Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao responded on May 25 at the scene where officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng tried to arrest Floyd for alleged attempts to pay a counterfeit bill.
Floyd was later confined to the ground. While Thao was standing nearby, Lane, Kueng and Officer Derek Chauvin held Floyd to the ground, while Floyd pleaded with officers that he could not breathe.
Thao and the other two officers are each accused of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree murder.
In the roughly half-hour interview, Thao told FBI agents that the call for an officer’s backup on the scene sounded “as if it was urgent in his voice.” He said he heard there was “a forgery going on.”
Thao told investigators that after he arrived, he saw the door of a police car open and that Floyd resisted efforts to voluntarily sit in the car.
“Floyd is a bigger boy. He’s bigger than all of us,” Thao said. “He’s calling … does not want to get in the squad car.”
While the other officers struggled to get Floyd in the car, Thao said he suggested putting Floyd on the ground. He told agents he said, “Okay guys, it’s useless to do this. Let’s put him on the ground.”
Thao described the crowd that gathered around the scene as ‘hostile’, saying he had to tell people several times to get off the street and that he even had to get someone back to the sidewalk.
Special Agent Brent Peterson asked for specifications on what they said, to which Thao replied that they said they would walk away from Floyd, shake his neck and look at him.
It led Peterson to ask, “Is that hostile or was it that they were trying to warn your attention that something had happened to Mr. Floyd?”
Thao said that while talking to Kueng after paramedics arrived and began carrying out life-saving efforts on Floyd, “It looks like this man is working, so this could potentially be a critical incident if he dies … I do not know. his status, but they do CPR. ”
Thao said much of his time was spent on the scene making the officers and keeping an eye on the crowd gathered on the sidewalk, some of whom wrote on the officers.
Asked by FBI agents if there were any suggestions that the officers were just talking to Floyd and seeing what the problem was, Thao said he assumed the officers did, and that he was not the contact person. He said he did not try to do this.
The video cuts off towards the end of the interview. Agents also asked Thao if he ever saw Floyd stop fighting. Thao replied that he might have pecked a few times when he visited the crowd. He told the agents that Floyd was lying right there.
The release of this footage comes the day after video of Thao’s bodycam was released showing that he was trying to control a crowd of people who were increasingly overwhelmed when police intercepted Floyd, and pleaded with officers to get rid of him and to control his pulse.
Thao said that although a dispatcher blew him away while he was halfway to the scene, he continued to add support because he knew the area was dangerous.
Thao said that although he had known Chauvin for about three years, the two did not talk much when they were not on duty.
“We really don’t talk much outside of work,” he told agents.
None of the officers has filed formal pleas. Lawyers for Thao and Lane have dismissed the cases against them, and Kueng’s lawyer says his client intends to plead guilty.
CNN reached out to lawyers representing the four former officers for comment on Friday.
Lawyers for Chauvin and Kueng declined to comment, while lawyers for Thao and Lane did not immediately respond.
CNN’s Omar Jimenez and Brad Parks contributed to this report.
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