THE CASHIER WHO TOOK GEORGE FLOYD'S $20 BILL

Christopher Martin lived above a bricked grocery store in south Minneapolis, with a maroon awning and bold red signage that reads Cup Foods. So when a cashier's position came up last year, he took it without thinking.

He quickly learned the regulars' orders by heart, their specific tobacco preferences, their favored snacks. The job was more than just a paycheck. A family, community base, he remembered. A lot of jokes and laughs.

But on 25 May last year, he served a customer he had never met before, igniting a chain of events that rippled around the world and irreversibly changed Martin's life.

It was George Floyd, who had come to Cup Foods that day to buy a packet of cigarettes. He handed Martin an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill. Martin accepted, and then informed his managers. A co-worker called the police. And shortly after, George Floyd would be dead, held for nine minutes and 29 seconds under a white police officer's knee as Martin watched from the sidewalk in disbelief.

Within a week he and his family moved from their apartment. He quit his job. He battled with grief and trauma. And eventually he testified as an eyewitness in Chauvin's murder trial – one of the most closely watched and significant cases in modern American history.

Martin testified on the third day of the trial. He was one of seven bystanders to take the stand, a choice he made to tell the whole world what really happened that day.

Dressed in a black and grey windbreaker, he told the jury calmly how he had considered putting the counterfeit $20 on his own tab, but had been told by store managers instead to confront Floyd before the police had been called.

Hours after the guilty verdicts against Chauvin were delivered, Martin returned to Cup Foods and stood at the site where Floyd took his last breath.

Miss you brother, he posted on Instagram below a picture of himself looking up at a giant mural of Floyd painted next to the store.

To read the complete article, see:
‘I allowed myself to feel guilty for a very long time': the teenage cashier who took George Floyd's $20 bill (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/23/christopher-martin-george-floyd-minneapolis-cup-foods)

The Minneapolis Field Office investigates counterfeit money. The special agent in charge says they catch more than a million dollars in counterfeit bills in Minnesota each year. SAC Joe Scargill explains where it comes from, and how you can spot it.

Money passes hands every day at stores and for services. Scargill says counterfeit money does too.

Oh absolutely, absolutely, yeah, Scargill said. Most of what we see here in the Twin Cities area is made locally, which means it's produced in someone's house, in someone's car, in someone's basement.

To read the complete article, see:
Where Counterfeit Money Comes From, And How To Spot It (https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2021/05/26/where-counterfeit-money-comes-from-and-how-to-spot-it/)

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