light Center and found 23 grams combined of cocaine and meth in his backpack. Officers also discovered a gun — which Hall was barred from carrying due to his criminal convictions — in his locker at the shelter.
By then, several men in the Houston crowd had backed away from Hall. Floyd would not. He was known to befriend those who faced struggles, and referred to Hall as “my boy.”
Earlier this year, the center hired anti-violence outreach group MAD DADS to patrol the block and ward off drug dealers. One of the supervisors was Wallace White, Floyd’s friend from Turning Point and Miss Bea’s House.
White invited Floyd to join MAD DADS, figuring he would be an ideal outreach worker to patrol Currie Avenue, Nicollet Mall or the North Side. White saw a dapper-looking Floyd on May 24 at the Harbor Light Center and urged him to come to his office the next day to finalize his hiring.
“OK, I’m going to come up there, Wally man,” Floyd replied. “I’m going to be up there tomorrow.”
Floyd never showed up.
That afternoon of May 25, Floyd invited Rhodes to a Memorial Day barbecue, but Rhodes was working a double shift. As the day waned, Floyd, Hall and another friend named Shawanda Hill drove in a Mercedes-Benz to Cup Foods in south Minneapolis, where Floyd had gone to pay his phone bill over the last two years.
Hall went inside first and a clerk rejected his $20 bill as counterfeit, according to Cup Foods spokesman Jamar Nelson. A short time later, Floyd walked in and paid for cigarettes with a bill the clerk also believed was fake. Floyd returned to the car and was sitting in it with Hall and Hill when the police arrived.
Wallace White of MAD DADS worked security outside the Harbor Light Center. He’d offered Floyd a job the day before Floyd died.
FLOYD LOOKED UP, STARTLED.
Officer Thomas Lane was rapping on the window of the Mercedes with his flashlight.
He screamed and cursed at Floyd to put his hands on the steering wheel. He briefly flashed his gun.
Floyd said he was sorry, Mr. Officer. He cried.
“Please, please, please, man. Please, please, I didn’t know, man.”
Lane and officer J. Alexander Kueng pulled Floyd out to handcuff him. They walked Floyd across the street. They tried to maneuver him into the back of a squad car. Floyd panicked. He said he had anxiety and claustrophobia.
“Man, I’m scared as f —, man,” Floyd said. He asked to be put on the ground. “I’m going down, I’m going down, I’m going down.” He said over and over that he could not breathe.
Finally, Floyd tumbled onto Chicago Avenue. Lane held down his legs. Kueng applied pressure on his back.
Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck.
Floyd begged for help. He called out, “Mama! Mama! Mama!”
“My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. Need some water or something. Please. Please. I can’t breathe, officer.”
“Then stop talking, stop yelling,” said Chauvin.
“They will kill me. They will kill me, man.”
“It takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.”
“Come on, man. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Please, sir. Please, please, please …”
Floyd went silent.
Chauvin did not lift his knee.
A crowd of onlookers, kept back by officer Tou Thao, shouted at the cops.
“Get the f — off of him! … He’s dying, bro!”
Floyd’s friends grieve over how a man who had worked so hard to build a new life died over so little, in the city that he hoped would save him.
FONTENO WAS DRIVING HIS truck when a friend called to tell him.
“You know they killed Big Floyd?”
Fonteno was distraught. Then he was angry. He thought of how little had changed since his parents told him a half-century earlier about the Houston police killing of a Black activist, shortly after a Black man’s death in officers’ custody stirred a neighborhood uproar.
How brutality against Black people even today seemed to be the accepted order of things.
How a Third Ward hero who had worked so hard to build a new life died over so little, in the city that he hoped would save him.
Fonteno kept running down the varied trails of fate in his mind, imagining: What if Floyd had stayed in Houston? Even as he believed that all the world’s happenings were divinely inspired — even as he believed that Floyd’s death was a racist murder — his conscience felt unsettled.
After some time, Fonteno called the pastor.
“You know, Pastor Riles,” he said, “if I had never brought him up here, would he still be alive?”
Riles had been asking himself the same question. He had gone numb in those days after Floyd’s death, sleeping fitfully as he imagined the anguish of Floyd’s final moments.
But he told Fonteno that he believed God had chosen him to influence Floyd’s passage in that moment. He convinced him that Floyd’s death had not been fruitless, that it was already changing lives.
When Fonteno thought of Floyd’s fate — that of a Black man who had passed through so many of the same doors, overcoming the heavy hand of criminal justice in Texas only to meet a more oppressive one here — he also realized that it just as easily could have happened to him.
Life suddenly seemed finite, and Fonteno decided to do more to help people, much like others had aided him and members of the Houston-to-Minneapolis pipeline. He returned to college to pursue degrees in psychology and addiction counseling, with plans to become a licensed master social worker and to open a center to serve addicts, ex-offenders and the mentally disabled.
During his last conversation with Floyd, they mourned a high school friend of the H-Town crowd nicknamed Big Dood, who died in Minneapolis in mid-May of meningitis. Floyd called for their Houston brethren to band together.
Aubrey Rhodes integrated a tribute for two recently departed friends into his car stereo system.
“We have to hold on,” Floyd told Fonteno. “We need to get together more often. We need to become … more like family, because we’re all we have up here.”
The sentiment stayed with Fonteno. He began talking to Rhodes more often and visiting him at work.
Rhodes, privately, was grappling with his own guilt.
“I actually told him how to get here,” said Rhodes. “That really messes with me. … I was trying to guide him but I didn’t know that it would come down to that.”
One of the biggest mysteries to Rhodes and other friends was that the clerk’s 911 call began over suspicions of Floyd using a fake bill — something they did not believe he would do knowingly. He had many friends who had helped him out with money before and would have done so again.
Ross, for her part, was surprised to hear that some friends from Houston were haunted by the question of whether Floyd would have been better off in Texas. She believed there should be no regret, because Floyd lived a series of beautiful years here.
She still feels Floyd’s spirit, hears him talking to her all the time. She once asked him for a 24-hour sobriety medallion he received from Alcoholics Anonymous, because she used to love the ones her father gave her. Sometimes she still holds Floyd’s in remembrance.
The medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide, and the four officers were fired and charged in his killing. The autopsy showed fentanyl and meth in Floyd’s system. Ross and others were distressed and angry that some blamed him for his own death.
Then maybe I should be out there too, she thought. Put me on the ground and put a knee on my neck and take my life, because I’ve done it.
Courteney Ross paused as she talked about her memories of Floyd.
FOR MONTHS AFTERWARD, RHODES assumed his usual post behind the security desk of the Harbor Light Center and looked toward the door. He kept waiting for a smiling Floyd to walk in and greet him. “What’s up, Deuce?” he’d say, calling Rhodes by his nickname.
Everybody was talking about Floyd when Rhodes went to work on May 26, the day his death became widely known. “We came here to better our life not to be killed by wicked cops,” Rhodes posted on Facebook, still stunned. He kept reporting for duty as protesters stormed the streets. He kept reporting for duty as the city burned. “Work,” he said, “helps me stay on my square.”
He missed only a few days to attend Floyd’s funeral in Houston. When he returned, a crowd gathered in front of the Harbor Light Center with red and white balloons. They stayed silent for the close to 9 minutes that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, and a friend from Houston finally said, “That shows us our brother’s suffering, but he shall suffer no more.”
Everybody cheered as the balloons they released became wisps twirling toward the sky. The Harbor Light Center meant so much to Floyd that the George Floyd Memorial Foundation would later make its first donation of $5,000 there.
A Floyd tombstone stands at a memorial for those killed by police, not far from where he took his last breaths in May.
Rhodes started wearing Black Lives Matter bracelets. Though he’d had his share of run-ins with the police in Texas, Rhodes had not felt bound to the movement until the loss of one of his closest friends. He joined protesters at the Mall of America, where he once surprised Floyd with a birthday shopping trip, and they walked to Cup Foods to demand justice. He attended the March on Washington and stood before the Lincoln Memorial wearing a T-shirt bearing Floyd’s image, raising his fist.
The cops could kill you in Houston. The cops could kill you anywhere. This, he knew. So Rhodes did not see Floyd’s loss as a reason to leave Minnesota, nor would he dissuade other Third Ward residents from moving here.
He stayed.
Rhodes found tenants for the other half of his duplex and decorated his living room with mementos of the North and the South. On a shelf on one side of the fireplace, he displayed a cake tin in the shape of a 3 to represent the Third Ward; on the other, he positioned a Houston Rockets cap between two Timberwolves caps.
Rhodes bought a pickup truck to start a side business delivering equipment. He marked his fourth year of sobriety. He had charted a strange confluence of promise and loss all year, and some days, in the midst of his gratitude, Rhodes broke down and cried.
Hall, who has publicly maintained that Floyd did not resist arrest, is expected to be a witness in the trial against the four former officers. He declined to speak to the Star Tribune, but Hall’s attorney said he is back in the Twin Cities after being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder at the Menninger Clinic, a leading psychiatric hospital in Houston.
Rhodes received a call from Hall in November seeking a ride, but Rhodes was in Minnetonka picking up a red kettle for the Salvation Army’s fundraising drive and declined to meet him. He held nothing against Hall but had tried to help him a few years back and believed there was only so much he could do for the time being.
Aubrey Rhodes headed out to work. He’s haunted by his role in bringing Floyd to Minnesota. “I actually told him how to get here,” said Rhodes. “That really messes with me.”
RHODES STEPPED OUTSIDE THE Harbor Light Center one recent afternoon, the fierce chill foreshadowing his fifth northern winter. He walked east along Currie Avenue, past the bright swirls on a mural that read Come in she said I’ll give ya shelter from the storm. He turned the corner and stopped at the Greyhound bus station, now quiet, and recalled the moment Floyd appeared after his long journey from Houston.
“I remember this like the back of my hand; he walked out that door,” Rhodes said. “It’s just shocking every time I think of it. Shocking that he’s gone.”
He is determined these days, as he puts it, to “live a normal Christian life.” Even if it would be easy to use Floyd’s death as a reason to give up.
Rhodes refuses.
He knows what Floyd would say.
Man, this just a hurdle. Just go do what you do.
He pictures Floyd smiling down, urging him onward.
Keep striving, lil’ bro. Keep striving.
So he does. For himself. For Floyd. For the next weary Texan who steps off the bus praying for a whole new life.
ABOUT THIS STORY
This story is based on interviews with 38 people about Floyd and his world, and draws on court records, police reports, videos and photos. Courteney Ross shared some of Floyd’s writings. Quotes attributed to Floyd were heard directly by people who spoke with the Star Tribune.
CREDITS
Reporting Maya Rao
Photography Carlos Gonzalez
Photo editing Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Deb Pastner
Videography Carlos Gonzalez, Mark Vancleave
Video editing Mark Vancleave, Jenni Pinkley
Editing James Eli Shiffer, Baird Helgeson, Eric Wieffering, Catherine Preus, Holly Willmarth, Amy Kuebelbeck
Illustration Charles Chaisson
Art Direction Greg Mees, Josh Penrod, Anna Boone
Design Anna Boone, Josh Penrod
Development Anna Boone, Jamie Hutt
Audience engagement Tom Horgen, Alexis Allston, Colleen Kelly
Minneapolis police, protesters clash almost 24 hours after George Floyd's death in custody
Four Minneapolis police officers were fired Tuesday after the detention and death of 46-year-old George Floyd — a scene that unfolded in a Facebook video showing a white officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he pleaded with police, “I can’t breathe.”
Floyd died at Hennepin County Medical Center soon after the encounter, which started when police detained him Monday evening on suspicion of trying to pass a fake $20 bill at a convenience store.
The FBI launched an investigation Tuesday, as the Minneapolis Police Department fired the officer as well as three others who were at the scene. The quick action didn’t prevent a large protest Tuesday evening that included tense confrontations with police, who responded with tear gas.
“Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” said a visibly shaken Mayor Jacob Frey, who said the officer used an unauthorized move against Floyd. “For five minutes, we watched a white officer press his knee into a black man’s neck. Five minutes. When you hear someone calling for help, you’re supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic, human sense.”
Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said he had stayed up all night wrestling with his decision to fire the officers. Arradondo said he couldn’t say much about the case — either about the FBI’s investigation or a parallel probe by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) — but added that “sanctity of life” has always been a pillar of his department.
“What occurred last night was certainly very tragic, and very sad,” he said in an afternoon news conference on the steps of City Hall.
Officials have not publicly named the four officers, but multiple sources identified the two prominently featured in the 10-minute Facebook Live video as Derek Chauvin, who was kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and Tou Thao, who stood by as witnesses pleaded with the officers to let Floyd up and to check his pulse.
Arradondo said at an earlier news conference that he’d asked the FBI to take the case after watching the video of the encounter and receiving “additional information” about it from community members, without elaborating.
Community activist John Thompson says the images of Floyd and other black men across the country who have met unjust deaths at the hands of police trigger a kind of collective trauma within the black community.
“Let’s be clear: This is murder,” said Thompson, whose advocacy in the 2016 police killing of his friend Philando Castile catapulted him into a run for state office. “I don’t want to be labeled the angry black man — I should be able to have that emotion. I’m angry. Wouldn’t you be?”
Floyd’s family has retained attorney Benjamin Crump, who also represents the families of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, a black man and woman killed in recent high-profile cases.
“This abusive, excessive and inhumane use of force cost the life of a man who was being detained by the police for questioning about a nonviolent charge,” read the statement from Crump’s office.
The arrest that sparked the fatal chain of events happened about 8 p.m. Monday, when police were called to investigate a report of someone trying to pay with a counterfeit bill at Cup Foods, 3759 Chicago Av., and found the man matching the suspect’s description in his car, according to police and scanner audio posted online.
Cup Foods’ owner, Mike Abumayyaleh, later confirmed that one of his employees had followed store policy by calling police after someone, thought to be Floyd, tried to pay with a counterfeit $20 bill. Abumayyaleh said he’s been receiving death threats since then.
Officers ordered Floyd out of the car and took him into custody, police spokesman John Elder said, adding that their body cameras were rolling the whole time.
The arrest also was streamed by a bystander on Facebook Live, where the archived footage approached 1 million views as of Tuesday evening.
The video captures Chauvin with his knee on the neck of Floyd, who is lying face down on the street next to the rear passenger wheel, writhing, while repeatedly telling police he couldn’t breathe as three officers hold him down.
“Please, please, please I can’t breathe. Please, man,” Floyd is heard pleading with the officers. At one point, he cries out for his mother.
By then, several other witnesses had gathered on the sidewalk outside of Cup Foods, with several recording the scene on their phones. “Bro, you’ve got him down, let him breathe at least, man,” one bystander is heard telling police.
At one point, as a group of bystanders continue to plead for the officers to check Floyd’s pulse, an officer, believed to be Thao, can be heard saying, “Don’t do drugs, guys.”
“So you call what he’s doing OK?” one bystander asks, referring to Chauvin.
As Floyd begins to lose consciousness, the group of bystanders becomes increasingly agitated. Among them was a woman who identified herself as an off-duty firefighter and first responder.
“The fact that you guys aren’t checking his pulse and doing compressions if he needs them — you guys are on another level!” she said.
Thao is then shown moving away from his colleagues to tell the crowd to “get back on the sidewalk.” As he moves toward them, one of the bystanders points out that Floyd no longer seems to be moving.
A short time later, paramedics arrive and put him onto a gurney and into a waiting ambulance. Floyd was taken to HCMC, where he died at 9:25 p.m. The cause of his death is “pending further testing and investigation” by multiple agencies, according to the medical examiner.
No weapons were recovered from the scene, police said.
The footage doesn’t capture what led to Floyd’s arrest, only picking up after he has already been taken to the ground and is in handcuffs.
Darnella Frazier, who filmed and posted the encounter, told the Star Tribune that she started recording “as soon as I heard him trying to fight for his life” in front of her and other bystanders near the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue S.
“It was like a natural instinct, honestly” to start recording, said Frazier, who lives in the neighborhood. “The world needed to see what I was seeing. Stuff like this happens in silence too many times.”
Later on Tuesday, Frey and Council Member Andrea Jenkins, who represents the ward where Floyd died, joined editors of traditional black publications North News and Insight News for an emotional 45-minute Facebook live session.
The conversation later turned to the MPD’s initial news release that said Floyd died after a “medical incident,” which sparked widespread criticism on social media that the department appeared to be downplaying his death.
Jenkins pointed out that the MPD has its own communications department and issues statements without vetting at City Hall.
“The statement that was put out was almost as harmful the perpetration of the act,” Jenkins said. “We all watched that video — there were no medical concerns prior” to the officer putting his knee on Floyd.
Elder, the police spokesman, at first said that Floyd had gotten out of the car on his own, but “physically resisted” officers and was handcuffed, before officers noticed that he was in “medical distress.” Elder later walked back some of those statements, saying they were based on preliminary information.
The technique used, he added, was not a department-authorized chokehold.
All body camera footage has been turned over to the BCA, which said in a news release that its investigation was separate from the FBI’s civil rights investigation, and that it would turn over its findings to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office for possible criminal charges.
Nekima Levy-Armstrong, a prominent local voice on police reform who was a fixture at those protests, said that for all the gains that people of color have made, deaths like Floyd’s are another reminder that the system remains stacked against them.
“It just reminds me of Eric Garner once again: a black man being accosted by police and pleading for his life saying he couldn’t breathe,” she said, referring to an unarmed New York man who died in 2014 after being placed in a police chokehold. “I’m fully convinced that if police wouldn’t have been called to the scene, then he would still be alive.”
Staff writers Chao Xiong, Miguel Otárola, Rochelle Olson, Liz Sawyer, Randy Furst, Paul Walsh, Andy Mannix and Ryan Faircloth contributed to this report.
On Memorial Day, a white police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a black man who died less than an hour later.
In the following days, thousands of people — some peaceful, some violent — took to the streets.
Businesses burned.
A community grieved.
By Anna Boone • Star Tribune • June 3, 2020
It started on a street corner in south Minneapolis.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department ignited protests against racism and police brutality across the globe. Peaceful marches in the Twin Cities grew into the thousands by day. After dark, violence flared.
The police station’s destruction is celebrated, decried, pondered
By Jennifer Bjorhus • Star Tribune • July 26, 2020
Charred, boarded up, spray painted and fenced off, the abandoned Third Precinct station sits at East Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue in Minneapolis — stars and stripes still flying — as a nation comes to grips with what the fall of the police station means.
Home to the four Minneapolis officers involved in killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, the complex was a focus of the explosive protests. When it went up in flames on May 28, there was shock and disbelief.
“It was like watching your house burn down,” said retired Minneapolis Police officer Val Goligowski, who worked in the station for more than two decades.
The destruction of a police station is unprecedented in modern U.S. police history. The last time one was destroyed appears to have been in the New York Draft Riots of 1863, when a deadly race riot erupted targeting African Americans, said University of Nebraska policing historian Samuel Walker.
In interviews, people described what the fall of the Third meant to them: a deep betrayal of trust, a loss of control, a symbol of change and a breaking point.
“We’re done backing down. We’re doing rolling over. We’re done dying,” said protester Queen Jacobs.
In a 1985 Star Tribune article about the opening of the new Third Precinct building, it was hailed as state-of-the-art station, designed to be more inviting. It had skylights and an atrium and resembled a middle school. It was supposed to be a new day in policing.
“We want to break down the stereotyped police station atmosphere that people are afraid to come into,” then-Deputy Police Chief Bob Lutz said at the time. Then-Precinct Captain Al Pufahl called the new station “a symbol of law enforcement” that “says something to people who will be working in and around it.”
Today, the future of the building itself is uncertain. But what its fall meant is distinct to many.
THE PROTESTER
Queen Jacobs, 26
Jacobs, a north Minneapolis swim instructor, said the killing of George Floyd moved her to protest for the first time in her life. She protested for about eight days straight, she said, getting tear gassed, Maced and flashbanged.
It was about midnight, Jacobs said, when she finally got to the Third Precinct on May 28. It was already ablaze, and she stood in shock with the crowd watching the flames leap. Jacobs, who is Black, described the experience as “liberating.”
“I think we all felt a sense of strength and community, and of a piece of what our ancestors went through, and when they were able to be liberated,” she said. “We showed them, by physically removing them from what should be their safe place. We can’t go outside and be safe, so why should they be able to hide in that building with all their weapons?
“If they don’t want to hear us asking and begging to be treated like humans ... if they can’t treat us like humans ... then I am not going to be quiet, and I’m not going to peaceful, and they’re going to hear me one way or another.”
THE RETIRED OFFICER
Joey Sandberg, 55
Sandberg, a native of south Minneapolis, spent 31 years in the Third Precinct before retiring in 2018. He picked the precinct and chose to stay, he said, “to work in the community I grew up in.” He watched the station burn on television at his house.
“That was my home for 31 years. I did the very, very best I could do in police work to serve my people,” he said. “To see that go up in flames like that was very hard for me take.”
Sandberg said he remains troubled by Mayor Jacob Frey’s order for officers to evacuate the precinct as protesters continued the onslaught.
“I couldn’t sleep that night. I was just fuming,” he said. “ I could not believe that the politicians would just do this. That’s not just a building to us, it’s a symbol of pride for us.”
The officers remaining at the Third that night felt completely abandoned, he said. “A lot of them feel like they were left for dead.”
“I gave my heart and soul to that precinct,” he said. “To see those people cheering and throwing rocks ... it almost seemed like all the work I did for 31 years was for nothing.”
THE RESIDENT
James Works, 47
There is no love lost between Works and the Third Precinct. Works, who is Black, is a food delivery driver who works along Lake Street. Over the years officers have repeatedly pulled him over, he said, without good reason and harassed him.
In 2017, he went to the police station to take the matter to a supervisor but was tossed out and cited for trespassing. A lawyer got the ticket dropped, Works said, and obtained bodycam footage from inside the station. It shows one officer referring to Works as an expletive.
Still, Works said the station house should not have been destroyed. He’s a veteran, he said, and feels strongly about law and order. He watched it burn from his apartment.
“Even though I have issues with the police, I feel like they shouldn’t have given up the police station,” Works said. “They should have stood their ground. Once you take down a police station, anything goes.”
“We still need to uphold the law,” said Works, who said his father is a deputy sheriff in Georgia. Works called the station house a symbol — not of authority, “but of what we stand for, like law-abiding citizens.”
Burning down a precinct doesn’t change the department’s culture, he said.
“They’re going to be right back there with the same officers doing the same stuff,” he said, and we “got nowhere.”
THE BUSINESS OWNER
Juno Choi, 41
Choi and the other co-owners of Arbeiter Brewing say they have no idea how their startup was spared from the damage. The brewery, which sits in a brick building a few doors down from the Third Precinct station, hadn’t even opened yet when the protests began.
The first two days, they stood guard. On the third, they boarded up and went home, not knowing what would be left the next day. Choi said he felt torn between protecting the business and joining in the protests.
“We don’t exactly know why our building did not burn down,” said Choi. “I think it had a lot to do with luck.”
The deserted station represents more than a Minneapolis precinct, he said. “It has become sort of symbolic of police brutality and systemic racism across the country. It was really a protest about what’s been going on all across the nation for a long, long time.”
It’s also a constant reminder now, said Choi, of why his group wanted to start their brewery: to create a gathering space for people to talk, exchange ideas and build their community. With a bit more luck, that will start happening next month, after Arbeiter Brewing’s grand opening.
THE MAYOR
Jacob Frey, 39
To many, Frey’s decision to evacuate the Third Precinct station is the moment he lost control of the city. Gov. Tim Walz the next day called the city’s handling of the riots an “abject failure.” But Frey says he’d had several conversations with Walz earlier and that the governor had never disagreed with the Third Precinct strategy in those conversations.
“There will be things I look back on and wish I would have done differently, but the decision regarding the Third Precinct is absolutely not one of them,” he said. “If I had ordered the chief to hold the precinct at all costs, hand-to-hand combat would have been inevitable. There was a possibility of serious injury or even death.”
Frey said that he and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo were united on a strategy with three goals: to preserve life, to protect property in other neighborhoods and to de-escalate the situation. “The route we took accomplished all three,” Frey said.
“There were no good options on the table,” he said. “Imagine what would have happened to our city if either an officer or a member of the public was killed. The crisis we would have experienced would have dwarfed even what we saw.”
THE RELIEF WORKER
Jennifer Starr Dodd, 36
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, about two blocks from the Third Precinct station, still operates the emergency relief program it started during the protests when the neighborhood lost its grocery stores. A recent Wednesday finds site manager Starr Dodd coordinating volunteers under a shade tree as families line up.
In the charred police station, Starr Dodd sees the pain and injustice people of color have experienced. She also sees hope.
“People aren’t going to be quiet anymore,” she said. “People are moving forward. They’re going to fight and protest until there is justice for all. It represents the hope to end police brutality, a clean slate.”
“I think of it as the Pentecost,” she said, referring to the Christian holiday following Easter when the Holy Spirit visited the followers of Jesus and flames appeared. “It’s like a holy anger. The spirit came and it was a great fire, and everybody changed in that moment of Pentecost. I see the burning of the Third Precinct as the same. It changed everyone, whether they like it or not.”
THE COUNCIL DIRECTOR
Melanie Majors, 53
At first, Majors, the executive director of the Longfellow Community Council, said the destruction shocked her. It wasn’t the buildings, she said. What she saw was destroyed jobs and investments, loss of access, loss of visitors to the neighborhood and a destroyed sense of safety.
“Later,” Majors said, “I thought this place [the Third Precinct station] right there made this community a target, and what does that mean for the future?
“You’ve got four officers now who have been charged, and no one knows what those outcomes are going to be,” she said.
“If there are outcomes that are really offensive to the community, and the Third Precinct is still in greater Longfellow, then that makes the area a target again. We just got past this crisis period. If we will be a target again in the future, what message would that send to those who A) want to rebuild and B) who have invested in the rebuilding?”
Majors said outrage over police treatment of Black people isn’t new for her. She said her father, who was Black, was brutalized by Minneapolis police through the 1970s. She has seen outrage come and go.
Majors said she fears that once the outrage passes, people trying to make changes will “hit the political and financial wall.”
“The symbol keeps peoples’ eyes open, but I don’t know that they provide for sustained change over time.”
CREDITS
Reporting Jennifer Bjorhus
Photography Glen Stubbe, Jeff Wheeler
Editing Abby Simons, Eric Wieffering
Design Anna Boone, Jamie Hutt, Josh Penrod
Development Anna Boone, Jamie Hutt
On Minneapolis' North Side, residents question calls to defund police
Blasts rang out as Keion Franklin pulled up to a red light in north Minneapolis on Monday. He thought at first that he heard firecrackers, but he quickly realized they were bullets when he saw nearby pedestrians begin to scatter. Franklin ducked, honked the horn and raced around the corner.
The shots kept coming — he thought he heard at least 30 — and struck four people, including a man Franklin knew from working with youth at Farview Park.
Still wearing a neon vest from his job at a cement company, Franklin watched in wary disbelief as police sealed off the stretch of Lyndale Avenue north of W. Broadway. He had been thinking about crime, the roles police play and the meaning of racial justice more than ever since the May 25 killing of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis cop and the “defund police” movement that followed.
Now those forces had converged in the latest of a spate of shootings on the North Side, as city leaders scrambled to call in outside law enforcement to help stop the violence.
“I know on one side of the city, it looks beautiful for defunding to happen,” Franklin said from the parking lot of Merwin Liquors as investigators marked shell casings that fell inches from where his car had driven. “But here on this side of the city, I’m scared if you defund the police … Is it going to turn into World War III over here?”
Surveying the block, Steven Belton, president and CEO of the Urban League Twin Cities, noted a “significant, dramatic uptick” in violent crime since June 7, when nine Minneapolis City Council members publicly pledged support for defunding police.
Belton called the move irresponsible, even as he supports transforming the department. He said those council members had not consulted with people who have a stake in the black community, particularly those on the North Side.
Violent people “have used that sound bite — ‘defund the police’ — as an indication that there is no consequence, that there is no policing, and [concluded] that they are free to do whatever they want to do,” Belton said.
‘I needed to get up’
A month ago, Franklin was watching TV with his 15 year-old son, Jaydin, when they saw the news of Floyd’s death.
Not again, he thought.
From the start, the 37-year-old Franklin saw himself in Floyd. They were both black fathers who moved here from the South — Franklin from Arkansas, Floyd from Texas. Franklin had faced racial profiling and tense encounters with cops.
He hadn’t joined past protests against police brutality. But a friend who participated in demonstrations over Michael Brown’s 2014 killing by police in Ferguson, Mo., stressed the importance of being at “ground zero.” Franklin demonstrated for seven days straight and paid homage to Floyd where he died on 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.
“I realized, instead of sitting here being voiceless, I needed to get up,” Franklin said.
In the wake of riots and looting that followed Floyd’s death, residents joined together on the South Side to patrol their own streets. Franklin was convinced that a smaller police presence could work in part of the city. But he wasn’t sure about north Minneapolis, where he served as a football coach to 10-to 14-year-old boys at Farview Park.
Last October, Franklin and fellow coach Clinton Scott were leading their team through stretching and conditioning drills when two men were shot in a drive-by near the north side of the park. The same month, the parent of a player punched them during a dispute at a game, and they said police were slow to respond.
The men unsuccessfully advocated for more park police patrols in the area.
“I’m tired of being put in these situations where we don’t have police on the field,” Scott said.
Like Franklin, he was frustrated by a perceived mismatch of public safety officers to community needs.
“Either the police are over-policing or in the next minute they’re just nowhere to be found,” Scott said.
Outrage over Floyd’s killing spurred Franklin to volunteer with ISAIAH, a faith-based coalition fighting for racial and economic justice. He went with Scott to North Commons Park for a discussion on public safety that ISAIAH co-hosted on June 14 for black residents.
Wearing a T-shirt that said, “Get your knee off our neck,” Franklin hung back in the shade as speakers voiced their frustrations with law enforcement. He listened as organizer Brian Fullman said that Police Chief Medaria Arradondo is a good man, but he’s part of a system that must go.
“There’s a culture inside of the Minneapolis Police Department, and to extract the culture, you’ve got to strip it down to its bare bones,” Fullman said.
Franklin believed that working with youth through the park system could make a real difference in breaking the cycle of violence, but he doubted that community involvement in north Minneapolis was widespread enough to offset the elimination of the police department, as some activists have promoted.
A rash of shootings
Early Sunday morning, a fusillade of gunfire tore through Uptown, injuring 11 people.
Afterward, police said 113 people had been shot in Minneapolis since Floyd’s death.
The violence carried into Monday, when a 2:30 p.m. shooting near the southwest corner of North Commons sent one person to the hospital in critical condition and wounded three others.
Ninety minutes later and a mile to the east, Franklin was driving south on Lyndale when he heard the gunshots that caused him to seek cover. He later learned that his acquaintance from Farview Park took a bullet in the ankle.
Arradondo briefly visited the corner as a crowd gathered.
“Y’all don’t need to be here right now,” Franklin told some of the boys he knew from Farview Park. “Because if they get to shooting again, y’all will be in the midst.”
Franklin said with his extended family in Arkansas, he’s on his own in Minnesota. He worries not just for the future of his three sons, including a 4-year-old and 1-year-old, but also for the boys he coaches.
Franklin was conflicted over the best solution to the city’s violence. But he believes much would improve if officers policed communities where they live. Just 8% of Minneapolis police officers live in the city. He thinks a lot of North Side kids are over-policed for petty violations, which make it harder for them to find work or to feel safe when police respond to more serious crimes.
“It’s like a no-win situation in some cases for our youth because they don’t know who to trust and who to look to for safety besides people in the streets,” Franklin said.
‘The murder station’
The intersection Franklin drove through when the shots broke is marked by a Winner Gas Station that has been the site of so much crime that the locals call it “the murder station.”
For several hours after the shooting, people came by to ask what happened. Franklin lamented that it almost seemed like the day’s entertainment. He explained the shooting to one woman passing by and told her about the attack near North Commons, too.
“Tonight is going to be crazy,” he predicted.
An hour after Franklin left the scene, someone was wounded by gunfire a half-mile north.
20 families who have lost loved ones to police violence are working to change the system they say makes justice elusive
Story by Andy Mannix • Photos by Aaron Lavinsky • Star Tribune • Oct. 24, 2020
They are always wary of who might be listening, so the families met in a remote park pavilion 13 miles outside Minneapolis, where they could spread out among some picnic tables, pass around chips and bottles of water and talk openly.
It had been an exhausting summer, spent telling stories of their darkest moments to strangers on some legislative committee, or to a legion of activists gathered in Minneapolis’ dog-day humidity, or outside police precincts. A couple of them had gone hoarse from telling the stories so many times.
Even so, at this private gathering on a late-summer afternoon, they began as they always do, by telling them again.
Each starts differently —
A young autistic man is living with his grandparents. He is close to graduation from culinary arts school. One day, after getting a wrong order at a Wendy’s, he loses his temper ...
A man says he wants to die. His girlfriend is afraid he might take his own life, so she calls for help ...
An inmate complains of chest pains. He says he’s having difficulty moving his limbs …
— but they all end the same way: with a loved one dying in an encounter with law enforcement.
“They shot him in the head,” said Amity Dimock, the mother of Kobe Dimock-Heisler, a 21-year-old on the autism spectrum who was killed by police last year. “They did it in front of his grandmother. They then let his body lay there so long that he couldn’t even donate organs.”
Amity Dimock, at home in Baxter, Minn., successfully pushed for new police autism training at the Capitol this year, but she says the system has deprived her of true justice for her son, 21-year-old Kobe Dimock-Heisler, who was killed by two Brooklyn Center Police officers in August 2019.
Since the police killing of George Floyd, this group, known in activist circles as “the families,” has emerged as an influential voice in the movement to remake policing in Minnesota. There are about 20 of them in total, spanning three generations, men and women, of different races, religions and geographic backgrounds. They function as part grief therapy group, part lobbyists. They meet in parks like this, or on Zoom, every week, often with politicians or anyone else who might be able to help their cause — which is to upend a system they say prevents them from attaining justice.
Over the past two decades in Minnesota, at least 195 people have died in incidents involving law enforcement, according to a Star Tribune analysis.Only one officer has been convicted of an on-duty killing in the state’s history — and, as the families frequently point out, that officer was Somali American and the victim was a white woman.
The families have already succeeded in catalyzing some systemic changes to Minnesota policing. This summer, their stories helped persuade skeptical Republican leaders to compromise on new laws that include autism and mental health training for law enforcement, a prohibition on warrior-style training and the creation of a new advisory board to investigate incidents of deadly force.
Yet, according to the families, all of these changes fall woefully short of the reckoning that is necessary.
“Hundreds of families are out here suffering in the state of Minnesota alone, and thousands around the United States,” said Toshira Garraway, the founder of the families.
“The rioting happened not because of one life,” she said. “People finally had enough.”
ChaMee Vue, daughter of Chiasher Fong Vue, 52. In December 2019, Minneapolis police killed her father after officers say he pointed a “long gun” at them. Vue says she hasn’t been allowed to see the body-camera video and is still searching for answers as to how a call for help ended in tragedy.
“Theyarecorrupt,racist,andunwillingtochange.”
Ashley Quiñones, wife of Brian Quiñones, a 30-year-old rapper killed by Edina and Richfield police after a car chase in 2019. The officers open fired on Brian after he got out of the car with a knife. Ashley says he posed no real danger to the officers and criticized a lack of transparency during the investigation.
Ding …
In early August, a week after the meeting in the park, Dimock awoke to the sound of a text message. It was early, not quite time to rise for work, so she ignored it, rolled back over to sleep a little longer with her Chihuahua, Lettie.
Ding … Ding … Ding …
More messages poured in. She knew something had happened. She answered a call from Jason Heisler, her ex-husband and Kobe’s father. As she listened to his news, she noticed she was not mad, not sad — not really anything.
She walked into the living room and relayed the message to Encarnacion Garcia, her partner of 20 years, who was on the couch watching television.
“They’re not charging,” she said.
Garcia, who was both mad and sad, uttered an expletive. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
Dimock is a wiry 47-year-old with short black hair and a bright smile. Fifteen years ago, she broke her back as the passenger in a car wreck that doctors said would leave her permanently paralyzed. Dimock regained her leg function, though she still walks with a limp and she sometimes uses a cane, the latter mostly serving as a warning to give her space in crowds. She lives in Baxter, Minn., a rural town in a conservative part of the state, in a house on a lake with an American flag glimmering in the front yard, where she is among the less than 1% of residents who are Black.
Dimock is a self-professed introvert. Even before the pandemic, she left her 8-acre property as infrequently as possible. She never pictured herself speaking at protest rallies or on TV news or fielding personal calls from the governor.
In August, after the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office declined to charge the officers who killed her son, Dimock held an impromptu news conference in front of the government center to call for an independent investigation into her son’s killing. There, she cried for the first time about the decision.
By the time she got the call that Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s office would not file charges, it had been 11 months and five days since two Brooklyn Center police officers killed her son.
Kobe had lost his temper at Wendy’s and his grandfather, Erwin, left him to walk the six blocks home. Erwin thought the walk would cool him off, but instead it had the opposite effect. Kobe stormed into the house and grabbed a paring knife and a hammer and demanded an apology.
Kobe had recently lost his health insurance, leading him to go off his medication and quit a treatment program. He had never hurt his grandparents before, but earlier that year, during a similar episode, he’d cut himself with a kitchen knife and been committed to the hospital on a psychiatric hold. Erwin feared Kobe may hurt himself again and called 911.
In interviews with investigators later, Erwin said Kobe’s demeanor changed abruptly when he found out the police were coming. “He was just crying. He was so upset that the police were going to come, take him away and commit him.” Erwin took the weapons from Kobe and called back 911 to tell them to “just forget it.” The officers arrived anyway. Erwin asked them not to come inside the house, but they insisted on making sure everyone was OK. Police body camera footage shows Kobe seated in the living room, holding his head in his hands and sobbing as the officers questioned him. Then, suddenly, he lunged for something hidden in the couch cushions.
“He’s got a knife!” screamed one of the officers.
And then they shot him six times.
For a long time afterward, Dimock thought the officers would be held criminally liable for shooting her son. When months passed, and summer turned to winter and then spring, she thought maybe Freeman’s office was just taking time to build a rock-solid case.
Then George Floyd died. Watching the national news, she saw celebrities, reporters, presidential candidates — everyone — speaking Floyd’s name.
“Why aren’t you saying ‘Kobe Heisler’?” she wondered. “Why is my son’s name not in your mouth also?”
After that, Dimock and Garcia started driving down to Minneapolis for protests. There, they met the other families whose stories were similar to her own. Like Dimock, they too had waited for justice that never came.
When Freeman made the official announcement not to charge, if she felt anything at all, it was a relief to have that part over with. At least now she could take the next steps, like pursuing a civil lawsuit.
Dimock decided to hold a news conference that day outside the government center in Minneapolis, where Freeman’s office is located, to call for an independent prosecutor to review the case. She cried for the first time just after 3 p.m., standing in front of hundreds of people, including the other families and a dozen TV cameras.
That night, before driving back to Baxter, Dimock attended another protest. It was a small but vigorous crowd. Instead of shouting “shut it down,” they were screaming “burn it down.” At one point, a squad car drove by and the protesters swarmed it, yelling expletives at the officers inside.
This wasn’t Dimock’s style. She and Garcia have law enforcement in their families, and she knows police are not all bad people. But that night she found herself flipping the middle finger to the police officers.
“Get a different job!” she shouted. “What’s wrong with you?!”
Toshira Garraway, founder of Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, shown here with her fiance, Justin Teigen. In August 2009, Justin, 24, was found dead in a recycling facility after a chase with St. Paul police. Police say he crashed his car, climbed into a dumpster and suffocated when the truck picked it up. Garraway believes police are responsible for his death.
Taren Vang, girlfriend of 36-year-old Travis Jordan, killed by Minneapolis police in November 2018. Vang, fearing Travis might hurt himself, called for help, and when police responded, he walked toward them with a knife. Travis’ family and friends say he didn’t have to die that day.
In the world of the families, birthdays and death anniversaries are sacred, so they held a rally across the street from the Fourth Precinct, the north Minneapolis police headquarters, on the day Travis Jordan would have turned 38 years old.
Police shot and killed Jordan in November 2018. His girlfriend had called for a wellness check, afraid he might follow through on a threat to hurt himself. When the officers arrived, Jordan was holding a knife. He walked toward them, screaming, “Let’s do this!” The whole thing took less than two minutes.
Freeman said that Jordan presented a serious threat, and the officers were justified in using deadly force. Yet Jordan’s friends and family say it could have gone differently, that someone could have talked him down, that the officers could have kept a barrier between them and Jordan so they didn’t need to shoot.
“Travis had one bad day,” said Paul Johnson, Jordan’s best friend and roommate. “He could have easily recovered from that bad day. Easily.”
Now, nearly two years later, outside the police precinct where the officers who shot him work, the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Jordan. Then the families spoke.
Youa Vang Lee told of how a police officer from this same precinct shot her son, Fong Lee, on a playground 14 years ago. “He was out playing sports when the police approached him and killed him,” she said through a translator.
The officer who shot him eight times, Jason Andersen, said Lee had been carrying a gun. Lee’s family argued the gun was planted and had been in a police evidence locker for two years. A federal jury ruled that Andersen used reasonable force, and after the police chief fired him, Andersen fought the discharge through arbitration and won his job back with back pay. He was also charged criminally and fired for kicking a teenager in the head; in 2010, a jury found him not guilty and he again got his job back. He still works for the Minneapolis Police Department.
The families’ stories vary greatly in key details, such as whether their loved one carried a weapon, or if the incident was caught on film. Many begin with a person in the mental health crisis, which is why the families believe more 911 calls should be handled by social workers instead of armed police officers.
ChaMee Vue is among those who don’t know what happened during their family members’ final moments. She connected with the families in hopes they could help her find answers. Her father, Chiasher Fong Vue, was killed last December by Minneapolis police, and Vue said her family still hasn’t been allowed to view the body-camera footage.
“My dad was shot at by more than 100 bullets,” she said outside the Jordan rally. “He was killed by 13 bullets.”
Many of the families talk about how the system makes it difficult to find answers after these tragic encounters. Dimock was not permitted to see bodycam footage of Kobe’s death until the week Floyd died — nine months later — when the Brooklyn Center mayor invited her to come to his office and watch it, she presumes in hopes of stopping riots from spreading to his city.
Dimock has asked legislators to pursue a new law that would require police to show blood relatives bodycam video within 48 hours of the death. The families also want to end qualified immunity, the legal principle that protects police from being sued if they’re acting within their duties. They want to set up a system that allows them to seek reparations, and to eliminate the statute of limitations that stops some families from getting justice in civil courts years later. And they want to pressure prosecutors to more aggressively pursue charges against law enforcement officers who use deadly force or otherwise cause the death of a person in their custody.
Del Shea Perry, also present at the Jordan rally, spent two years calling for an investigation into how her son, Hardel Sherrell, died in Beltrami County jail. This summer, Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell joined her in demanding an investigation, after jail employees discovered two misfiled letters written by medical staff shortly after his death. In Sherrell’s final days, the letters state, guards neglected his complaints about his diminishing condition and “spoke negatively” of him, including accusing him of faking the paralysis that had spread throughout his body. The letters state the guards left Sherrell in his cell in soiled clothes and a diaper, which they refused to change, before he died of an undiagnosed immune disorder on Sept. 2, 2018.
Dimock touched her son’s urn, which rests on a table in her kitchen surrounded by clothes, art projects and other keepsakes that belonged to Kobe. The family spread a portion of his ashes in the Mississippi River during a Viking-style funeral ceremony.
A few weeks after the Jordan rally, in late August, some of the families marched through Minneapolis with Mia Montgomery, whose father, Lionel Lewis, died in Hibbing after police arrested him in 2002. Lewis’ death certificate lists the cause as “agitated delirium” — a controversial diagnosis that often entails profuse sweating, aggressive behavior and hyperthermia — and cocaine use. The day of the march, it was Montgomery’s birthday, and hundreds of people showed up to walk with her to Father Hennepin Bluff Park, where they grilled dinner and held a memorial for her dad.
Across the river, a crowd gathered around Nicollet Mall, where some said a police officer had killed a man. The crowd did not believe the police, who said the man had killed himself. By the time police released a video showing the death was actually a suicide, it was too late. By nightfall, rioters were breaking windows and looting shops downtown.
All over the country, from New York City to Los Angeles, similar protests and riots were unfolding over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, Wis.
Marilyn Hill, mother of Demetrius A. Hill, 18, killed by St. Paul police in April 1997. Hill says she doesn’t believe officer accounts that her son pointed a gun at them. She only began talking about the death this summer, 23 years later, in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, when she met the other families.
Del Shea Perry, mother of Hardel Sherrell, 27, who died from an undiagnosed immune disorder in Beltrami County jail in 2018. Medical staff at the jail say guards ignored Hardel’s complaints of chest pains and paralysis, and left him on the floor of his cell in a soiled diaper.
On Aug. 31, exactly one year after her son’s death, Dimock stood in front of a crowd of about 200 people outside Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, alongside five other women who have lost family members to law enforcement encounters.
The plan had been to march through downtown. But after the riots the week before, which Dimock did not want to see repeated, she asked the others to limit the event to a candlelight vigil.
The last few months have taken a toll on Dimock. She will continue to work behind the scenes to promote change. She may move to Minneapolis and run for office. She is considering turning her Baxter property into a retreat center for families who have lost people to police violence. But she’s decided her time driving down to Minneapolis, often several times a week and requiring her to miss work, must come to an end.
When it was her time to speak, she found the words stuck in her throat, making her choke up. She leaned on her cane for support as she tried to force them out. “The last time I saw my beautiful boy, he was lying in the morgue. He was still hard from the ice. And cold and clammy. I’m still upset I didn’t take the wisp of hair that I saw — I wish I had it. I just want to see my boy again. I just miss him so much.”
As she climbed in the car afterward, five deputies in tan uniforms rushed outside the Government Center, lined up across the street, and stared at her car. One of them placed a hand on his belt, near where his gun was holstered.
“Hey, we’re going to get pulled over, man,” said Garcia as he drove off. “I see him radioing.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” said Dimock. “I do not like this.”
Garcia drove steadily, careful not to stray above the speed limit, his eyes darting at the rear view mirror, until they arrived safely at the corner of Park Avenue and S. 37th Street.
Just a few blocks from where Floyd died, there is a cemetery that runs about half the length of a football field, with the words “Say their names” written on a hill. The headstones hold names like Travis Jordan, Hardel Sherrell, Justin Teigen, Philando Castile, Thurman Blevins, Jamar Clark, Brian Quinones, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. No one is actually buried here, and the headstones are made of flimsy cardboard. But for Dimock, this guerrilla art installation has become a holy place.
“Look at all these people,” said Dimock, walking through the memorial. “Isn’t this sad?”
She arrived at the headstone that said Kobe Heisler. It was decorated with photographs. The date of his death is wrong. But since Kobe’s ashes sit on a table in her kitchen, it’s the closest thing she has to a grave site.
“When I see this, I just see that he was clearly loved,” said Dimock.
Dimock, Garcia and a few family members cleaned up the headstone and rearranged the offerings, placing roses they brought from the vigil. They sat around the headstone and smoked cigarettes and talked until darkness shrouded the cemetery.
“It’s getting dark,” Garcia called to her. “I don’t like being out here after dark.”
Dimock lit one more cigarette and stuck around just a little longer.
CREDITS
Reporting Andy Mannix
Photography Aaron Lavinsky, David Joles
Photo editing Deb Pastner
Videography Aaron Lavinsky, Matt Gillmer
Video editing Jenni Pinkley
Editing Abby Simons, Catherine Preus, Eric Wieffering
Libor Jany is the Minneapolis public safety reporter for the Star Tribune. He joined the newspaper in 2013, after stints in newsrooms in Connecticut, New Jersey, California and Mississippi. He attended Lewis & Clark College (Portland, Ore.) and Mississippi State University, majoring in communications with a minor in sociology. In his free time, he likes traveling, having visited 25 countries on six continents, including Pakistan in the summer of 2017. He was born in Czechoslovakia, and has lived in Gabon, France and seven U.S. states.
Anna Boone
Digital designer and journalist - Star Tribune
Anna Boone is a digital designer and journalist at the Star Tribune. Since joining the company in 2017, she has worked on a variety of enterprise projects, including investigations into police handlings of sex assault cases, the events that led to the destruction of a police station, breaking down body camera footage from Daunte Wright's killing and creating a visual timeline of the week after George Floyd's death that changed the world. Previously she interned in Denver, doing print news design, and London, doing web design and writing. Boone attended Indiana University where she majored in journalism with a focus on graphic design and worked at her college newspaper all four years.
Maya Rao
Race and immigration reporter - Star Tribune
Maya Rao is the race and immigration reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. On staff since 2012, she has written about City Hall, urban affairs and regional issues, as well as reported from the bureau in Washington, D.C. Rao took time away to report on the North Dakota oil rush – one of the largest in U.S. history – and published a narrative nonfiction book titled “Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks and the Making of an Oil Frontier” in 2018. She previously worked as a staff writer for the Philadelphia inquirer and Press of Atlantic City, and has been published in the Atlantic, Houston Chronicle, Longreads and The Millions.
Mark Vancleave
Video journalist - Star Tribune
Mark Vancleave is a video journalist at the Star Tribune covering breaking news, features, and investigative projects. His work includes reporting on inequities in disabled Minnesotans' access to jobs, families' ability to intervene when elderly loved ones face abuse and neglect in care homes and civilian deaths at the hands of police–including the recent killing of George Floyd.
Jennifer Bjorhus covers the environment for the Star Tribune. During her 12 years with the company, she has covered business and criminal justice as well as been an investigative reporter. She was a reporter on the newspaper’s 2018 “Denied Justice” series about systemic failures in the criminal justice system’s response to reported sexual assaults in Minnesota, a Pulitzer finalist and winner of a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the national Society of Professional Journalists. Her projects on police use of force and on discipline by the state’s police licensing board won national awards including the Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting and a National Headliner Award for investigative reporting. Jennifer was named Journalist of the Year in 2018 by the Minnesota chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She started in journalism as a general assignment reporter at the Seattle Times and covered a range of business beats at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Oregonian and the San Jose Mercury News. A native of Minnesota, she graduated from Carleton College in 1986 and the University of California-Berkeley in 1994 with master’s degrees in journalism and Asian studies. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, Ranjit. They have two sons.
Aaron Lavinsky
Staff photographer - Star Tribune
Aaron Lavinsky is a staff photographer for the Star Tribune covering news, sports and everything in between. He joined the visuals staff in 2014 after working at newspapers in Washington and Arizona. Lavinsky is a licensed drone pilot and is passionate about the outdoors. Lavinsky’s work has been recognized by the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism, Pictures of the Year International and the Society of Professional Journalists. He lives in the Twin Cities with his fiancée, a fellow journalist, and his dog, Bandit, and cat, Pixel.
Andy Mannix
Reporter - Star Tribune
Andy Mannix covers federal courts and law enforcement for the Star Tribune. He joined the paper in January 2016 and previously covered Minneapolis City Hall and statewide criminal justice. Mannix teaches at the University of Minnesota journalism school, of which he's an alumnus. He holds a master's degree from University of California-Berkeley, where he focused on data-driven investigative journalism. His work for the Star Tribune includes reports about solitary confinement conditions in Minnesota prisons, the use of sedatives in police encounters and several high-profile officer-involved shootings. Prior to joining the Star Tribune, Mannix wrote about a variety of topics, such as crime, recreational marijuana and politics, for publications including The Seattle Times, MinnPost, City Pages and The Minnesota Daily. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and a dog named Laika.
Carlos Gonzalez
Staff photographer - Star Tribune
Carlos Gonzalez is an award-winning staff photographer at the Star Tribune. He covers a variety of assignments including news, features, and sports.
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Tragedies & Journalists
A 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
This documentary, available online and on DVD, features a wide range of Australian journalists their recounting experiences covering traumatic stories.
Whether clinicians like it or not, children and families affected by trauma are routinely covered by the media. When that happens, clinicians often face difficult choices.
In conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dart Centre Asia Pacific created a teaching video on the treatment of news sources. The project was developed to supplement teaching materials for journalism educators.
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Integrating clinical and social perspective without sacrificing either the complexity of individual experience or the breadth of political context, "Trauma and Recovery" brings a new level of understanding to the psychological consequences of the full range of traumatic life events.
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
Jonathan Shay is a Boston based psychiatrist caring for Vietnam combat veterans diagnosed with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. In this unique and revolutionary book, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with many of his patients, Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD . Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, so much can be learned about combat trauma, especially when it is threaded through the compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.
Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War
War journalists, like all who have prolonged exposure to violence, come home emotionally maimed and often broken. And yet, a news culture in denial has pretended that war journalists are immune from trauma. This fit into the macho culture of war journalism. It also assuaged the consciences of those running news organizations, who often crumple up and discard, years later, those they send to war. Dr. Feinstein has provided us with research that is a chilling reminder that war journalists are human, as well as a searing indictment of major news conglomerates who have refused to acknowledge or address the suffering of their own.
PTSD and Veterans: A Conversation with Dr. Frank Ochberg
How do we help veterans who are returning from war with PTSD? Dr. Frank Ochberg, a leading authority on PTSD, shares his experiences, seasoned insights and suggestions in this intimate conversation with reporter Mike Walters. He shares his insights regarding common symptoms to look out for and the importance of building trust and other aspects of the patient-therapist relationship. He then explains techniques he has developed that help his clients work through the trauma and adapt to civilian life.
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Scholars
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake is a compilation of autobiographic essays by seventeen of the field's pioneers, each of whom has been recognized for his or her contributions by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Each author discusses how he or she first got interested in the field, what each feels are his or her greatest achievements, and where the discipline might - and should - go from here. This impressive collection of essays by internationally-renowned specialists is destined to become a classic of traumatology literature. It is a text that will provide future mental health professionals with a window into the early years of this rapidly expanding field.
Post-Traumatic Therapy And Victims Of Violence (Psychosocial Stress Series)
Frank M. Ochberg, MD is adjunct professor of psychiatry, criminal justice and journalism at Michigan State University. He served in the cabinet of Governor William Milliken as Mental Health Director. His book, Post Traumatic Therapy and Victims of Violence, is widely acclaimed as one of the leading resources in the field.
In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous and surprising course of his fascinating life journey, one that took him from what he refers to as, "a Jewish Huck Finn childhood in Brooklyn, to deep and meaningful friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals, writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer.
This work is more than a memoir, it is also a remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors. Lifton explored the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. Lifton writing illuminates the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians who had been socialized to Nazi evil. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil in order to help others move past it.
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
In this original psychological literary work, Dr. Jonathan Shay continues what he started in his book, Achilles in Vietnam. Uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, Shay sheds light on the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road to recovery, the return to civilian life. The combination of psychological insight and literary brilliance feels seamless. Shay makes an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions and in doing so deepens the readers understanding of the veteran's experience.
Trauma Journalism personalizes this movement with in-depth profiles of reporters, researchers and trauma experts engaged in an international effort to transform how the media work under the most difficult of conditions.Through biographical sketches concerning several significant traumatic events (Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine school tragedy, 9/11, Iraq War, the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina), students and working reporters will gain insights into the critical components of contemporary journalism practices.
After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for Returning Troops and Their Families
Two experts from the VA National Center for PTSD come together in this work to provide an essential resource for service members, their spouses, families, and communities. They shed light on what troops really experience during deployment and once they return home. Pinpointing the most common after-effects of war and offering strategies for troop reintegration to daily life, Friedman and Slone cover the myths and realities of homecoming; reconnecting with spouse and family; anger and adrenaline; guilt and moral dilemmas; and PTSD and other mental-health concerns. With a wealth of community and government resources, tips, and suggestions, After the War Zone is a practical guide to helping troops and their families prevent war zone stresses from having a lasting negative impact.
Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges
Experiencing trauma at some point in life is almost inevitable, overcoming it is not. This inspiring book identifies ten key ways to weather and bounce back from stress and trauma. Steven M. Southwick incorporates the latest scientific research and interviews with trauma survivors. This book provides a practical guide to building emotional, mental and physical resilience after trauma.
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions. Throughout, they focus on the real-life challenges that arise in typical therapy sessions to deepen our understanding and application of evidence based interventions.
While this book is intended for all clinical mental health professionals who work with trauma survivors it is also a phenomenal resource for those who seek to broaden their understanding of the way various approaches to understanding treatment of trauma.
The award-winning author and noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton offers a powerful critique of American militarism during the Vietnam War. Home from the War is recognized as the ultimate text for those working with Vietnam veterans, the book's insights have had enormous influence among psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world.
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The Boston Globe called this book, "A powerful reminder not only of what happened, but of the monumental evil done by the particular human beings who were trained to heal and cure."
Based on arresting historical scholarship and personal interviews with Nazi and prisoner doctors, the book traces the inexorable logic leading from early Nazi sterilization and euthanasia of its own citizens to mass extermination of "racial undesirables."This extraordinary work combines research and analyzation to describe a seemingly contradictory phenomenon of doctors becoming agents of mass murder. With chilling literary power, Lifton describes the Nazi transmutation of values that allowed medical killing to be seen as a therapeutic healing of the body politic.
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large.
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims & Trauma
More essential now than ever, Covering Violence connects journalistic practices to the rapidly expanding body of literature on trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and secondary traumatic stress, and pays close attention to current medical and political debates concerning victims' rights.
Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills is a story that points to a crisis facing international institutions and the media who seek to alleviate and report human suffering throughout the world. The goals of the editor are to tell the story of thousands of individuals dedicated to helping others; and to integrate issues of protection and care into all levels of planning, implementing and evaluating international intervention and action. The book identifies approaches that have proven useful and explores and suggests future directions.
The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence
Ervin Staub explores the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of group aggression. He sketches a conceptual framework for the many influences on one group's desire to harm another: cultural and social patterns predisposing to violence, historical circumstances resulting in persistent life problems, and needs and modes of adaptation arising from the interaction of these influences.
Drawing on more than 30 years of criminal justice experience, author Susan Herman explains why justice for all requires more than holding offenders accountable it means addressing victims three basic needs: to be safe, to recover from the trauma of the crime, and regain control of their lives.
Arnold Isaacs, who spent the final years of the war in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, describes his firsthand observations of the collapse of Cambodia and South Vietnam―from the 1973 Paris peace agreement to the American evacuation of Saigon and its aftermath―with heartbreaking detail, from the devastated battlefields and villages to the boats filled with terrified refugees.
Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles
This is the story of the Northern Ireland troubles told as never before. It is not concerned with the political bickering, but with the lives of those who have suffered and the deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict
A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold through Arab-American Lives
The history of Arab settlement in the United States stretches back nearly as far as the history of America itself. For the first time, Alia Malek brings this history to life. In each of eleven spellbinding chapters, she inhabits the voice and life of one Arab American, at one time-stopping historical moment.
This book seeks to tell the life stories of the innocent men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the “war on terror.” As we approach the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, this collection of narratives gives voice to the people who have had their human rights violated here in the U.S. by post-9/11 policies and actions.
Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs/Los niños en un mundo de las pandillas
With profound empathy for a reality that is too easily defined and dismissed as repugnant, Unsettled/Desasosiego takes us on a visual journey into the lives of children deeply affected by civil war and gang violence.
Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future
Legal Lynching offers a succinct, accessible introduction to the debate over the death penalty's history and future, exposing a chilling frequency of legal error, systemic racial and economic discrimination, and pervasive government misconduct.
War Photographer is a documentary by Christian Frei about the photographer James Nachtwey. As well as telling the story of an iconic man in the field of war photography, the film addresses the broader scope of ideas common to all those involved in war journalism, as well as the issues that they cover.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
For the first time in the United States comes the tragic and profoundly important story of the legendary Canadian general who "watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
In Blood and Soil, Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.
Ophuls examines attitudes toward war in the Western media, and in the societies they inform. The 243-minute documentary interlaces stark realities of combat with mordantly hilarious references to Hollywood fantasy-versions of war, and includes over 50 interviews with some of the world’s leading journalists, commentators, historians, newscasters and many others.
An enthralling, deeply moving memoir from one of our foremost American war correspondents. Janine Di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)
Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time--in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and New York City on September 11th, among many other places.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.
With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families.
Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide
This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo that authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how this memo set the stage for divergence.
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.
Humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence. Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, "Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology" is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence.
A gripping and insightful examination of the relationship between news-makers and news-watchers, looking at how images of war and tragedy are presented to us in the media and how we consume them
Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.
In his extraordinarily gripping and thought-provoking new book, Jeremy Bowen charts his progress from keen young novice whose first reaction to the sound of gunfire was to run towards it to the more circumspect veteran he is today
The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict
The Observer's chief foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont, takes us into the guts of modern conflict. He visits the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar; discovers a deserted Al Qaeda camp where he finds documents describing a plan to attack London; talks to young bomb-throwers in a Rafah refugee camp. Unflinching and utterly gripping
France's leading sociologist shows how, far from reflecting the tastes of the majority, television, particularly television journalism, imposes ever-lower levels of political and social discourse on us all.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World
MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well, the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in today’s world. By using the practices described within, you can learn to manage chronic pain resulting from illness and/or stress related disorders.
Slee: A Very Short Introduction, addresses the biological and psychological aspects of sleep, providing a basic understanding of what sleep is and how it is measured, a look at sleep through the human lifespan, and the causes and consequences of major sleep disorders.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.
This is a new edition of the world's leading textbook on journalism. Translated into more than a dozen languages, David Randall's handbook is an invaluable guide to the 'universals' of good journalistic practice for professional and trainee journalists worldwide.
Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka
This provocative study of the political culture of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia - is one of the few genuinely comparative studies in anthropology and in taking up such an important question as nationalism it reminds us that truly relevant anthropology questions deep-seated cultural beliefs, including our own
Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain
Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma.
During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks: Why?
The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan
Christina Lamb's evocative reporting brings to life the stories that no one else had written about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war. Her unique perspective on Afghanistan and deep passion for the people she writes about make this the definitive account of the tragic plight of a proud nation.
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe
Christina Lamb's powerful narrative traces the history of the brutal civil war, independence, and the Mugabe years, all through the lives of two people on opposing sides. Although born within a few miles of each other, their experience growing up could not have been more different.
Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Failure in Afghanistan
Butcher & Bolt brilliantly brings to life the personalities involved in Afghanistan’s relationship with the world, chronicling the misunderstandings and missed opportunities that have so often led to war.
Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Jerusalem 1913 shows us a cosmopolitan city whose religious tolerance crumbled before the onset of Z ionism and its corresponding nationalism on both sides-a conflict that could have been resolved were it not for the onset of World War I. With extraordinary skill, Amy Dockser Marcus rewrites the story of one of the world's most indelible divides.
They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq
Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.
The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans
Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since. The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti
Kathie Klarreich's compelling memoir interweaves shattering political events with an intensely personal narrative about the Haitian musician Klarreich, who turns out to be as enthralling and complicated as the political events she covered.
In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times
Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodríguez spent several years following several youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives.
By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. This story is at times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
Still Here, documents the ongoing expressions of hope, perseverance, and suffering in the still-devastated communities of New Orleans and Texas post hurricane Katrina. Rodríguez spent two years photographing and interviewing families and individuals who shared their daily struggles to rebuild their lives.
Breaking News, Breaking Down, Two journalists' emotional journey after 9/11 & Katrina - This program tells the hidden story of how traumatic news impacts the men and women who cover it. Mike Walter loved chasing the big story, but on one September morning, the biggest story of his career chased him down: a jet rained from the sky, piercing the Pentagon and shattering his emotional well being.
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers
The debate about women and torture has, until recently, focused on women as victims of violence. The essays in One of the Guys challenge and examine the expectations placed on women while attempting to understand female perpetrators of abuse and torture in a broader context.
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
Tara McKelvey — the first U.S.journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib — traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians.
Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women
This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity; from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the women who know it best.
Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions.
Ari Goldman’s exploration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of spending a year in mourning for his father will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, as he describes how this year affected him as a son, husband, father, and member of his community.
What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today.
Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today
In Being Jewish, Ari L. Goldman offers eloquent thoughts about an absorbing exploration of modern Judaism. A bestselling author and widely respected chronicler of Jewish life, Goldman vividly contrasts the historical meaning of Judaism's heritage with the astonishing and multiform character of the religion today.
This book is a collection of reflective crime pieces, often approaching the events from different angles, yet written by on-the spot observers and reporters. There is an emphasis on the victims, and as a result these stories are written with sensitivity and compassion rather than sensationalism.
Over twenty-five tales of grisly murders and suspicious killings are laid out for inspection, including the story of the Police Killers and tales of the seedy Melbourne underworld.
This fully revised and updated new edition of Smart Health Choices will provide you with the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the Internet, or a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your health care, and to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones based on personal preferences and the best available evidence.
The Spanish-language version of the Dart Center's 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
9/11: Mental Health in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks
This book comprehensively describes the psychological response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and, to a lesser degree, Washington DC. The impact of what happened on the local and US national population is considered through various epidemiological studies, as well as personal accounts from some of those more directly involved.
Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation’s most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments. With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.
Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions
Daring to Feel is a bold, brave book. Jody Santos challenges the entrenched doctrine that journalists are neutral, dispassionate observers of 'fact.' Santos demonstrates how journalists themselves and society as a whole benefit from emotionally nuanced and emotionally engaged reporting. This is a beautifully written tribute to the passion of journalists and the heart-wrenching stories they cover.
The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War
In The Things They Cannot Say, award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who—by sharing the truth about their wars—display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war—including his complicity in a murder—and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.
Kevin Sites, the award-winning journalist, covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity.
Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War
Using his trademark immersive style, Kevin Sites uncovered surprising stories with unexpected truths. He swam in the Kunduz River with an infamous warlord named Nabi Gechi, who demonstrated both his fearsome killing skills as well as a genius for peaceful invention. Sites talked with ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, female cops, farmers, drug addicts, and diplomats, and patrolled with American and Afghan soldiers. In Swimming with Warlords he helps us to understand this kingdom of primitive beauty, dark mysteries, and savage violence, as well as the conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives--and what we might expect tomorrow and in the years to come.
The Price They Paid is the stunning and dramatic true story of a legendary helicopter commander in Vietnam and the flight crews that followed him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever—and how that brutal experience has changed their lives in the forty years since the war ended.
What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
Most Americans are now familiar with PTSD and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking book, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.
Collective Conviction: The Story of Disaster Action
Collective Conviction tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events.
When Lynne O’Donnell met Pauline and Margaret in Iraq she could never have guessed the wealth of stories she’d discover. Over tea the two women tell Lynne of their lives in the country: each having married Iraqi men had then relocated from England more than thirty years before.
Trauma Reporting A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief.