MINNEAPOLIS • As onlookers pleaded with Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to take his knee off George Floyd’s neck, Chauvin just gave them a “cold” and “heartless” stare, the teenager who shot the harrowing video of the arrest testified Tuesday at Chauvin’s murder trial.

In tearful testimony, Darnella Frazier, 18, said that Chauvin continued to kneel on Floyd and that fellow Officer Tou Thao held the crowd back, even when one of the onlookers identified herself as a firefighter and begged repeatedly to check Floyd’s pulse.

“They definitely put their hands on the Mace, and we all pulled back,” Frazier told the jury.

Frazier said of Chauvin: “He just stared at us, looked at us. He had like this cold look, heartless. He didn’t care. It seemed as if he didn’t care what we were saying.”

Floyd’s death last May, along with the video of the Black man pleading that he couldn’t breathe and onlookers angrily yelling at the white officer to get off him, triggered sometimes-violent protests around the world and a reckoning over racism and police brutality across the U.S.

Frazier testified that she began recording the scene because “it wasn’t right, he was suffering, he was in pain.”

She said shed walked to a convenience store with her 9-year-old cousin when she came upon the officers, and sent the girl inside because she didn’t want her to see “a man terrified, scared, begging for his life.”

Frazier breathed heavily and wept as she viewed pictures of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd and after a prosecutor asked her to describe how the encounter changed her life.

She said she looks at her father and other Black men in her life, and “how that could have been one of them.”

“I stay up at night apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more … not saving his life,” she said, adding of Chauvin: “It’s not what I should have done; it’s what he should have done.”

Another bystander, 18-year-old Alyssa Funari, testified tearfully that she also felt helpless to intervene when she saw Floyd struggling to breathe as Chauvin knelt on his neck and other officers pinned down his lower body.

“I felt like there wasn’t really anything I could do as a bystander,” Funari said, adding that she felt she was failing Floyd.

“Technically I could’ve did something, but I couldn’t really do anything physically … because the highest power was there at the time,” she said, explaining that an officer held the crowd back.

The prosecution asked multiple witnesses to describe their horror at what they saw, buttressing the testimony with multiple videos.

In this image from video, witness Donald Williams wipes his eyes as he answers questions, as Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill presides Tuesday, March 30, 2021, in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin at the Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis, Minn. Chauvin is charged in the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd. (Court TV via AP, Pool)

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