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MINNEAPOLIS: George Floyd’s girlfriend took the witness stand on Thursday (April 1) and described their relationship, from a first kiss to date nights at restaurants, but also talked about how an addiction to painkillers took over her life. together.
Courteney Ross, 45, was the first witness to meet Floyd personally to testify at the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop accused of murdering the man he loved by kneeling on his neck during an arrest last May.
In his testimony, Ross described how his romance with Floyd began in 2017 when he offered to pray with her. He also talked about addiction: Like millions of other Americans, Floyd and Ross fought to get off opioids.
“It’s a classic story of how many people get addicted to opioids,” Ross said. “We both suffered from chronic pain: mine was in my neck, his was in his back.”
The death of Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, sparked protests in the United States and around the world over racial injustice and police brutality against blacks.
Prosecutors wanted the jury to hear Ross’s frank account of the use of opiates to undermine a central pillar of Chauvin’s defense in a trial seen as a litmus test of the responsibility of American police.
Chauvin’s lawyers argue that Floyd’s death, which the county medical examiner called a homicide at the hands of police, was actually an overdose of the fentanyl found in his blood at an autopsy.
Prosecutors have said that Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s lead attorney, has tried to increase drug use in an effort to cloud Floyd’s character and that the theory is contradicted by medical evidence.
Nelson seemed to recognize the sensitivity when he stood up to question Ross: “I’m sorry to hear about your struggles with opioid addiction,” he began. “Thanks for sharing that with the jury.”
Before that, Ross, who had pinned a heart-shaped brooch to his black jacket for the occasion, smiled fondly as he remembered when prosecutors asked him on the fourth day of testimony how he met Floyd.
“It is one of my favorite stories to tell,” he said.
‘SIS’? YOU ARE WELL?’
Ross, 45, said he met Floyd in August 2017 at a Salvation Army homeless shelter, where he worked as a security guard. He was waiting in the lobby to visit his son’s father after closing the cafeteria where he worked. Floyd walked over to her.
“Floyd has this big, deep, husky southern voice,” she said, “and he was like, ‘Sister’? Are you okay, sister ‘?'”
He felt that she was sad and lonely and offered to pray with her.
“It was so sweet,” Ross said, rubbing a tissue over his eyes. “At that point I had lost a lot of faith in God.”
They had their first kiss in the lobby that night and, except for an occasional break, were together until his death, he said.
On his cell phone, Floyd listed Ross, a mother of two, as “Mom.”
They took walks in the parks and around the lakes of Ross’s native Minneapolis, which was still new to the Texas-raised Floyd, and dined out often: “He was a big man,” she said, describing his daily weight lifting. ” He is looking for a lot of energy to keep going. “
He said that he adored his two young daughters and that he was a “mama’s boy.”
After his mother’s death in 2018, he looked like “a kind of shell of himself, like he was broken.”
On occasion, the couple took prescription pain relievers. At other times they bought OxyContin and other pills on the black market. Sometimes they get over the habit; sometimes they relapsed.
“Addiction, in my opinion, is a lifelong struggle,” he said. “It’s not something that comes and goes, it’s something that I’ll deal with forever.”
Nelson, Chauvin’s attorney, asked Ross about an episode during which she took Floyd to a hospital emergency room, where he was treated for five days for an overdose.
“Didn’t you know he had taken heroin at the time?” Nelson asked him. She said no.
Attorneys for Floyd’s family, Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, criticized Chauvin’s defense in a joint statement: “Tens of thousands of Americans fight self-medication and opioid abuse and are treated with dignity, respect and support, not brutally, “his statement said. .
Ross said his last conversation with Floyd was on May 24, when they spoke on the phone.
A day later, Floyd was immobilized below Chauvin’s knees, under arrest on suspicion of buying cigarettes at a grocery store with a fake $ 20 bill.
The jury has heard three days of testimony from bystanders who said they yelled at Chauvin and other officers, imploring them to check Floyd’s pulse.
On Thursday, paramedics who arrived at the scene said they had to remove the police from Floyd, who by then had stopped breathing, had no pulse and had dilated pupils.
“In simple terms,” Derek Smith, one of the paramedics, told the jury, “I thought he was dead.”
