Witness Testifies

Cops Wouldn’t Let an Off-Duty Firefighter Save George Floyd, a Witness Testifies

ABIGAIL WEINBERG

Genevieve Hansen, a Minneapolis firefighter and EMT who was off-duty and a passerby at the scene where Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, broke down recalling how police prevented her from administering medical care to the dying man.

“The officers didn’t let me into the scene” even after she identified herself as a Minneapolis firefighter, Hansen said at Chauvin’s murder trial Tuesday. “In my memory, I offered to walk them through it, or told them, if he doesn’t have a pulse, you need to start compressions, and that wasn’t done either.”

Hansen testified that another officer at the scene, Tou Thao, “said something along the lines of, ‘If you really are a Minneapolis firefight, you would know better than to get involved.”

“There was a man being killed,” Hansen said later in her testimony. “Had I had access to a call similar to that, I would have been able to provide medical attention to the best of my abilities, and this human was denied that right.”