George Floyd: Floyd Mayweather offers to pay for funeral costs and memorial services
Undefeated former boxer Floyd Mayweather has offered to pay for the funeral of George Floyd, the unarmed African-American man who was killed while in police custody last week in the United States.
Mayweather has contacted the family of George Floyd, according to Leonard Ellerbe, the chief executive of Mayweather Promotions, and the offer has been accepted.
“He’ll probably get mad at me for saying that, but yes, he is definitely paying for the funeral,” Ellerbe told ESPN on Monday.
Floyd died on 25 May after being arrested in Powderhorn, Minnesota, which has triggered numerous peaceful and violent protests across the US against racial injustice and the treatment of BAME communities by American police.
A private post-mortem on Monday found that Floyd died of asphyxiation, having been seen in a video in handcuffs while a police officer forced his knee onto his neck for more than eight minutes, despite Floyd’s desperate claims that he could not breathe.
Recently-dismissed police officer Derek Chauvin has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree homicide following the incident.
An official autopsy stated that there was no evidence of "traumatic asphyxia or strangulation" and also blamed underlying health issues, but a separate post-mortem arranged by his family and carried out by two doctors determined a different cause of death.
"The cause of death in my opinion is asphyxia, due to compression to the neck - which can interfere with oxygen going to the brain - and compression to the back, which interferes with breathing," Dr Michael Baden, a former New York City medical examiner and one of the pair, said at a news conference.
On top of the funeral costs, Mayweather has offered to pay for memorial services in both Minnesota and North Carolina. Neither Mayweather nor the boxer’s agency have responded to requests to confirm the kind gesture.
If confirmed, it will not be the first time that the American former five-weight world champion has taken such action to help families at a difficult time. The undefeated 50-0 boxer won his first world title against Genaro Hernandez in 1998 for the WBC super featherweight title, and when Hernandez passed away in 2011 after suffering from cancer, Mayweather covered the funeral expenses.
Floyd’s death has sparked widespread tributes from the world of sport as well as messages of solidarity for the Black Lives Matter movement, and on Monday Steve Bisciotti, the owner of the NFL's Baltimore Ravens, pledged $1m for social justice reform and said a group of former and current players would decide which organisations benefit.
"We must all discover new ways to unite. We must all work to break the cycle of systematic racial injustice," Bisciotti said in a statement.
