George Floyd died of a drug overdose
A thorough, up-to-date case that the police are innocent of Floyd's death
This post will lay out the case that George Floyd died of a drug overdose and the police acted largely correctly in the encounter, and that, consequently, the establishment media have been lying to you for the better part of a year.
The State’s Autopsy
Two autopsies were performed, and both ruled the death a homicide. Clearly, a hurdle to be overcome in my argument here. The first one is the state’s autopsy, which you can read here. It is titled as follows:
Whu? What the hell does “complicating” mean in this case? What relationship does it express between “cardiopulmonary arrest” and “subdual, restraint and neck compression”? Seems purposely vague and ass-covering to me, but local pathologists may correct me if I’m wrong.
Anyway, a short press release from the coroner’s office (pdf) pointed to homicide as the cause, and that is often cited as open and shut. However, I arrogantly insist on reading the damn report to see what’s in it. It includes this section:
No neck trauma, no petechiae. Their absence is not definitive proof that Floyd did not die of strangulation, but given that they are associated with that cause of death (and not e.g. asphyxia from respiratory depression), in a probabilistic sense it certainly becomes less likely. Also this:
No sign of strangulation on dissection either. If George Floyd died from mechanical asphyxia from the knee to his neck, it has no corroboration from the state’s autopsy. In fact, an internal memo based on a conversation with the medical examiner contained the following:
AB is chief medical examiner Andrew Baker, who performed the autopsy. So, straight from the horse’s mouth, the state’s autopsy produced no physical evidence that the officers caused George Floyd’s death. The conclusion of homicide was based entirely on other evidence, primarily, or perhaps entirely, the video.
I will circle back to the question of the toxicology report, but for now, let’s take a look at…
The Private Autopsy
The second, private autopsy was ordered and paid for by Floyd’s family, which presents a clear bias towards a particular conclusion. Nonetheless, I will presume that the doctors responsible committed no outright fraud, but rather that at worst they are guilty of bullshit–technically correct or technically arguable statements which are nonetheless misleading.
Some statements from the doctors who performed the autopsy are found in this NYT story. Here’s a quote from one of the doctors:
What was that evidence, specifically? They certainly say a lot about what they didn’t find:
So the video again, and some abrasions on his face and shoulder. Ho hum. The Floyd family lawyer also released this on twitter:
The “findings” section, you’ll note, do not make mention of any specific physical evidence found in the autopsy, merely conclusions. Of the findings in the “condition of the body” section do refer to physical evidence. The very broad statements about the internal organs contradict some far more specific findings of the state’s autopsy, especially about the lungs. It also mentions bleeding in the neck, though the phrasing tickles my bullshit detector–the mention of “outside the carotid” in particular is just specific enough to suggest pressure on the carotid without actually making the implication outright.
In any case, the findings of the private autopsy in favor of mechanical asphyxia amount to abrasions on his neck, which are indirect and circumstantial. We already know his head was pressed against the pavement. To the extent that it offers new evidence, it is very weak. And given the incentives, we can presume this is the best the could come up with.
The autopsies, then, are kind of a bust for the case against Chauvin. The physical evidence is at best neutral. But the independent examiners do make some claims based on the video, and those deserve consideration, so let’s move on.
The Restraint
First, the restraint used on George Floyd was not something Chauvin made up. The hold is called maximal restraint technique, and the officers involved received training in it.
This is not simply a matter of passing the buck to whomever authorized the technique or the training (though this is, of course, relevant to Chauvin’s legal defense). The point is that it’s reasonably well-understood in practice and it is understood not to typically cut off air or blood flow—it is not a chokehold, in contrast to, for example, the restraint that caused the death of Eric Garner. It is regularly applied without causing strangulation (see, for instance). This restraint technique therefore, when applied correctly, does not cause strangulation.
Okay, as far as that goes. But did it cause strangulation in this case?
The Knee
We’ve already covered the fact that the autopsies produced no physical evidence that it did, but that’s not conclusive evidence either way. Let’s do our best to figure it out from the video. Take a look at this diagram:
The veins and arteries of the neck are on the front-side of the neck, as I’m sure you breath-play degenerates already well know (I kid, I kid). I encourage you to find them on your own neck to get a good sense of where they are–you’ll feel your pulse when you get it, and even light compression will leave you lightheaded in a few seconds. The windpipe is, of course, front and center.
Now look at George Floyd’s restained position, a still from this video:
Evidently, Chauvin could not possibly be applying direct pressure to Floyd’s windpipe or blood vessels from this position; his knee is towards the back of Floyd’s head (and you can check the video and see that it remains roughly in that position throughout).
Perhaps, then, the cause was indirect pressure against the pavement, as suggested by the private autopsy. But his head is nearly sideways against the ground, which means his windpipe was clear, no matter the force exerted by Chauvin’s knee. The blood vessels of the neck are fairly recessed, so it would be difficult to put pressure on them against a flat surface (you can also try this at home; you’ll find the jaw rather gets in the way). Moreover, pressure on the blood vessels of the neck causes unconsciousness in a few seconds rather than several minutes. Given the timeline, it’s fairly safe to say that we should be looking for asphyxiation, not cut off blood flow; and given the position, It doesn’t seem possible that Chauvin’s knee could have caused it.
If you’re with me so far, I’d just like you to take a moment and reflect that, even if Chauvin and the other officers were responsible for Floyd’s death because of the restraint position, if we have successfully established that the knee to his neck was not itself the cause, then a whole lot of people have been lying to you for nearly a year about an event of major political import. The “clear, obvious” conclusion, “what we all saw”, is false, and the media establishment has whipped the public into a frenzy based on a falsehood, even if you only grant me this partial point. If you take from this post nothing more than that, then I will be more than satisfied.
The knee to Floyd’s neck is not the only possible mechanism by which the officers could have caused his death, however, so let’s move on.
Not the Knee
The private autopsy, among others, cites also pressure to Floyd’s chest and the position in which he was held as contributing factors. I suspect, though this is more a matter of literary criticism than anything, that the independent examiners stressed both neck and back because they know the neck hypothesis is very weak but they don’t want to abandon it for the rhetorical power of the associated image.
Anyway, this section is about compressive and positional asphyxia. Compressive asphyxia refers to limitation on breathing from pressure applied to the chest, thus preventing the diaphragm from expanding. The argument would be that the officers’ pressure on Floyd’s back contributed to his death in this way. Positional asphyxia, in contrast, is when breathing is limited by position alone, with no added weight. Both are potentially relevant here.
Having looked at the video many times over, I’m still not entirely sure where Chauvin’s other knee was with respect to Floyd. Seems like it could be on his back, but also on his shoulder or arm.
But let’s assume the possibility that Chauvin had his right knee where it might have compressed Floyd’s chest area.
Looking over case reports of compressive asphyxia, mostly they’re events like fatal crowd disasters, where there is the accumulated pressure of sometimes hundreds of people, or people who get stuck under heavy equipment, or wedged in a chimney or the like. And then you have these cases that are almost exclusively about law enforcement in which supposedly the weight of a single person had the same effect.
Just to establish a very general baseline, here is a section from a wiki article on executions by crushing:
The only death reported here, of a woman, took 784 lbs(!) to kill. That’s about 5 Derek Chauvins. Others resisted weights greater than that of a single person for periods several times that which George Floyd was subjected to the restraint position.
This is, of course, mere illustration, but if you want to dig into the science, you can look at this paper, which concludes
This includes both epidemiological and experimental data. That paper, as well as this one, is similarly incisive about positional asphyxiation: there is no evidence of prone restraint positioning as a cause of asphyxia. Just for a taste:
We can thus say, with confidence, that the restraint of George Floyd would not have even come close to killing a man of average health. If we allow, out of a healthy skepticism, that compression might have played some role in his death, it is in addition to a severe impairment of his breathing from a different cause.
Which brings us to
The Fentanyl Hypothesis
George Floyd’s post-mortem blood test showed a blood concentration of 11 ng/mL of fentanyl, a particularly deadly opioid which has taken America by storm. When they talk about the opioid epidemic, it’s mostly referring to fentanyl and its analogues.
Here’s the tox report:
Norfentanyl is a metabolity of fentanyl, and the others don’t matter much, except, tangentially, the meth–it is common for opioid users to consume them together with a stimulant. But the meat of the thing is the fentanyl.
The data on what this concentration means is all over the place, because it depends on a multitude of factors like how long after death the sample was taken and from what part of the body, and moreover the lethal blood concentration has a ridiculously wide range and tends to be different for addicts vs therapeutic users. Very roughly and with all possible caveats, this concentration seems to be more or less on the high end of non-addict overdoses and on the low end of addict overdoses. Would it certainly, without a doubt have killed him? Can’t say. Could it have? Yes, absolutely.
And how does fentanyl kill? Apart from the effect of respiratory depression that it shares with other opioids, fentanyl can also cause something called “wooden chest syndrome”, a commonly fatal condition of muscle rigidity in the upper body, not only in the chest proper but also around the larynx and of the diaphragm. “Normal” opioid respiratory depression works by depressing the regulation of breathing in the central nervous system, such that the victim will not notice they are not breathing (and will typically be unconscious, or rendered so very quickly). In contrast, wooden chest syndrome feels like an inability to breathe.
Page 12 of the transcript (pdf) from the body cams contains the following:
What’s happening here is that the officers are trying to put Floyd in the police car–this is when he “resists”, technically speaking, which, in purely procedural terms, justifies the restraint. But notice:
Being in considerable distress before being put in the restraint position, he asks to be on the ground
He complains multiple times that he can’t breathe before he is restrained
So, at most, you can say that the restraint or compression added to a preexisting condition. Or, as I am arguing, George Floyd was at that point suffering from wooden chest syndrome, which started before he was on the ground and eventually killed him; the restraint, if it had any effect at all, was minor and most likely not a determinant contributing factor.
There is, however, still one major sticking point that many, rightly, point to, so let’s talk about
The Coincidence
This was the main sticking point for me too. I initially thought that, realistically, it couldn’t have been just the drugs, because it would have been a hell of a coincidence for Floyd to have died right then, in that window of a few minutes, right when he happened to be restrained.
This is also related to the main contention of this video, which is that George Floyd was not showing signs of a fentanyl overdose as he interacted with police officers before being restrained–not of an advanced fentanyl overdose, anyway, in which he would be largely unresponsive, and not agitated as he was.
These would indeed be very serious problems for my case here–unless George Floyd happened to ingest his fatal dose of fentanyl just as police were approaching him, say, in an attempt to hide evidence, which would have killed him in more or less the time it took him to die.
The evidence for this is circumstantial, but non non-existent.
There’s also this excerpt from an interview (pdf) with one of the officers, describing their first approach:
That is, they saw the police coming and reacted. Body cam footage shows Floyd had something in his mouth as police arrived:
And then there’s the fact that he had done the same thing before, a year previous, swallowing percocet to hide it from the police.
If you still think that’s a reach, consider the situation as we understand it. From his altered behavior during the encounter, we know Floyd was high. From the tox report, we known on what. We know he saw the police coming and reacted to it. The hurdle here is whether he had drugs with him in the car–police claim that he did–and whether he swallowed them to hide the incriminating stash as the police approached (or part of it, anyway).
Given the accumulated evidence, this seems like the most likely sequence of events.
The Responsibility of the Police
I often see people get very angry that the police supposedly failed to do things that they in fact did–that they should have called an ambulance (they did, when Floyd was first put on the ground, and then later upped the urgency as his condition worsened), or that they should have just let him chill in the back of the police car (which they of course tried; Floyd resisted and asked to be put on the ground).
But let’s address the things that actually happened, as there’s plenty said about that too.
One common point is that the police took way too far what was a very minor crime of passing a counterfeit bill. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. Let’s start with the 911 call that led the police to approach Floyd:
It’s clear that the counterfeit bill is a minor concern in this call–the greater problem was that Floyd was “not in control of himself”–not drunk, we know, but high.
We also saw, above, the report of the officer on the first approach. The occupants of the car were altered and acting strangely. This is the context of the officers’ belligerence in their first contact with Floyd.
His state of mind and the question of whether he was on drugs is an ongoing concern of the cops throughout the encounter. After the first tense interaction, where Floyd is in a state in which he is apparently mentally unable to comply with simple demands, there’s this exchange:
Some more from Lane in retrospect:
Then there’s the scuffle to get him in the back of the police car. They restrain him on the ground. This exchange:
And some more:
Excited delirium is a possibly-bullshit condition which supposedly makes people violent. Even if it is real, it is almost certainly not the case here. On the other hand, we don’t need a technical name to understand that altered people under the influence in a distressing situation may become suddenly and irrationally violent.
Here’s Lane again, covering some of these events:
Not that all of this is beyond reproach, but if there was a decision that could have possibly made any kind of difference, it was during these critical couple of minutes.
What’s undeniable is that it was a judgment call. The ambulance is minutes away at most; this very large guy is in an altered state, and there is a real possibility he’ll turn violent. You have him immobilized in a position you’ve used before, you’ve been trained in. You can roll him on his side, which might help him, but at a risk of loosening your hold on him. And so on.
The cops were obviously not maximally competent or compassionate–it is not my intention to canonize anyone. But the impression of Chauvin’s apparent callousness from the infamous video is not the whole story. There is clear evidence of both legitimate fear and concern for Floyd’s life in the officers’ actions, and a good argument, at least without the benefit of hindsight, that maintaining the restraint position until the ambulance arrived was the right call.
Alternatives to policing or whatever
This is a tedious discussion and I’m not having it. Sometimes people get high, and sometimes that makes them dangerous to themselves and others. There are improvements to be made on the margins, but police abolition is an ancomtard delusion.
Why does this matter?
The hook, of course, is that Tucker Carlson recently made this claim, and was possibly the first to do so on mainstream media. But the death of George Floyd matters because people put up murals of him George Floyd around the world and protested and rioted for months over it. It matters because he (and not, say, Tony Timpa) was chosen as anointed saint of global progressivism. It matters because policy will be drafted based on this event, not only in the United States.
And it matters as a case study because the particular can reveal the general in a way all its own. The shape of the lies, omissions and distortions in the particular reveals the shape of the required narrative. It is the fulcrum of something much bigger.