'I Cannot Breathe!': Black Man in Minneapolis Dies With Video Showing Police Officer Kneeling on His Neck

By Timothy Bella, The Washington Post

26 May 20

 

n a video shared on social media early Tuesday, a Minneapolis police officer pins his knee against the neck of a black man who appears to be struggling to breathe on the ground.

“I cannot breathe! I cannot breathe!” the man yells as bystanders gathered. “Don’t kill me!”

The Minneapolis Police Department announced early Tuesday that the unnamed man, who is believed to be in his 40s, later died of a “medical incident” after police responded to a report of a forgery in progress on Monday.

Now, the FBI and state authorities are investigating his death as advocates and city officials call for a quick response.

“Our community continues to be traumatized again, and again and again,” Minneapolis City Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins said in a statement to KARE. “We must demand answers.”

The incident began when two officers arrived at the 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South around 8 p.m. Monday, police said. Officers located the man, whom they believed to be under the influence, inside his car. After he got out, police said the man “physically resisted officers.”

“Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and realized that the suspect was suffering a medical distress,” a Minneapolis police spokesman said in a news briefing early Tuesday. “Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died a short time later.”

Police said that no weapons were used at any time by the man or the officers during the encounter.

Darnella Frazier was on her way to see friends when she saw the incident unfolding outside of a Cup Foods grocery store on the south side of Minneapolis. She quickly began recording the encounter in a 10-minute video later shared to Facebook.

“When I walked up, he was already on the ground,” Frazier said in a Facebook video. “The cops, they was pinning him down by his neck and he was crying. They wasn’t trying to take him serious.”

As more people gathered around the encounter outside the grocery store, the man pleaded that his whole body was in pain. Frazier recalled that the man’s face was being pressed so hard against the ground that his nose was bleeding.

Witnesses begged the white officer to take his knee off the man’s neck.

“You’re going to just sit there with your knee on his neck?” one bystander said on the video.

Minutes later, the man appeared to be motionless on the ground, his eyes closed and head laying against the road.

“Bro, he’s not even f------ moving!” one bystander pleaded to police. “Get off of his neck!”

Another asked, “Did you kill him?”

Later, the unconscious man was loaded onto a stretcher and into an ambulance. Bystanders who remained in front of Cup Foods pointed at the two officers and said the incident would haunt them “for the rest of your life.”

“The police killed him, bro, right in front of everybody,” Frazier said on Facebook. “He was crying, telling them like, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and everything. They killed this man.”