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In more than 19 years on the Minneapolis police force, Mr. Chauvin had a reputation as a rigid workaholic with few friends. He sometimes made other officers uncomfortable.
The Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct station remained blocked off and empty on Friday. It was set on fire by protesters after George Floyd was killed in police custody.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
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By Kim Barker and Serge F. Kovaleski
MINNEAPOLIS — The four teenagers drove around playing a game of Nerf Gun Assassin on a May evening before graduation in 2013. One of them randomly fired an orange dart out the window.
It was a stupid teenager move. What happened next was deadly serious: Two Minneapolis police officers pulled up, pointed their guns at the teenagers and shouted orders laced with expletives, two of them later recalled.
Kristofer Bergh, then 17, said he kept telling himself not to move suddenly or give the police any reason to shoot him. The youth who had fired the dart was steered into their cruiser for what seemed like an hour, and the officers seized everyone’s Nerf guns. One officer made a lasting impression; in fact, Mr. Bergh and another passenger said they would never forget him, nor what he said as he gave them back their guns.
“Most of you will be 18 by the end of the year,” the officer said, before letting them go. “That means you’ll be old enough for ‘big boy jail.’”
It was Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who, seven years later, would become known around the world for putting his knee on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd during an arrest and holding it there for more than eight minutes, until he no longer had a pulse.
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