He met George Floyd in sixth grade. Now he's grieving alongside millions.
"They're chanting his name across the world," said one of Floyd's former high school classmates in Houston, "but they didn't know him like we knew him."
Jonathan Veal attends the wake of George Floyd, his longtime friend. Fred Agho / for NBC News
June 9, 2020, 9:42 AM PST / Updated June 9, 2020, 10:03 AM PST
By Mike Hixenbaugh
HOUSTON — On Memorial Day, Jonathan Veal was at home in Oklahoma City, getting ready to start up the grill, when he saw a disturbing video circulating on social media. It showed a black man struggling for breath under the knee of a white police officer in Minnesota.
"No, no, not again," Veal remembers thinking.
He felt the same sickening tightness in his chest that hits him every time a new viral video shows a black man or woman being killed by a police officer. That could have been him or one of his five children — or a friend.
At first, he didn't recognize the man whose face was pressed against concrete, gasping for his mama. It wasn't until the following morning, when the name George Floyd started appearing in social media posts and news articles, that Veal, 45, made the connection. Afterward, he locked himself in his office at the leadership consulting company he owns and sat in silence, trying to process the realization — memories of "Big Floyd" rushing through his mind.
Back at his house that afternoon, Veal broke down in tears as he shared the news with his wife: "That was my friend," he said, before playing the video for her. "I've known him since the sixth grade."
Full coverage of George Floyd’s death and protests around the country
On Saturday, Veal drove six hours back home to Houston to say goodbye to a high school classmate who, through his death, had become something much more: an international symbol of racial injustice and a catalyst for nationwide protests.
After spending a night in his childhood bedroom, Veal woke up Monday morning and slipped on a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words "I can't breathe." He drove across town, toward the same church where he'd attended a different funeral last year, for a high school friend who'd died of chronic health problems. Only this time, Veal had to park a mile away, along with hundreds of others, and wait for a bus to shuttle him to the public visitation.
"I could never have imagined anything like this," Veal said, surveying the line of strangers outside The Fountain of Praise church, many of them wearing T-shirts with a picture of his old friend printed on the front. "Not for a kid from Third Ward."
As Veal waited in line, a dozen TV cameras — news crews from around the world — recorded interviews with people who'd come to pay their respects a day before Floyd's private funeral and burial. U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, one of many elected leaders in attendance, greeted Veal with an elbow bump as she walked by.
"It's a lot to process," Veal said. "I knew this guy, ya know?"
He wondered, Is this what it felt like to be one of Emmett Till's grade school classmates? Till's lynching during a family visit to Mississippi in 1955 — and his mother's decision to display his 14-year-old body in an open casket — shocked the nation and helped ignite a new chapter of the civil rights movement.
And now Floyd's death had done the same. On Sunday, members of the Minneapolis City Council announced radical plans to disband the city's police department and create a new system for ensuring public safety — one of many reform efforts unfolding in cities across the U.S.
"They're chanting his name across the world," Veal said, "but they didn't know him like we knew him."
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