- Former Minneapolis police officer Kim Potter's manslaughter trial in the death of Daunte Wright begins Tuesday with jury selection.
- Wright's former teacher, Courtney Ross, said Potter "murdered a Black man with no thought."
- Ross was the girlfriend of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed during an arrest in 2020.
The manslaughter trial of Kim Potter, a former police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, who fatally shot Daunte Wright earlier this year begins Tuesday. Ahead of the trial, Wright's former teacher, Courtney Ross, said Potter "murdered" Wright "with no thought."
"The fact that Kim Potter garnished a weapon for a routine traffic stop when the entire world was looking at racist cops under a microscope proved to me that Kim Potter was so brash and brazen that she murdered a Black man with no thought and she did that admittedly so," Ross said at a press conference on Monday.
Earlier this year, Potter, a white woman, fatally shot Wright, a Black man, during a traffic stop. Wright's death occurred in April, during the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd in May 2020.
Potter and her partner had pulled over Wright for driving with a suspended license plate on April 11, and according to police determined that he had a warrant out for his arrest for failing to appear in court for a previous charge. In body-camera footage released by police, Potter can be heard shouting, "I'll tase ya. Taser! Taser! Taser!" shortly before shooting Wright in the chest. "Shit, I shot him," Potter can be heard saying.
Ross said there was "no excuse" for Potter's "incompetence" to not tell the difference between her gun and her taser and said that she thought Potter had "profiled Black people in Brooklyn Center for a long time and finally lost her temper and murdered Daunte Wright."
"Kim Potter was seen as a senior officer and an officer that trained new cadets, a trainer who claimed not to know the difference between a taser and a gun," Ross, who said Wright was her former student at Thomas Edison High School in Minneapolis, told reporters. "In all my years working in education, I never mistook a sticker for a stapler."
Ross, who was also Floyd's girlfriend, told reporters she was at a gathering with other people who had lost loved ones to police violence to celebrate a birthday party when she found out that Wright had been killed in April.
She said at the press conference that the case following Wright's death was "very dear" to her heart.
"He was a joy and his smile would light up this room a thousand times," Ross said.
Wright's mother, Katie Wright, spoke briefly at a press conference and thanked the community for coming together for her family.
"Everybody who's been there for us, standing with us, on one of the worst days of our life, one of the worst months going forward of our life, we really thank you and we appreciate this," Wright said.
Potter faces first and second-degree manslaughter charges, a maximum of up to 25 years in prison, and $50,000 in fines if convicted on both counts.