Philonise Floyd thanked teenager Darnella Frazier for taking the horrific video showing the police killing of his brother George Floyd, saying that there’s no way he “can repay her” and that her actions “changed the world.”
Floyd spoke with MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Wednesday, a day after a jury in Minneapolis found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd.
Frazier was 17 when she took cellphone video of George Floyd in May 2020 being pinned to the street with Chauvin’s knee on his neck. Her video, which she posted on Facebook, was key evidence in Chauvin’s conviction. Frazier, now 18, told jurors she was haunted by “not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life.”
Philonise Floyd, however, said he had nothing but gratitude for her actions.
“You know, there’s no way that I can repay her,” Floyd said. “But I can honestly tell her she changed the world, just like Gianna said like her father was going to change the world. God put people in places at certain times to sit there and do the duty that he wanted them to do. She was the one who recorded a motion cinema picture that set the world on fire.”
He went on to reflect on the impact of the video. “People protest because of that video,” he said. “They see that officers need to be held accountable and now you have a George Floyd policing act that we’re trying to push forward for people like Darnella.”
Floyd acknowledged that Frazier and other young people scarred by his brother’s killing “may suffer from PTSD now, because [that video is] seared in their minds for life.”
“They watched a grown man being tortured to death. She said that could have been my father, that could have been my brother, that could have been my uncle, that could have been my cousin or any one of my friends,” Floyd said of Frazier’s testimony.
Floyd told Reid he wanted to “jump up and down” when he heard the trial verdict.
“When the judge started reading and I heard ‘guilty,’ and then I heard ‘guilty,’ and then I heard ‘guilty’ one more time, I wanted to jump up and down, but I was giving the judge respect ... I was ecstatic about everything,” he said.
In a news conference on Tuesday after the verdict, Floyd said he wasn’t just fighting for his brother anymore.
“I’m fighting for everybody around this world,” he said. “Today we are able to breathe again.”