Maya Santamaria, who owned El Nuevo Rodeo club for almost twenty years says that George Floyd and Derek Chauvin both worked for her at the same time. Since they worked overlapping shifts, there is a good chance they knew each other but we don’t know that as a fact.
Santamaria said:
“Chauvin was our off-duty police officer for almost the entirety of the 17 years that we were open. They were working together at the same time, it’s just that Chauvin worked outside and the security guards were inside.”
But Santamaria says she does not know if the two had ever actually talked to each other during that time. She says that she wished the two men had recognized each other and that might have stopped the escalation of the incident.
I have to wonder if Chauvin did recognize him. If there had been bad blood between them, that might have given the officer incentive to be rough. Of course, that is purely speculation of a hypothetical situation.
On busy nights, Santamaria noted, there were dozens of guards on staff. She says she doesn’t know if the men ever spoke during the time they worked for her.
Santamaria described Chauvin as sometimes having “a real short fuse,” and says she wishes the two men could have recognized each other during Floyd’s detainment on Monday and possibly deescalated the situation.
Chauvin was fired along with three other Minneapolis police officers after footage went viral showing Chauvin holding down Floyd with his body weight and pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck as the the black man was detained. After several minutes of Floyd and onlookers begging Chauvin to stop blocking Floyd’s airway, Floyd became unresponsive. He was later pronounced dead.
No arrests have been made in the case, and protests in Minneapolis and across the country have raged for days — often devolving into violence including attacks on police, vandalism and looting.
