One of Ross' favorite stories is the tale of how she met Floyd.
In 2017, Ross went to a Salvation Army shelter to visit her son's father to discuss the boy's birthday. She was tired. She'd had a long day. She grew upset as her former partner kept her waiting in the lobby.
Then she heard a deep, raspy voice with a southern twang say, "You OK, sis?"
The shelter's security guard was standing there. He offered to pray with her.
"I was tired, and we'd been through so much, my sons and I, and for this kind person to come up and say, 'Can I pray with you,' when I felt alone in this lobby — it was so sweet," she told a Minneapolis jury on Thursday.
Ross provided a range of tearful testimony on her three-year relationship with Floyd, which lasted until his death in May, during the fourth day of Chauvin's trial.
Chauvin is accused of killing Floyd last Memorial Day during his arrest for allegedly using a $20 counterfeit bill at a convenience store. Floyd lay handcuffed and on the ground, pleading and saying he couldn't breathe as Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd's neck. He continued to do so even after Floyd lost consciousness.
Prosecutors allege Floyd died of asphyxiation. Chauvin's defense is that Floyd, who tested positive for fentanyl and methamphetamine, died of a drug overdose.
Outraged bystanders taped the arrest on their cellphones, and the image of a Black man gasping for breath under the knee of a white police officer rekindled a nationwide racial justice movement last summer. Floyd's name became that movement's rallying cry, his face an emblem.
But to Ross, he was "Floyd," a loving father, a "mama's boy," and her partner. At one point, prosecutors displayed a photograph of him on the witness stand's monitor, and Ross tearfully traced the image of his face with her finger. She inadvertently set off the touch screen, leaving a green line along his chin.
Ross' testimony Thursday also included details about the couple's favorite date spots and their struggles with opioid addiction.
"It's a classic story of how many people get addicted to opioids," she said. "We both suffer from chronic pain; mine was in my neck, his was in his back. We both had prescriptions, and we got addicted and tried to break that addiction many times."
When they ran out of their medication, they would try to buy pills from other people with prescriptions. When they couldn't do that, Ross said, they would buy pills "off the street."
They tried to help one another overcome their addiction, and went through periods where they were not using, she testified. But in March 2020, Ross said, "his behavior changed," and she knew he was using again.
She also testified that in March, he bought some pills that did not have the relaxing effect of the opioids they usually took. Ross tried one and it kept her up all night. She said it was a stimulant. Floyd bought more of those pills in May, she testified during cross-examination from Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson of Halberg Criminal Defense. He asked her if Floyd had bought the pills from Morries Hall, the friend whom he'd spent time with the day he died. She said she wasn't sure.
Nelson also asked her about an incident in March, when Floyd was doubled over in pain from a stomach ache. She drove him to the emergency room, she said, and he was hospitalized for several days. Nelson asked her if she'd known whether the cause was a heroin overdose. She said she did not know.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Frank asked her about Floyd's health. She said he worked out every day.
"Did he ever complain of shortness of breath, of difficulty breathing?" he asked.
Ross testified that he did not.
Jurors also heard from Seth Bravinder and Derek Smith, two paramedics who responded to the scene and were unable to resuscitate Floyd.
When they pulled up in the ambulance, Bravinder said, he saw "multiple officers on top of the patient," and he "assumed there was some struggle still."
But Smith, who checked Floyd's pupils and his pulse the moment he got there, said Floyd was unconscious.
"In lay terms, I thought he was dead," he said.
One of the police officers who held Floyd down rode in the ambulance, and stills from his body-worn camera revealed that Smith used a mechanical chest compression device, ventilated Floyd and administered epinephrine, a drug meant to restart the heart, and sodium bicarbonate.
Nothing worked, Smith said.
"He's a human being, and I was trying to give him a second chance at life," he said. "When we showed up, he was deceased, and when we showed up at the hospital, he was still in cardiac arrest."
Later in the day, the jury also heard from Sgt. David Pleoger, the shift supervisor on duty the evening Floyd died.
He was first alerted of the arrest by Jena Scurry, a 911 dispatcher who testified earlier this week that she had watched Floyd's arrest on a live security feed and called Pleoger about it. She said she wasn't sure if she was witnessing a use-of-force situation that would require review, but she told him, "all of them sat on this man."
According to Pleoger's testimony on Thursday, he then called Chauvin, who reported that Floyd had been "combative." Pleoger testified that, after a struggle, Floyd had "suffered a medical emergency." Chauvin did not tell him then about the way he'd restrained Floyd, Pleoger said.
Body camera footage showed that Pleoger then drove to the scene of Floyd's death and interviewed the three other officers. He told two of them to try to find witnesses, and had Chauvin and his partner meet him at Hennepin County Medical Center, where staff were trying to revive Floyd.
Pleoger first learned the investigation would have to be sent up the chain of command at the hospital. There, Chauvin first revealed that he'd pressed his knee into Floyd's neck while Floyd was in handcuffs. Any use of force while a suspect is restrained goes to Internal Affairs, Pleoger said. He also soon learned that Floyd had died, which made the arrest a "critical incident," that automatically required his supervisor's involvement, he testified.
Pleoger served as an expert witness, as well, explaining the Minneapolis Police Department's use-of-force policies.
Steven Schleicher, a partner Maslon LLP working pro bono for the prosecution, asked Pleoger about "positional asphyxia."
"If you restrain someone, or leave them on their chest or stomach for too long, their breathing can be compromised," Pleoger told him.
"You're talking about a situation where the pressure is from the person's own body weight?" Schleicher asked. "The danger is there without anyone pressing down on them?"
Pleoger said that was correct, and that police are trained to roll suspects onto their sides once they're restrained to avoid positional asphyxia.
Schleicher asked him at what point Chauvin should have eased the pressure on Floyd's body, and Pleoger said, "When Mr. Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended their restraint."
On cross-examination, Nelson asked the sergeant about the department's critical decision making model, which requires that officers take in their surroundings, assess a situation and continually modify their response.
"Officers constantly assess and reassess the situation based on the information as it comes to them, right?" he asked. "Sometimes, officers have to do violent things, correct? It's a dangerous job."
Nelson also noted that police sometimes have to decide between administering medical aid and dealing with danger. He offered the sergeant the hypothetical example of an officer being in a gun battle while a victim goes into cardiac arrest. Pleoger agreed he wouldn't be able to administer aid until the shooting stopped.
On redirect, Schleicher addressed both those points. He noted that the sergeant had reviewed the police body camera footage from last May, and he asked if he'd observed a gun battle. He had not.
"If a suspect is no longer breathing," Schleicher said, "would it be necessary for an officer to take that into account and reassess what they're doing?"
"Yes," the sergeant said.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier.
Update: This story has been updated to include reporting on David Pleoger's testimony.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled David Pleoger's last name. The error has been corrected.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
