HENDERSON, Nev. — Las Vegas Raiders proprietor Mark Davis, responding to widespread criticism of a tweet delivered from the group’s Twitter accounts following former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, told ESPN on Tuesday night the article was his thought, and he doesn’t intend to disable it.
Floyd told officers”I can not breathe,” over 20 days before he was murdered when Chauvin pushed his knee into the back of Floyd’s neck for approximately nine minutes May.
Davis told ESPN he”intended no sympathy” into Floyd’s family together with the tweet, which he”took the lead” out of Floyd’s brother, Philonise, who said after the verdict,”Now, we can breathe .”
“I believed that was a strong statement,” Davis stated. “Today was a day where I could breathe, and we could all breathe because justice has been served. But we’ve got a great deal of work to do on social justice and police brutality.”
The tweet was broadly condemned in answers on Twitter but stayed pinned to the peak of the group’s accounts hours after being submitted.
Davis told The Associated Press and The Athletic he didn’t understand that the term”I could breathe” was used by fans of authorities in New York following the departure of Eric Garner at 2014 which he would not have used this phrase if he understood the background.
“It is a difficult situation,” Davis told the AP. “I feel awful it had been shot in ways it was not intended to be accomplished.
Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree accidental murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter by a jury for his part in the murder of Floyd out of a neighborhood convenience shop.