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"He confused people because he was so tall that many thought he was a bully type, but deep down he was a loving person." This is how Roxie Washington described the father of her daughter Gianna, a six-year-old girl who was orphaned this May 25 when her father, George Floyd, was killed in the city of Minneapolis in a new case of abuse Police officers in the United States who have rekindled the wick of racial tensions and who are putting Donald Trump's presidency in check.

The "friendly giant," the nickname Floyd had been known to by many since the days when he was a football player in his hometown of Houston, had moved to Minneapolis in 2014 in search of work and a fresh start after a episode that marked his life, his stay in prison after being sentenced to five years in prison in a case of armed robbery of which he pleaded guilty in 2009.

He started out working at a Salvation Army store in downtown Minneapolis, then tried out as a truck driver and became a night watchman at a club called The New Rodeo where by chance, last year, he met Derek Chauvin , the cop who He was earning a bonus as a security guard and ended his life last week in a controversial arrest whose images have gone around the world.

George Floyd's last job was at another Hispanic restaurant in the city, the Conga Latin Bistro, where he had been laid off last March when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ordered the closure of all non-essential stores in the state to trying to stop the coronavirus pandemic, its owner, Jovanni Thunstrom, reminded local media this week.

"He was a very caring person, he really liked Latin music and food ... all my employees and my clients loved Floyd. He was not an aggressive person, he never was in the four years he worked with me . All of this is an injustice, it has been a murder, they killed him and we are going to continue fighting for justice to be done because he had never done anything to anyone and he did not deserve to die that way, "according to the Dominican businessman.

Floyd grew up in Houston's Third Ward, one of the city's predominantly black neighborhoods, where he excelled on the Jack Yates High School football team, former NBA player Stephen Jackson recalled. "It pissed me off so much that after all the things you went through, when you became the best version of yourself, they got you out like this. Rest Easy Twin," he said goodbye to his networks.

He got to have a basketball scholarship to study at a Florida state university but never finished his university studies, and on his return to Houston he made a place for himself in the city's music scene as a rapper in the band Screwed Up Click, in which He became known in the 1990s as Big Floyd - half a meter tall - with DJ Screw, a local mini hip hop legend.

Another of his childhood friends, Christopher Harris, also regretted George Floyd's unfair ending, " The way he died is nonsense . When you try to have faith in the system, a system that you know was not designed for you, When you want to do things right and you don't succeed, you start looking for justice by your hand, "he told the local newspaper" Houston Chronicle. "

He was 46 years old and according to the official report of the Hennepin County coroner's office suffered from coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease and toxic substances were detected in his body, but found no physical evidence of possible traumatic suffocation or strangulation. cause of his death. Results that differ completely from the private autopsy that his family commissioned.

"What we found is consistent with what people saw (in the images of his arrest)," according to Michael Baden, one of the forensic doctors hired by the family, according to which the weight on his back, the handcuffs on his wrists. , and the position of his body disabled his lungs. A death by unjust and unnecessary suffocation that has returned to flood the streets of the country with anger at the war cry "I can't breathe."

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