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Ex-Minneapolis Cop Charged In George Floyd’s Death Accosted At Grocery Store Hours After Posting Bail
“You’re not going to be able to comfortably go around Minnesota like this,” an angry shopper told J. Alexander Kueng as he bought groceries at a Minneapolis-area supermarket hours after his release.
One of the four former Minneapolis police officers charged in the killing of George Floyd has been released pending trial.
J. Alexander Kueng, 26, was freed on Friday after posting a $750,000 bail, according to Hennepin County jail records. He’s the youngest of four former Minneapolis police officers to be charged in Floyd’s death.
Hours after his release, the accused police officer was apparently accosted while standing in a checkout line at a suburban grocery store, according to a video of the now-viral encounter.
The roughly two-minute clip begins with a woman approaching Kueng at a Cub Foods in Plymouth, Minnesota after she spotted Kueng while shopping.
“What’s your name?” the shopper, who filmed the interaction, asked him.
“Oh, yeah, that’s me,” Kueng responded.
Kueng, clad in grey joggers and a baseball cap, said he was picking up “necessities.” The 26-year-old clutched a package of OREOs in his right hand. He was accompanied by a bearded man wearing a black, backwards baseball cap.
“You’re literally outside here comfortably as if you didn’t kill that man?” the shopper said, referencing Floyd. “Did you think that people weren’t going to recognize you? Honestly, did you? You don’t have the right to be here. You killed somebody in cold blood — you do not have the right to be here.”
Kueng responded: “I understand. I’ll get my stuff paid for.”
But the shopper behind the camera wasn’t having it.
“We don’t want you to get your stuff — we want you to get locked up,” the woman said. “Do you feel any remorse for what you did? Do you?”
The former Minneapolis police officer stared blankly at the ground and didn’t respond. As he stood in line, the woman openly accused him of murdering Floyd.
“He has the nerve to literally come outside thinking that we don’t know what he looks like,” she added. “How dare you? You’re not going to be able to comfortably live in Minnesota after this — or anywhere.”
The blistering clip concluded with the woman predicting he’d soon be back behind bars.
“And you will be going back to jail — trust, trust,” she said.
The footage was posted to Twitter early Sunday by a man identifying himself as the brother of the shopper who confronted Kueng. The clip had more than 4 million views as of Tuesday.
Thomas Plunkett, Kueng’s attorney, didn’t immediately respond to Oxygen.com’s request for comment regarding the incident.
Floyd’s killing — and his dying moments, captured on video — triggered mass protests against racial injustice and ignited a fierce national conversation about systematic police reform.
Kueng, who assisted in restraining Floyd, is charged with aiding and abetting both second-degree unintentional murder and second-degree manslaughter in the unarmed Black man’s death, according to a criminal complaint obtained by Oxygen.com.
Three other Minneapolis officers, including Derek Chauvin, who dug his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes last month, have been fired and arrested.
Officers Thomas Lane, 37, who helped subdue Floyd, and Tou Thao, 34, who watched, are also charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death. Lane, who had been on the job for four days at the time of Floyd’s death, bonded out of police custody on June 10, jail records also show. Chauvin and Thao are still in police custody.
Chauvin, too, was publicly shamed prior to his arrest. Protesters swarmed — and vandalized — his home, splattering the words, “killer” with blood-red paint on his garage. “A Murderer Lives HERE,” scrawled in sidewalk chalk, was also written at the foot of Chauvin’s driveway, according to images circulating social media.
Chauvin was transferred to a maximum security facility related to concerns for his safety, Oxygen.com previously confirmed.
Kueng doesn’t have any prior misconduct complaints against him, according to police records. He faces a combined maximum of 50 years in prison if convicted on murder and manslaughter charges in Floyd’s death.
Kueng, Chauvin, Lane, and Thao are scheduled back in court on June 29, court records show.
