A renowned lung critical care physician testified last week that George Floyd died of “low oxygen levels” when former police officer Derek Chauvin pinned him on the street limiting his ability to breathe.
“This caused damage to his brain, as we can see, and it also caused a PEA arrhythmia that caused his heart to stop,” Dr. Martin Tobin from Chicago, referring to pulseless electrical activity, a type of cardiac arrest.
“The cause of the low oxygen level was shallow breathing,” he added. Small breaths. Small tidal volumes. Shallow breaths that couldn’t carry the air through his lungs to the essential parts of the lungs that get oxygen into the blood and remove the carbon dioxide. ‘
He identified four main reasons why Floyd died:
- The handcuffs and the street that acts as a “vise”
- Chauvin’s left knee on his neck
- Floyd’s prone position
- Chauvin’s right knee on Floyds back, arm and side
Combined, these limited Floyd’s ability to expand his lungs and narrowed his hypopharynx, a part of the throat that air passes through.
Floyd’s pre-existing health problems and drug use were irrelevant to his death, Tobin said.
“A healthy person subject to what Mr. Floyd was exposed to would have died,” he said.