A Life Is Worth Only 20 Lousy Bucks?

By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column

If you have been watching any summaries of the George Floyd murder case for the past week or so, you probably have noticed a startling trend in the evidence presented by the prosecution team, and that is: George Floyd was murdered for 20 bucks! Twenty lousy bucks is all that the depraved cop Derek Chauvin charged to murder this man.

I say 20 bucks because it was the dispute over the late George Floyd attempting to pass off a counterfeit 20-dollar bill at the Cup Foods Carryout, the locale of his eventual sentencing and execution by Chauvin.

Police experts and others who have a modicum of common sense told graphic details of how the acts of the cop Chauvin in pinning his knee on the neck of a prostrate, handcuffed and subdued George Floyd, caused his untimely death.

Make no mistake about it. George Floyd should be alive today but for the malicious and obscene acts of Derek Chauvin deciding on that date and place, that it was nigh time for George Floyd to die and die at his hands.

The three other cops, sycophants to a tee and like Zombies, fell in line and assisted their supervisor, Derek Chauvin, in his dastardly act of public murder.

Those three other cops abandoned their conscience and any humanity and allowed their boss to bully them into being accomplices to a murder. Silence to a murder is complicity to that murder.

None had the moral fortitude to make a stand and say anything to deter or slow the roll of Derek Chauvin in his appointed task of morbidly snuffing out the life of another human being.

Those other three spineless cops closed their eyes and ears to the muffled cries of another human being slowly being tortured to death by the knee of a craven police officer.

Even the small crowd of anxious onlookers had enough presence of mind to know that what they were witnessing was a life being snuffed out on a mere pre-text of “prisoner control.”

An EMT who was present at the murder site and realized that Derek Chauvin was not going to allow her to interfere with the murder of George Floyd when she yelled out for permission to render assistance to what was by then, a dead man.

But Chauvin had other plans for George Floyd. Chauvin was maniacally hell bent on sending George Floyd into eternity.

Derek Chauvin rested his body weight on his left knee and that weight was on the sensitive neck area of the now pleading George Floyd and that knee planted there for an astonishing nine minutes and 29 seconds!

If you saw the video over and over again, one could not notice the dead eyes of cop Chauvin and his impervious responses to George Floyd who was literally begging for his life.

His life was being exchanged for a counterfeit 20-dollar bill.

In his panicked mind, George Floyd did not have a ghost of chance to utter anything other than crying out to his mother and tell the brute cop Chauvin that he could not breathe.

When anyone in the assembled crowd spoke with shock or with fear as to what they were witnessing, Chauvin resisted all attempts for anyone to deprive him of his role of murdering a defenseless George Floyd.

Cop Chauvin was steely minded in his mission to kill George Floyd because of a lousy 20 dollars.

Never mind that the counterfeit bill charge was a misdemeanor and thus the perp could have simply been issued a summons to appear in court.

No. For Chauvin, that was too easy justice. He wanted a life taken because Chauvin was a monster masquerading in a police officer’s uniform.

He wanted the thrill and exhilaration to terminate a life knowing that he only would face a trifle dustup with his superiors for his dastardly deed…but the video recording by the courageous teenager would shock the world and eventually rock cop Chauvin’s life.

A watching America watched a murder play out before them in slow time and some may still yet wonder why and what the BLM protest is about.

For Chauvin, black life is cheap. For him, 20 dollars was enough of a payment to him to obliterate a human being and so when that black life was pleading to live and not to be killed, it was as if George Floyd had a premonition about dying when he was dragged from his car.

George Floyd was prophetic. Prophetic about his upcoming murder by the cops. He innately knew something was about to transpire that would leave him lifeless and his final and frantic calls to his mom was his way of saying, “I am coming to you Mom, wherever you are.”

The grisly death scene, as macabrely orchestrated by cop Chauvin, was not an aberration. It was planned by cop Chauvin. It was to be

his lasting testimony and memorial to police violence, police hatred of Black people and Chauvin’s determination that when it comes to the matter of Black people living or dying, he would make that decision and him alone.

Contact Lafe Tolliver at tolliver@juno.com