A condolence phone call from President Donald Trump ended up frustrating George Floyd’s brother, who said Trump “didn’t give [him] the opportunity to even speak.”
“It hurt me,” Philonise Floyd said in an interview Saturday on MSNBC. Floyd’s brother George died Monday during an arrest by white police officers in Minneapolis. He was 46.
The call with Trump was “so fast,” Floyd told the Reverend Al Sharpton on “Politics Nation.”
“He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak,” Floyd said, as his son Brandon sat beside him. “It was hard. I was trying to talk to him, but he just kept, like, pushing me off, like: ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about.’”
Floyd said: “I just told him I want justice. I said that I couldn’t believe that they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. I can’t stand for that. I can’t. And it hurt me.”
George Floyd, who was Black, died after police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for several minutes while an unarmed Floyd was restrained and held on the ground. Chauvin has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The other three officers involved in the arrest were fired, but remain free.
“They all need to be convicted of first-degree murder and given the death penalty,” Philonise Floyd told Sharpton. “They didn’t care about what they wanted to do with my brother. He wasn’t a person to them. He was scum, he was nothing [to them]. I can imagine how many people they did like that.”
Floyd became emotional later in the interview. “I just don’t understand, man,” he told Sharpton tearfully. “Why we gotta go through this? Why we gotta have all this pain, man? I love my brother. I’m never going to see him again.”