Apparently, wringing $27 million out of the taxpayers of Minneapolis, Minnesota, wasn’t a big enough payday for the family of George Floyd, the late and lamented drug addict and career criminal.
Now, the bereaved family is considering a lawsuit against Kanye West because he told the truth about Floyd: He died of a fentanyl overdose, as both an autopsy and an internal city memorandum made clear.
Though one cannot defame the dead, defamation isn’t what the family will claim. Rather, they would want a jury to believe that West intentionally inflicted emotional distress — again, by telling the truth.
How Floyd Died
Despite dramatic, endlessly replayed video that supposedly depicted a racist police officer, Derek Chauvin, ruthlessly kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and suffocating him as Floyd cried “I can’t breathe,” a sober look at the evidence shows that Floyd’s death could have occurred at any time during the arrest, or during one of his routine drug binges.
The final autopsy report said Floyd, 47, died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The problem with that conclusion is that it doesn’t say much. “Cardiopulmonary arrest” means that Floyd stopped breathing and his heart stopped.
Although the autopsy found multiple “blunt force” wounds, “no life-threatening injuries [were] identified,” the report says:
A. No facial, oral mucosal, or conjunctival petechiae
B. No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures
C. No scalp soft tissue, skull, or brain injuries
D. No chest wall soft tissue injuries, rib fractures (other than a single rib fracture from CPR), vertebral column injuries, or visceral injuries
E. Incision and subcutaneous dissection of posterior and lateral neck, shoulders, back, flanks, and buttocks negative for occult trauma
The absence of petechiae — small red or purple spots in the eyes or skin from bleeding capillaries — is significant because they occur in upwards of 85 percent of strangulation or traumatic asphyxia deaths; i.e., increased pressure on the neck of the type that Chauvin applied to Floyd.
Aside from having the China Virus, Floyd suffered serious health issues: severe atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, and cardiomegaly (enlarged heart).
But on top of those findings, the toxicology report revealed that Floyd was stoned. He was loaded on fentanyl and methamphetamine. He admitted he had been “hooping,” or ingesting drugs through his rectum.
Fentanyl is a dangerous narcotic 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. Its properties as a respiratory depressant explain why Floyd began claiming he couldn’t breathe as cops tried to put him in a car before Chauvin pinned him to the ground.
The level of fentanyl in Floyd’s bloodstream was “pretty high” and indeed a fatal dose, the coroner told an assistant prosecutor. That evaluation appeared in a memorandum the prosecutor wrote after speaking with the coroner, who told the prosecutor, in her words, “if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death.”
Threatened Lawsuit
Nonetheless, the Floyd family is looking for another big payout, CNN reported, because West offered this conclusion in a podcast after watching Candace Owens’ Floyd documentary:
I watched the George Floyd documentary that Candace Owens put out. One of the things that his two roommates said was they want a tall guy like me, and the day that he died, he said a prayer for eight minutes. They hit him with the fentanyl. If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that.
“Civil rights” lawyer Lee Merritt took to Twitter. “While one cannot defame the dead, the family of #GeorgeFloyd is considering suit for Kanye’s false statements about the manner of his death,” Merritt wrote:
Claiming Floyd died from fentanyl not the brutality established criminally and civilly undermines & diminishes the Floyd family’s fight.
The truth is on West’s side. A meritless lawsuit might be a good thing. If it went to trial, it would require the Floyds to expose the autopsy and prosecutor’s memorandum to more scrutiny and expert testimony.
That would not bode well for the preposterous myth manufactured about a man who held a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach as he and his fellow thugs robbed her home.
