For George Floyd, a complicated life and a notorious death

By LUIS ANDRES HENAO, NOMAAN MERCHANT, JUAN LOZANO and ADAM GELLER


HOUSTON (AP) — Years before a bystander’s video of George Floyd’s last moments turned his name into a global cry for justice, Floyd trained a camera on himself.

“I just want to speak to you all real quick,” Floyd says in one video, addressing the young men in his neighborhood who looked up to him. His 6-foot-7 frame crowds the picture.

“I’ve got my shortcomings and my flaws and I ain’t better than nobody else,” he says. “But, man, the shootings that’s going on, I don’t care what ’hood you’re from, where you’re at, man. I love you and God loves you. Put them guns down.”



At the time, Floyd was respected as a man who spoke from hard, but hardly extraordinary, experience. He had nothing remotely like the stature he has gained in death, embraced as a universal symbol of the need to overhaul policing and held up as a heroic everyman.

But the reality of his 46 years on Earth, including sharp edges and setbacks Floyd himself acknowledged, was both much fuller and more complicated.

Once a star athlete with dreams of turning pro and enough talent to win a partial scholarship, Floyd returned home only to bounce between jobs before serving nearly five years in prison. Intensely proud of his roots in Houston’s Third Ward and admired as a mentor in a public housing project beset by poverty, he decided the only way forward was to leave it behind.

“He had made some mistakes that cost him some years of his life,” said Ronnie Lillard, a friend and rapper who performs under the name Reconcile. “And when he got out of that, I think the Lord greatly impacted his heart.”

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