Under defense questioning, Kueng said he wasn’t sure if Chauvin was violating policy by pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck because he hadn’t been explicitly trained on such maneuvers and couldn’t see how much pressure Chauvin was using.
During his testimony, Kueng recalled the struggle that ended up with Floyd handcuffed and facedown on the ground. Kueng, who was positioned at Floyd’s back, said another officer, Thomas K. Lane, asked Chauvin if they should shift the man into his side, which Chauvin quickly rejected.
“He was my senior officer, and I trusted his advice,” Kueng said, repeatedly telling the jury that he had been trained to defer to senior officers.
Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis force, had been Kueng’s training officer for roughly half of his five months of field training, which had began in January 2020. Kueng testified he was only on his third shift as a full-time officer on May 25, 2020, when he and Lane, another rookie, struggled with Floyd as they tried to detain him as part of a counterfeit bill investigation.
Kueng recalled how Chauvin had suddenly appeared on the scene and injected himself into the struggle with Floyd — a show of power that he told the jury led him to believe “we were making a mistake or that he saw we were doing something incorrect.”
While Minneapolis officers are trained that the first responding officers are the ones in charge of a scene, Kueng said that was not “the practice.”
“In all my experience in policing … in the field, it’s always the senior officer. I’ve seen multiple officers defer to seniors on scenes, and the senior officer is the one that we go to as they have the most experience and are typically better equipped to handle situations,” Kueng said under defense examination, adding that this was his experience with Chauvin, whom he described as his “supervisor.”
“He was very quiet. But he had a high level; that experience was very vital. He was very knowledgeable of policy and law,” Kueng said of Chauvin. “He had a lot of respect from other officers … They would defer to him on what to do.”
In his first public recounting of the incident, Kueng recalled how he and Lane were restraining Floyd on the other side of the squad car, separated from a growing crowd of bystanders who loudly urged the officers to get off an unconscious Floyd and to check the man’s pulse.
Kueng claimed he couldn’t hear the bystanders but had been monitoring Floyd’s vitals and said that he believed the man was still breathing, even as he went limp. He recalled how he at one point heard Chauvin unhook a snap from his duty belt and witnessed the officer take out a can of mace and shake it toward what he assumed was the crowd on the other side of the car.
Kueng testified that he subsequently looked for a pulse on Floyd’s wrist, and he couldn’t find one. He recalled twice telling Chauvin that he couldn’t detect Floyd’s pulse and said he assumed Chauvin would check the pulse on Floyd’s neck — which he had been trained to know was more reliable — but the senior officer didn’t check and kept his position.
The former officer recalled how a paramedic later arrived on the scene and reached around Chauvin’s knee to check the pulse on Floyd’s carotid artery and then walked “casually” back to the ambulance. Kueng said that led him to believe his not being able to detect a pulse had been wrong because he felt the paramedic would have shown “immediate concern.”
Kueng testified he did not realize Floyd might be in medical danger until after Lane had returned from performing chest compressions in the ambulance — though he did not elaborate on what Lane said to him. A prosecutor had only started questioning Kueng as the court recessed Wednesday. He is scheduled to be back on the stand tomorrow ahead of expected testimony from Lane.
Kueng’s testimony came shortly after Thao returned to the stand for a second day of questioning and said he heard Floyd’s cries for breath getting weaker and that he observed the man go unconscious but did nothing to intervene or offer care.
Thao, who held back bystanders as they urged the officers to check Floyd’s pulse and “get off” the man, acknowledged under prosecution questioning that he heard the concerns voiced by the onlookers about Floyd’s health but said he did not say anything to Chauvin or the other officers.
“I think I would trust a 19-year veteran to figure it out,” Thao said, referring to Chauvin, who had been his partner that day.
“Even 19-year veterans can do something wrong, right?” responded LeeAnn Bell, an assistant U.S. attorney and one of the lead prosecutors in the case. “You are aware you have a duty to stop someone from committing a crime, right?”
Thao offered conflicting responses — repeating his claim that he was focused on his role of “crowd control” at the scene and relying on Chauvin and the other officers to monitor Floyd’s condition.
But Thao also admitted he was standing next to Floyd and the officers for six of the 9½ minutes that Chauvin pressed his knees into the man’s neck and back and suggested the force was justified in his view because he feared Floyd was suffering from “excited delirium,” a disputed medical term used by law enforcement and some health professionals to describe people who are under the influence of drugs and in a severely agitated state.
Thao said he feared Floyd might rear up and resist the officers with “superhuman strength” — one of the alleged symptoms that officers are trained to look for in excited delirium. A training PowerPoint introduced as evidence in the case instructs officers to stop force when a subject is no longer resisting, but Thao testified he thought the continued restraint of Floyd was necessary “to save his life” as they awaited the arrival of paramedics.
Thao also testified that he did not think Floyd was in danger from Chauvin’s use of the knee restraint because it was not on the front of his neck.
“So you're saying that if someone is in excited delirium, you get to ignore the rest of your training that you should not continue to use force on them?” Bell asked, prompting an objection from Robert Paule, Thao’s attorney.
A federal grand jury indicted Chauvin, Kueng, Lane and Thao in May 2021 on charges that they violated Floyd’s constitutional rights during the fatal 2020 arrest. Kueng and Thao were charged with violating Floyd’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure by not intervening as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. All three officers were charged with failing to render medical aid to Floyd. Kueng, Lane and Thao have each pleaded not guilty.
Chauvin, who was convicted on state charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death, pleaded guilty in December to federal charges in Floyd’s death. Chauvin, currently serving a 22½-year state sentence, is awaiting sentencing in the federal case.
Prosecutors began presenting their case Jan. 24 with a litany of video that captured Floyd’s death, including footage filmed by Frazier and other eyewitnesses. They called 21 witnesses over 13 days, including an off-duty firefighter who tried to get the officers to check Floyd’s pulse; other law enforcement officers; and medical experts.
Three Minneapolis police officers testified that Kueng, Lane and Thao had been trained to stop force when it was no longer necessary and to intervene when another officer used excessive force or a restraint that was not allowed under department policy.
Defense attorneys sought to discredit that testimony, repeatedly pointing out to the jury that the Minneapolis Police Department is facing state and federal investigations into its policies and training practices. They have argued that officers were given conflicting training on use of force and presented videos of academy training that showed a cadet placing his knee on someone’s neck without intervention by instructors.
Defense attorneys have sought to shift responsibility to Chauvin for the man’s death, arguing the 19-year veteran “took control” at the scene and became the “shot caller.” But the case could pit the former officers against one another as a jury determines whether officers broke federal law when they failed to push Chauvin off Floyd’s body and render medical aid.
U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson has limited prosecutors from asking the former officers questions that would lead them to render judgment on their fellow defendants — though he has allowed questioning about what the officers observed.
On Tuesday, Thao countered a claim made by Lane and Kueng that they believed Chauvin was in charge of the scene because of his seniority.