Texas man Kenneth Knotts is being touted as the next George Floyd after footage from 2022 has emerged showing him losing consciousness while in police custody. Why is this footage only coming out now? pic.twitter.com/H2OPVbkDCb
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 11, 2024
Americans have raised questions over the election year timing of the release of bodycam footage showing a Black man saying “I can’t breathe” while being restrained by hospital cops who were charged with homicide after he died.
The video released Tuesday shows the death of Kenneth Knotts, 41, at UT Southwestern Medical Center where he had been taken by police for a mental health evaluation on November 29, 2022.
But some Americans asked why the footage was released during the 2024 election cycle, and almost exactly four years after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, highlighting similarities between the deaths.
Floyd’s 2020 death was seized upon by Democrats and sparked weeks of violent Black Lives Matter rioting across the United States, leaving at least 19 dead, causing billions in property damage, and resulting in a spike in Black crime.
“New George Floyd just dropped,” responded several X users, while a popular meme account said: “This election cycle is going to be insane”.
“Interesting how these things always happen before the summer before the election,” a commenter said.
“The Dems are losing, they badly need division among the races,” wrote another.
“Texas man Kenneth Knotts is being touted as the next George Floyd after footage from 2022 has emerged showing him losing consciousness while in police custody. Why is this footage only coming out now?” asked commentator Ian Miles Cheong.
“Maybe because they realized that Dexter Reed wasn’t going to be the next George Floyd, despite the best efforts of our mockingbird media?”one response read, referring to a March police shooting of a Black criminal who was killed in a hail of bullets after opening fire on officers during a traffic stop.
Mr Knotts was ruled a homicide by the Dallas County medical examiner’s office in September, which said he died of sudden cardiac arrest after being restrained in a “semi-prone” position, but a grand jury found in November that no officers will face charges.
The footage shows Mr Knotts complaining that his handcuffs were too tight, and asking for water and orange juice ftom hospital staff who declined, saying: “We don’t feel safe with you”.
When he got up to drink from a faucet officers put him back on the bed. As he struggled with the officers he was placed face-down and is told to let go of a female cop’s hand, and at one point says “I can’t breathe”.
Moments later he lost consciousness and hospital staff yelled “no pulse” as they rushed to revive him.
According to a police incident report, Mr Knotts became agitated while on a road trip to Dallas with his girlfriend and young sons.
After a tire blew out he stood on top of his car with his toddler telling responding officers that Austin Police were trying to kill him.
He was “reportedly acting erratically, combative and spitting” the medical examiner’s report said. He was then given medication to calm him down and taken to the hospital where he died for a mental health evaluation.
Family lawyer Geoff Henley, who obtained the footage via a third party subpeona from the City of Dallas, said the footage showed Mr Knotts was physically healthy until police “restrained his ability to breathe”.
“The guy was in mental distress, clearly he was irrational, but you don’t have to kill them to solve what is absolutely a medical problem,” Mr Henley told The Dallas Morning News.
He last year announced the family was filing a lawsuit against the hospital.
