“My Neighborhood Too”

Dymanh Chhoun

Cambodian | Minneapolis, MN | he/him/his| Non-Profit

The morning of May 26, 2020, around 2 a.m. I was on Facebook scanning posts and saw someone repost a video of a Minneapolis police officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. It was hard to sleep that night. I kept on thinking about the video and what happened to George.

I joined WCCO-TV as a photojournalist in 2014 and became known as the “breaking news photographer” because I work fast. That morning I texted WCCO about going to work early to check out what was going on at 38th and Chicago. I got there before noon and saw a lot of people wandering around Cup Foods. I got out right away and started to take photos and videos of what was going on around that intersection. What I remember the most was a woman holding onto a bunch of flowers, gently trying to put it on the ground where Floyd took his last breath; she started to cry and seemed like she was about to fall, that is when a young girl came over to hug her. I took that picture and still remember how emotional I was as a cameraman trying to do my job and keep my cool. 

I was out there for five days capturing both videos and photos for WCCO-TV. It’s an experience that I thought I would only see on TV in other cities, but now I was witnessing it happening in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I just want people to know I understand from both points of view, and maybe because of that, I felt the strength that I needed to be out there capturing history. 

I came to America in 1993 from a Thailand refugee camp because my homeland Cambodia had a civil war where Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, killed over 2 million people. I grew up in South Minneapolis and went to Minneapolis public school since I was 7 years old. I remember my family’s rented home near Lake Street and Park Avenue and how we would walk to play at Phelps Field Park. I graduated from Roosevelt High School in 2005. I think it’s important for people to understand why l felt comfortable going to 38th and Chicago; it’s because that is my neighborhood too. 

Dymanh Chhoun was the first person in his family to attend college. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2011 with a Journalism and Mass Communication degree. He got his first job as a photojournalist at Fox 21 in Duluth before joining KTTC-TV in Rochester, Minnesota. He stayed at KTTC-TV for about 2 years and a half before landing his dream job as a photojournalist at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. After 6 years at WCCO-TV capturing breaking news and many marches and protests in Minnesota, he joined ThreeSixty Journalism at the University of St. Thomas as a Program Manager. He got into the news business because of ThreeSixty; they saw something in him when he was in high school and told him to join their summer workshop program. After joining and falling in love with the news programs, he decided to go into journalism, and he never looked back. Now he gets to work with high school students at the University of St. Thomas who might be interested in journalism. He hopes to use his experience to help and guide them in telling their own important stories.