Lori Falce: Seven breathless minutes

I frequently tell my son that more can happen in a short period of time than he thinks.

This usually happens as I am pushing him to clean his room or bring down the laundry or take out the trash or empty the dishwasher. Seriously, the boy has very few regular chores but seems to think making his own bed is akin to working on a chain gang.

And so I often look for ways to show him how quickly something can take place to underscore how much he could accomplish in the space of a commercial break if he just put his back into it.

This week, as I watched coverage of the George Floyd case in Minneapolis — in which Floyd is restrained with a knee in his neck as police officers hold his handcuffed body to the pavement — my son apparently stopped playing video games on his phone to watch the video of the incident.

“Mom,” he asked. “How long does it take a person to die if they can’t breathe?”

My kid knows what it’s like to not catch your breath. He has asthma. His father died of pneumonia. He understands the currency of oxygen.

But as someone with ADHD, he can struggle with the concept of time. I knew he wasn’t asking for a specific number of minutes, which would mean nothing to him.

“Well, it isn’t always the same, honey,” I said. “But in this case, it appears to be maybe seven minutes.”

A kaleidoscope of witness smartphone videos, body cam footage and surveillance from a nearby restaurant, shows snippets of the police interaction with Floyd, who was officially pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m. Monday. The videos show bystanders asking to have someone take his pulse far earlier. There wasn’t one.

My son went back to his own phone. I thought I had lost him back to his 12-year-old world of YouTube stars and games I don’t understand. It wasn’t long before he looked up again.

“Mom, that was just seven minutes.”

I don’t know what will happen with the Floyd case. I know that great and terrible things come from the collision of pain and injustice with bureaucracy and institutions. I am a native Minnesotan, and watching the state where I was born erupt in flames as mourning became protests and protests became riots was a knife in my gut.

But when these things have happened before, they have often happened quickly. When then-East Pittsburgh police Officer Michael Rosfeld shot Antwon Rose II in 2018, that was one of the points. Officers react. Things escalate. Someone — often a black man — dies.

This time it wasn’t a split-second decision or confusion or fear, as it was when Philando Castile’s 2016 shooting was livestreamed by his girlfriend from the Twin Cities suburb less than 15 minutes from where Floyd died against a police SUV outside a Chinese restaurant.

This was in slow motion. Long minutes, with now-fired Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee in Floyd’s neck as he gasped and said he couldn’t breathe. As he called for his mother. As he went still. And as Chauvin made frequent eye contact with bystanders and their cameras.

My son tells me that seven minutes is about half of a good YouTube video. It’s a sliver of a game of Fortnite. It’s about how much time he takes to wolf down his dinner so he can go play with friends.

And it is just enough time for a 12-year-old boy to realize how dreadfully fast life can disappear and how horribly unfair that is.