For George Floyd, a complicated life and a consistent death

Houston – Years before a viewer video by George Floyd's last moments turned its name into a global scream for justice, Floyd trained a camera.

“I just want to speak to them very quickly,” says Floyd in a video and appeals to the young men in his neighborhood, who looked at him. Its 6-foot 7 frame urges the picture.

“I have my shortcomings and my mistakes and I'm not better than none other,” he says. “But man who shoots who are going on, I don't care about which hood you are, where you are, men. I love you and God loves you. Lay them up.”

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Note from the publisher: The Associated Press originally published this profile of George Floyd on June 10, 2020. The fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd is May 25, 2025.

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At that time Floyd was respected as a man who spoke of hard but hardly unusual experience. He had nothing like the stature he won in death as a universal symbol of the need to revise police work and to keep it as a heroic everman.

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

Once a star athlete who dreams of making professionals and enough talent to win a partial scholarship, Floyd returned home to jump between jobs before he was in prison for almost five years. He was very proud of his roots in Houston's third station and as a mentor in a public housing project occupied by poverty, he decided that the only way was to leave it back.

“He had made some mistakes that cost him for a few years of his life,” said Ronnie Lillard, a friend and rapper who occurs under the name of reconciliation. “And when he came out of it, I think that the Lord has strongly influenced his heart.”

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Floyd was born in North Carolina. But his mother, single parents, moved the family to Houston at the age of 2 to look for work. They settled in the Cuney Homes, a low warrble of more than 500 apartments south of downtown “The Bricks”.

The neighborhood has shaped a cornerstone of the black community of Houston of Houston for decades in recent years. Texas Southern University, a historically black campus directly opposite the projects, has long been a launch pad for those who are ready to try. But many residents fight almost four times higher with an income of about half of the city average and unemployment, even before the recent economic collapse.

Yeura Hall, who grew up next to Floyd, even said in the third station that other children looked down on those who lived in public apartments. To distract the neck, he, Floyd and other boys invented a song about themselves: “I don't want to grow up, I am a child of Cuney Homes. They have so many rats and cockroaches with which I can play.”

Larcenia Floyd invested her hopes in her son, who wrote as a second grader that he had dreamed of being a judge at the US Supreme Court.

“She thought he would be the one who would get her out of poverty and struggle,” said Travis Cains, a long -time friend.

Floyd was a close star for the Jack Yates High School football team and played for the losers in 1992 in the State Championship Game in the Texas Memorial Stadium.

He was an atypical football player. “We called” Big Friendly “,” said Cervaanz Williams, a former teammate.

“If they would tell him something, his head would fall,” said Maurice McGowan, his football coach. “He just wouldn't build up and do as if he wanted to fight you.”

At the basketball court, George Walker, a former co -trainer at the University of Houston, became aware of the height and strength of Floyd and strength, which was set for the head job on today's South Florida State College. The school was a 17-hour drive away in a small town, but high school administrators and Floyd's mother asked him to go, said Walker.

“They wanted George to really come out of the neighborhood, do something, something is,” said Walker.

In Avon Park, Florida, Floyd and a few other Houston players, their size, accents and city stood out. They lived in the Jacaranda Hotel, a historic lodge that was used as a dormitory and were known as “Jac Boys”.

“He always told me about the third stop of Houston how rough it was, but how much he loved it,” said Robert Caldwell, a friend and announcement that often traveled with the basketball team. “He said people know how hard as it is, people know how to love.”

After two years in Avon Park, Floyd spent a year in Texas A.&M University in Kingsville before returning to Houston and his mother's apartment to find work under construction and security.

The driver Floyd, who was known in the entire neighborhood as Ms. Cissy, greeted her son's friends from childhood and offered her apartment as a refuge when her life became stressful. When a neighbor went into prison for drug accusations, Ms. Cissy took the woman in front of teenagers Cal Wayne and set George to play the older brother for the next 2 individual years.

“We steal his jerseys and put his jerseys on and ran through the house, went outside, jerseys to our ankles because he was so big and we were small,” said Wayne, now a well -known rapper, the Floyd to have encouraged him to encourage music.

George Floyd, he said, “was like a superhero.”

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Floyd also worked with music, occasionally to rap with Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw, whose mixtures have since been recognized as influential since then Houston's place as a breeding site from hip-hop on cards.

But then the man who was known throughout Cuney as a “Big Floyd” began to find problems.

Between 1997 and 2005 Floyd was arrested several times for drug and theft and spent in prison for months. During this time, Wayne's mother Sheila Masters remembered Floyd on the street and learned that he was homeless.

“He is so big that he knocked me on my head … and said: 'Mom, you know it will be okay,” said Masters.

In August 2007 Floyd was arrested and charged due to a severe robbery due to a fatal weapon. The investigators said he and five other men got into a woman's apartment and Floyd pushed a pistol in her stomach before looking for objects to steal. Floyd was guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to five years in prison. When he was on probation in January 2013, he approached 40.

“He came home with his head,” said friend Travis Cains.

At a Christian rap concert in the third community, Floyd Lillard and Pastor Patrick “PT” Ngwolo, whose service was looking for opportunities to reach the residents in Cuney Homes. Floyd, who seemed to know everyone in the project, volunteered as a guide.

Floyd soon built a washing facilities on the Cuney basketball fields for baptisms of NGWOLOS newly educated resurrection in Houston in Houston. He joined three against three basketball tournaments and grills, which were organized by the Ministry. He knocked on doors with NGWOLO and hired the residents as candidates for food deliveries or Bible studies.

Another pastor, Christopher Johnson, remembered Floyd, who came by in his office while Johnson's mother visited. For decades, since Johnson's mother was a teacher at the Floyd's high school. It didn't matter. He wrapped them into a bear reduction.

“I don't think he has ever considered himself big,” said Johnson. “There are many big guys here, but he was a gentleman and a diplomat and I didn't put a sauce on it.”

On the streets of Cuney, Floyd was increasingly assumed as a OG – literally “original gangster”, as the title of respect for a mentor who had learned from life experience.

In Tiffany Cofield's classroom in a charter school in the neighborhood, some of their male students – many already had brushes with the law – to speak to “Big Floyd” if they wanted to understand.

Floyd patiently listened when she expressed her frustrations with bad behavior of the students, she said. And he would try to explain the life of a young man in the projects.

After school, Floyd often met with her students outside of a corner business.

“How does school work?” He would ask. “Are you respectful? How is your mother doing? How is your grandma?”

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In 2014 Floyd started leaving the neighborhood.

As a father of five children from several relationships, he had to pay bills. And despite his stature in Cuney, everyday life could try. Floyd was more than once in handcuffs when the police came through the projects and arrested a large number of men, said Cofield.

“He would appear with a good example: 'Yes, officer. No, officer.' Very respectful.

A friend of Floyd had already moved to the Twin Cities as part of a junction program, which offered men a way to self -sufficiency by changing their environment and helping them find jobs.

“He wanted to start fresh, a fresh start,” said Christopher Harris, who preceded Floyd to Minneapolis. Friends provided Floyd money and clothing to make the transition easier.

In Minneapolis, Floyd found a job as a security officer in the Harbor Light Center of the Salvation Army, the city's largest homeless home.

“He would regularly go out a few female employees … at night and make sure that they came to their cars safely and safely,” said Brian Molohon, director of development manager for the army office in Minnesota. “Just a big strong guy, but with a very tender side.”

Floyd went after a little more than a year and trained to drive trucks while working as a bouncer in a club called Conga Latin Bistro.

“He would badly dance to make people laugh,” said owner Jovanni Thunstrom. “I tried to teach him how to dance because he loved Latin music, but I couldn't because he was too big for me.”

Floyd held his connection to Houston and regularly returned to Cuney.

When Houston organized the Super Bowl in 2017, Floyd was back in the city and organized a party in the church with music and free AIDS tests. He came back for his mother's funeral next year. And when Cains spoke to him a few weeks ago, Floyd planned another trip for this summer.

Until then, Floyd was unemployed. At the beginning of this spring, Thunstrom's floyd's order cut when the Covid 19 pandemic forced the club.

On the evening of the Memorial Day, Floyd was with two others when the Convenience Store employees accused him of paid for cigarettes with a fake 20 dollar bill for cigarettes and then called the police. Less than an hour later, Floyd breathed his last.

Those who knew him are looking for meaning in his death.

“I came to the belief that he was selected,” said Cofield, the teacher. “Only that could have happened to him because he was and how much love he had for people who had people for him.”

It is a small consolation, she admits. But then the people in Big Floyd's neighborhood made less.

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Merchant and Lozano reported from Houston, Henao from Hershey, Pennsylvania and Geller from New York. Aaron Morrison in Associated Press in Minneapolis and the videoographer John Mone in Houston contributed to this report.