DEREK CHAUVIN DIDN'T KILL HIM. IT WASN'T JUST
THE FENTANYL & METH. FLOYD-THE-FELON HAD
AN EXTRA-ADRENAL PARAGANGLIOMA.

How George Floyd Actually Died

An adrenaline-caused catecholamine crisis leading to bi-lateral heart failure seems the most likely cause.

As it happens, my office overlooks the main drag of Kansas City’s counterculture/ homeless hub. On one lonely day during the weird COVID spring of 2020, I heard screaming out on the street, not unusual here, but when it persisted, I went down to check it out.

What I saw wasn’t pretty. A white male Kansas City police officer was kneeling on the neck of a woman. My first thought? “Thank God she’s white.” The woman was large and rambunctious. Using just a well-applied knee, the officer managed to hold her in place for at least ten minutes until back-up arrived. The arriving cops slipped a Hannibal-the-Cannibal mask over her face. That wasn’t pretty either. Take-downs never are. I had considered recording the incident on my cellphone, but I chose not to. In retrospect, I should have. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: The Semantic Burden of Speaking While White)

From the moment I saw the edited video of George Floyd’s arrest a few weeks later, I knew better than to accept the media verdict. Derek Chauvin used exactly the same maneuver my local cop did. The woman in Kansas City had lungs enough to wake a neighborhood. Floyd did not. The problem, I suspected, was not with Chauvin, but with Floyd.

As recently reported in these pages, Hennepin County prosecutors knew from day one how George Floyd did not die. Medical Examiner Andrew Baker reported to the prosecutors the evening following Floyd’s May 25, 2020, death, “There were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.”

For political reasons, the prosecutors buried the truth. To save his career and possibly his life, Baker finessed his findings to include “neck compression” and declared the manner of death a homicide. So doing, he gave the state the wiggle room it needed to slip a noose around Chauvin’s neck.

To learn what did kill George Floyd, I have consulted with two physicians. One, Dr. John Dale Dunn, is a veteran emergency physician and lawyer with expertise in cause of death matters. The other, a pathologist at a major medical center with more than two decades of experience, I will call “Dr. Quincy.”

Quincy requested anonymity given the safety concerns expressed by his wife. She has reason to be cautious. The use-of-force expert who testified on behalf of Derek Chauvin was rewarded for his courage by having a pig’s head placed on his doorstep. The doctor who testified on Chauvin’s behalf had his entire career as a medical examiner investigated by the Maryland attorney general.

I have been consulting with Dunn for at least two years. He has never shied from venturing his opinion publicly. In fact, he recreated Derek Chauvin’s hold on Floyd, using two men whose weight mirrored that of Chauvin and Floyd with no ill effect on the Floyd stand-in. “Derek Chauvin didn’t kill Mr. Floyd,” Dunn tells me. “His bad heart did.” Baker knew this to be true as well. As he testified at Chauvin’s trial, Floyd had “very severe underlying heart disease.”

I met with Quincy two weeks ago. I asked Dunn if he would review Quincy’s findings and give me an informed second opinion. Like Quincy, Dunn is confident that Chauvin’s “subdual” of Floyd — Baker’s word — had nothing to do with Floyd’s death. He agrees with Quincy as well that the fentanyl in Floyd’s system was a non-factor, but that the meth in his system might have been.

The line in Floyd’s autopsy report that caught Quincy’s attention was this one: “Taken together, the gross and microscopic (H&E-stains) features of the lesion are most suggestive of an extra-adrenal paraganglioma.” This rare tumor was found in Floyd’s pelvis. Baker recognized the tumor, argues Quincy, but he failed — or refused — to understand its potency and significance.

These tumors, says Quincy, produce the most potent hormones in our bodies, namely adrenaline and noradrenaline. The class of hormones they belong to is called catecholamines. “When the tumor goes off,” he tells me, “that is what’s called a catecholamine crisis. It might as well be a bomb.”

Among the symptoms of such a crisis are high blood pressure, confusion, excessive sweating, muscle weakness, anxiety, panic attacks, shaking, delusions, and hyperactivity, all of which Floyd exhibited on that fateful evening in May. More critically, when massive amounts of catecholamines are released into the blood, various organs of the body fail. Quincy compares the effect to the flooding of a lawnmower’s carburetor. (READ MORE: Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd)

“When a lawnmower engine gets too much gas and floods the carburetor, the engine loses power and chokes and sputters,” says Quincy. “In a similar way, too much adrenaline causes the heart  to lose its ability to pump blood.” When an individual’s heart begins to fail and cannot effectively pump blood, the blood backs up from the heart and leaks into the lungs. The increased fluid covering the alveolae of the lungs interferes with the oxygenation of the blood.

“It appears to me, watching the police bodycam videos, and now knowing he has an occult paraganglioma” says Quincy, “that Mr. Floyd exhibits many of the signs and symptoms of a full blown catecholamine crisis.” The crisis was likely triggered when Officer Thomas Lane taps the window of Floyd’s car with his flashlight at 8:09 that evening. Floyd, who had been nodding contentedly in the front seat of a borrowed Mercedes SUV, is startled and flips out.

A minute later, Floyd is crying like a child. “Okay Mr. Officer, please don’t shoot me. Please, man.” Lane had no intention of shooting Floyd. His crime was passing counterfeit money, not murder. At 8:14, Officer Alex Keung, the son of a Nigerian immigrant, tells Floyd that he will be put in the back of a police car.

As Keung leads Floyd across the street, his mouth now foaming, Floyd says, “I’m scared, man.” Even before he gets in the car, Floyd tells Keung, “I got anxiety for real man, and I’m claustrophobic.”  He adds, “I can’t choke, I can’t breathe Mr. Officer! Please. Please! Aaaaaah!”

When Keung tries to place Floyd into the car, his legs collapsing underneath him, Floyd says, “I’m claustrophobic man, please man, please.” He moans, “I want to lay on the ground. I want to lay on the ground. Okay, okay. I want to lay on the ground. I want to lay on the ground. I want to lay on the ground.” A friendly onlooker named Charles shouts at Floyd, “Bro, you about to have a heart attack and shit, man. Get in the car.”

Squirming feverishly, Floyd refuses to remain in the patrol car. “I’ll roll windows down, okay?” says Lane. At about 8:17, Floyd foretells his doom, “Y’all, I’m going to die in here. I’m going to die, man!” A minute later he adds, “I’m scared as fuck man…. When I start breathing, when I start breathing, it’s going to go off on me, man.”

As  Quincy argues, it already has gone off. The confusion, paranoia, muscle weakness, anxiety, claustrophobia. and shear terror that Floyd exhibits are all signs of a catecholamine crisis that is causing serious acute bilateral heart failure. Floyd’s complaint that he cannot breathe — even before he gets in the squad car — indicates the resultant pulmonary edema is causing respiratory failure too. He is minutes from dying, and Floyd is the only one who senses this.

Floyd had flirted with disaster before. On May 6, 2019, he was pulled over by the Minneapolis Police in an OxyContin investigation. When Officer Scott Creighton approached Floyd in the passenger seat, says Creighton, he was “moving all around and acting extremely nervous and would not listen” to his commands. Here too, the officers tried to calm Floyd down but finally had to forcibly remove him from the vehicle and handcuff him. “Listen to him,” said Creighton’s partner. “He’s crying like an adult baby.” Floyd was experiencing many of the symptoms of a catecholamine crisis that would kill him a year later. (RELATED: The Reparations Success Story That Isn’t)

Officer Creighton testified for the defense at Chauvin’s trial. “Mr. Floyd didn’t drop dead while you were interacting with him, correct?” asked the cold-hearted prosecutor. He obviously did not, but, observes Quincy, “There is a subtle but important difference between these two confrontations.”

In 2019, Floyd was alert and prepared as  Officer Creighton approached his car. When Officer Lane confronted him in 2020, Floyd was caught off guard. He reacted as if Lane had just snuck up on him to spook him. That reaction caused his tumor to release even more adrenaline than the encounter with Creighton, this time enough to overwhelm his heart.

At the Chauvin trial, paramedic Michelle Moseng testified that Floyd’s blood pressure after the 2019 arrest was extremely high. Floyd had told her “he had a history of hypertension and hadn’t been taking his medication.” Worried that he was on the verge of a stroke, she had Floyd transported to the hospital.

In 2020, a struggling Floyd will not let the officers transport him anywhere. “Just take him out,” says an exasperated Lane. “Just lay him on the ground,” adds Tao. At 8:19, Chauvin and Keung oblige Floyd and lay him on the ground.

As Dunn and Quincy agree, lying on the ground is not at all helpful for someone experiencing acute heart failure. Upright as he was in the patrol car, Floyd at least had gravity to help lessen the back pressure on the lungs. On the ground, he loses that advantage, and the accumulating pulmonary edema accelerates.

The officers know none of this. They believe Floyd is either acting or reacting to the drugs he swallowed. The officers had found a “weed pipe” on Floyd and seen him swallow something. Given Floyd’s behavior, Lane questions whether the drug might have been PCP.  According to the NIH, “The elicitation of violent or psychotic behavior by phencyclidine (PCP) administration is well documented.” Police understand this.

For the next 9 minutes and 30 seconds, Chauvin restrains the muscular 6’6” Floyd using the same restraint I saw the officer use on a Kansas City woman weeks earlier. At 8:21, the officers upgrade their request for emergency assistance to a Code 3. With the fluid rapidly filling his lungs, Floyd is breathing, but he knows something is terribly wrong. Although he can still inhale, exhale, and talk, he is literally drowning in his own fluid.

For the next several minutes, Floyd complains that he can’t breathe, that his stomach hurts, that everything hurts. “Then stop talking, stop yelling,” says Chauvin. “You can’t win,” onlooker Charles chimes in. “You didn’t listen.” Even after he passes out, Lane worries that Floyd might spring back into action. At about 8:27, the ambulance arrives. By this time, Floyd is already dead.

One can forgive the cops for not correctly diagnosing Floyd’s condition. Baker and the other state witnesses deserve no such grace. Quincy was stunned to learn that once Baker observed Floyd’s paraganglioma, he failed to test for catecholamines. Quincy had been taught that if a catecholamine producing tumor is found during the autopsy of someone who dies suddenly and unexpectedly, a catecholamine crisis is the prime suspect. Unless the lab results come back normal, it remains the prime suspect.

“There is no way in God’s green Earth that Baker can honestly say [the paraganglioma] is an incidental finding without running the catecholamines,” says Quincy. “The absence of ordering these tests convicts Baker’s lack of knowledge.”

Dunn is a bit more cynical. “[Baker] didn’t know about catecholamine crisis? Never saw it?” scoffs Dunn. He discounts the wisdom of “Hanlon’s Razor” — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — and opts instead for “the paranoid approach” —  “Bad things spring from bad intentions.” Baker had a powerful incentive to fudge his findings, says Dunn. “He knows if he goes with the evidence, he likely loses his job and he and his family are at risk from the mob and his career will be extinguished.”

If Quincy’s theory is correct — and Dunn believes it is — here is what happened. Floyd’s paraganglioma, set off when he was startled by Lane, released a large bolus of adrenaline into his circulation. This excessive catecholamine then overwhelmed his heart, causing acute heart failure. The severe acute heart failure then precipitated pulmonary edema leading to respiratory failure, hypoxia, and death.

If Quincy is right, nothing the officers might have done would have reversed the course of Floyd’s demise. “Even if Floyd had made it to the hospital alive,” says Quincy, “he almost certainly would have expired.” The medical personnel would not have known he was having a catecholamine crisis. and would have found him profoundly hypotensive as a result of his acute heart failure. The medical personnel would have administered adrenaline to bring his blood pressure back up. As Quincy observes, any additional adrenaline would be contraindicated in someone in a catecholamine crisis, which, once given, would have sealed his fate.

Given that roughly one-third of catecholamine-producing tumors are inherited, Quincy believes the state should share this knowledge with the Floyd family. With proper screening, family members will have a better chance of avoiding George’s fate.

As for Chauvin, Lane, Keung, and Tao, George Floyd’s fate sealed their own. Knowledge, however, will not save them unless a person of character and consequence acts upon it. And in a state full of cowards, such a person may no longer exist. (read more)