They'll kill me. I can't breathe: Cops find new transcripts of George Floyd

George Floyd told officers more than 20 times that he could not breathe, according to newly released transcripts of Minneapolis police body camera footage documenting the last minutes of his life.

Several times, too, he exclaimed that officers were killing him.

“Come on, man. Oh, oh. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe,” Floyd said, according to one of the transcripts. “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

The transcripts offer one of the most thorough and dramatic accounts yet of the moments before Floyd’s death, which set off a national movement about police use of force. They were filed in state court in Minneapolis on Tuesday as part of an effort by a former officer, Thomas Lane, 37, to have charges that he aided and abetted Floyd’s murder thrown out by a judge.

Floyd died after an officer, Derek Chauvin, 44, pressed his knee down onto Floyd’s neck until he was no longer moving.

Chauvin, who was on the force for 19 years, faces second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in Floyd’s death and up to 40 years in prison if he is convicted. Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, 26, who were both rookie officers, and Tou Thao, 34, also face 40 years in prison if convicted on charges of aiding and abetting Floyd’s murder. All four officers were fired.

The filings made in court this week include 82 pages of body camera transcripts and the 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane, his lawyer alongside him, by investigators from Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

In that interview, when he was asked whether he felt at the time that Floyd was having a medical emergency, Lane replied, “Yeah, I felt maybe that something was going on.”

At the end of the interview, though, Lane’s lawyer, Earl Gray, objected when an investigator asked Lane whether he felt that either he or Chauvin had contributed to Floyd’s death.

“You’re not going to answer that,” Gray said. Lane did not answer the question.

The filings also include what Gray described as pictures from inside the car Floyd was sitting in when Lane first approached him. Officers had been called after a nearby store employee reported that Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. According to Gray, the pictures show two crumpled counterfeit $20 bills that were found lodged between the center console and the passenger’s seat.

The transcripts zero in on the most critical moments of Floyd’s restraint by officers.

After Floyd says that the officers are going to kill him, Chauvin says, “Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.”

While Floyd was being restrained on the ground, on his stomach, with Chauvin’s knee pressed onto his neck, Lane asked whether Floyd should be turned over onto his side.

Chauvin said, “No, he’s staying put where we got him.”

Lane then said he was worried Floyd might be having a medical emergency.

“Well that’s why we got the ambulance coming,” Chauvin responded, according to one of the transcripts.

“OK, I suppose,” Lane replied, adding soon after, “I think he’s passing out.”

At that moment, a bystander shouted: “He’s not even breathing right now, bro, you think that’s cool? You think that’s cool, right?”

The filings were the latest effort by Lane, who held Floyd’s legs while he was on the ground, to argue that he does not bear the responsibility for Floyd’s death that prosecutors say he does.

In court papers asking the judge to dismiss the charges against Lane, Gray argues that Lane, as a new officer, was taking his cues from Chauvin, a senior officer who served as a field training officer, or FTO, for some rookies. He also states that Lane believed that Floyd was on drugs, “based on his behavior.”

After Chauvin refused to turn Floyd onto his side, Gray wrote in his filings, “Lane listened to FTO Chauvin and thought it made sense because there are times when a person who is OD’ing or passed out one minute but then comes back really aggressive.”