A photojournalist shot by Minneapolis police in 2020 during the George Floyd protests has recently entered hospice care.
Police shot Linda Tirado, 42, in the face with a rubber bullet, leaving her with a traumatic brain injury and blind in one eye when she was covering the unrest after Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died while being restrained by Minneapolis police.
“I was lining up a photo when I felt my face explode,” Tirado wrote in an NBC op-ed in June 2020. “My goggles came off and my face was suddenly burning and leaking liquid, the gas mixing with the blood.”
A building goes up in flames during a George Floyd riot. (Getty Images)
Tirado’s friend, Noah Berlatsky, wrote this week on his Substack, “She lost her eye, and she’s been deteriorating slowly since — and now I guess less slowly. She still has some lucid moments, but they’re becoming more infrequent,” CBS News reported. Now she is reportedly dying because of the injuries sustained during the protest.
Tirado filed a lawsuit following her injuries, alleging that police “ignored the press credential she wore around her neck,” marked her with a “ballistic tracking round” and “shot her in her face with foam bullets” as she took photos outside the precinct building in south Minneapolis. She was awarded $600,000 from the city, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.
However, most of that money has gone toward medical expenses, National Press Club President Emily Wilkins said in a lengthy statement posted to X.
“We send our love and admiration to Linda Tirado, a freelance photojournalist who we learned today has entered a hospice in Tennessee,” Wilkins wrote in part on Thursday. “We are also sending some funding to support the costs of her care.”
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Riot police advance toward protesters at the intersection of E 31st St and S 3rd Ave on Saturday, May 30, 2020, in Minneapolis, MN. Protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd while in police custody erupted across the country. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Tirado recently posted on her own Substack that she is “getting ready to die” and shared some of the emotions she’s been navigating. In the piece, she does not detail her diagnosis.
“I know that I’m lucky to have been diagnosed early, so that I have time to write another book or at least put all my journals in one place so that if I go sooner than we think I will, someone will be able to read them all and pull out enough words to publish on my behalf,” she wrote.
“But I don’t feel lucky, or unlucky,” she continued. “I feel like the sweeping notes in the Flower Song, the Nessun Dorma, anything that Vivaldi ever wrote. I feel nothing but joy and peace and pain and fear, all of it all at once so that it bleeds into itself and can only be described as emotion raw and pure and beautiful and perfect, and also fleeting.”
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Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison for the death of George Floyd. (AP)
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Protests erupted in Minneapolis and other major cities across the country following Floyd’s death. The officer who restrained Floyd by kneeling on his neck, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of his murder in 2021. Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and riots, as well as calls by progressives to “defund the police.”
Chauvin later appealed his case to the Minnesota Supreme Court. In November 2023, he was stabbed 22 times inside a library at the Tucson penitentiary by an inmate who once served as an FBI informant. Chauvin was later released from a local hospital and returned to prison for follow-up care.
In September 2023, the Minneapolis City Council took up Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey’s proposed 2024 budget following the examination of the police department after Floyd’s death. The spending plan added $7.6 million in costs for new jobs, including adding 34 full-time positions across four city departments for jobs such as lawyers, IT people, workers to examine body-worn camera footage, counselors and trainers for police officers, and overtime, according to the Associated Press.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Minneapolis police for comment.
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