Zimmerman’s call begins at 7:09 p.m. Zimmerman tells the dispatcher, “He’s got his hand in his waistband.” Then, “Something’s wrong with him. Yup, he’s coming to check me out, he’s got something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is.”
As Martin nears the truck, he notices Zimmerman staring at him and looks back at him. For a moment they lock eyes. Zimmerman says, “These assholes, they always get away.” Then, “Shit, he’s running.”
The car doorbell rings. Zimmerman is leaving his truck to follow Martin on foot. Then, three lines around which destiny turns.
The dispatcher asks, “Are you following him?”
“Yeah.”
“OK we don’t need you to do that.”
In his call to Jeantel, Martin tells her that a “creepy ass cracka” is watching him. They try to talk about the All-Star Game. “The nigga is following me now,” he says to her. She says, “Run!” And he does. She hears a whoosh of wind and loses his call. When she calls back, he tells her, “The nigga still behind me.” She listens, and hears this:
Martin: “Why are you following me for?”
Zimmerman: “What are you doing around here?”
A thump, and then what Jeantel will later describe as “wet grass sounds.”
Martin: “Get off, get off.” Silence.
Jenna Lauer makes her 911 call. As she speaks, a voice can be heard in the background screaming something. Then, “Help!” A gunshot. Silence.
At this point the calls multiply. There are six more of them. The voices are scared, shocked, fearful, hysterical. All the conversations are private, individuated, separated, vectoring past each other into the wintry night.
Six minutes after Zimmerman’s call, Trayvon Martin is dead. The police arrive at 7:17, handcuff and detain Zimmerman for questioning, but release him without charging him. Trayvon Martin’s body is sent to the morgue as a John Doe.
Racial injustice is fed by the denial of difference.
For over six weeks, George Zimmerman was not charged in the killing. Sanford PD had just come through two separate brutality scandals—in two separate cases, sons of police officers were left uncharged in a beating of a homeless man and a killing of a Black teen. Yet Sanford police chief Bill Lee, brought in to restore confidence after those scandals, refused to file charges against Zimmerman, first citing a lack of probable cause and then arguing that the department needed to complete its “color blind” investigation.34
The murder of Trayvon Martin went largely unremarked, a back-page police blotter item, until lawyers Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson took on the case, and communications expert Ryan Julison began telling the story to the media. Nine days after the shooting the Reuters wire service picked up the story.35 Quickly it went viral.
If Fairey’s Obama HOPE image had been the image of rising idealism, four years later two images of Trayvon Martin—a small black-and-white of him in a hoodie peering upward, and another of him in a red Hollister shirt smiling like a schoolboy—would become the images of brittle precarity. Into these low-res images generations would pour all of their frustration over racial profiling, the sadness and rage over all those who had been impacted by the politics of fear, and the thousands of lives ended too soon.
In a month, a million people had signed an online petition authored by Trayvon’s father Tracy Martin and his mother Sybrina Fulton to ask state attorney Angela Corey to prosecute George Zimmerman. Million Hoodie Marches popped up all across the country. On March 22, the case hit an inflection point. That morning Geraldo Rivera went on Fox to declare, “I think the hoodie is as responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”36
In response, Dwyane Wade posted on Twitter and Facebook a photo of himself wearing a hoodie. By midday, LeBron James had tweeted a picture of himself and his Miami Heat teammates gathered in hoodies, their heads downcast and covered, their hands in their pockets.37 His tweet read: “#WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.” By the afternoon, President Obama had ended a press conference on his World Bank appointee by addressing the case, the first time that he had openly stepped into a high-profile race incident since his remarks early in his first term on the detaining of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had left him battered and reeling.
“When I think about this boy I think about my own kids,” he said. “I think all of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how something like this happened. That means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened as well as the specifics of the incident.”
He added, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
From around the country, protestors marched to the Sanford Public Safety Complex—a gleaming new $16 million building for the police and fire department dropped right into the center of Sanford’s historic Black community—and shut it down. The Department of Justice, FBI, and Florida Department of Law Enforcement soon launched their own investigations. Finally, Governor Rick Scott ordered the case transferred from Sanford PD to Corey for review. On April 11, she charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder.
By then, Zimmerman had long since bolted town, gone into hiding, quit his lawyers, and begun raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for “his living expenses and legal defense” through a Web site emblazoned with American flags, quotes from Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, and a photo of Ohio State University’s Hale Black Cultural Center, which had been vandalized with the words “Long Live Zimmerman.”38
An illegal leak of Trayvon Martin’s protected school records disclosed that Martin had been suspended for tagging “WTF” on a locker, another time for possession of a pipe and a Baggie with marijuana residue, and a third time for tardiness and truancy. Once, when school officers searched his backpack, they found pieces of jewelry and a screwdriver, and sent these items to the Miami-Dade police for investigation. But the police never found any evidence that the jewelry had been stolen. Martin’s parents were certain that the leak was meant to show that their child fit a kind of a profile—a criminal, a junkie, a lowlife. His mother, Sybrina Fulton, said, “They killed my son, and now they are trying to kill his reputation.”39
None of these facts—the institutional facts of a teen’s life ended unmercifully soon—were pertinent to how the conflict had begun that rainy night in February, when Zimmerman knew nothing of Martin but what he saw before him. Corey and the prosecution team needed to decide what Zimmerman’s initial gaze meant. In their affidavit, they chose to argue that Zimmerman had profiled, but not racially profiled Martin.
Perhaps they were worried that they would burden their case. Perhaps they were sensitive to the appearance of bowing to protesters. Whatever the case, when Corey announced the charges, she told the press, “We only know one category as prosecutors, and that’s a V. It’s not a B, it’s not a W, it’s not a H. It’s a V, for ‘victim.’”40 Colorblindness and colormuteness had framed the Sanford Police Department’s decision not to charge Zimmerman, and they would also frame the prosecution’s case.
When the trial commenced in June 2013, defense attorney Mark O’Mara asked Judge Debra Nelson to bar the prosecution from using the word “profiling,” arguing that the term was potentially explosive and that race was not at issue. Prosecutor John Guy responded, “That is not a racially charged term unless it’s made so, and we don’t intend to make it racially charged.”
He added, “There are a number of avenues someone can be profiled in any one way or combination. We don’t intend to say he was solely profiled because of race.”
O’Mara responded that profiling and racial profiling went together “like peanut butter and jelly.”41
Judge Nelson gave the defense a victory by accepting the prosecution’s argument. She barred the prosecution from telling the jury that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin. The prosecution was allowed, as they had put it in their affidavit, to use the word “profiling.” But they were uninterested in exploring even this theory. Although tapes of Zimmerman’s
911 calls regarding suspicious persons—all of whom were Black males—were at their disposal, the prosecution would never use them.
But if the prosecution would pretend not to see race, the defense had no such qualms. They dropped the jury inside the moment of conflict—into the darkness, stripped of context, thin of facts. In the darkness the defense would ensure that the jurors could not see Trayvon Martin at all. The defense would get the jury to see only Trayvon Martin’s surroundings, themselves, figments of their imagination.
They introduced the jury to the woman whose home had been burglarized—a young, blond, self-described “stay-at-home mom” named Olivia Bertalan. She gave a horrifying account of locking herself in her infant son’s upstairs bedroom, rusty scissors in one hand and her baby pressed close in the other, as two young African-American men broke into her home downstairs and stole a camera and a laptop. She described Zimmerman to reporters as a kind and concerned neighbor, bringing over a new lock for her back door. She later learned that one of the robbers lived at the Retreat at Twin Lakes.
The prosecution never objected, never asked what Bertalan’s story had to do with Trayvon Martin. The teenager merely happened to share the burglars’ gender, youth, and race, and for that weekend, he was resting in the same gated community where both the victim and the suspect lived. But the defense understood that the jury of six women—five of whom were white—could connect the dots themselves.
Olivia Bertalan was, The Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith wrote, “the ‘perfect victim,’ which Trayvon could never be: a white woman living in fear of Black criminals.”42 The defense had evoked an old racial narrative: George Zimmerman was not only defending himself and his neighborhood, he was defending white womanhood. They had justified the murder of Martin, Smith noted, in exactly the same way Southern defense lawyers had justified the killing of Emmett Till.43
In his closing, defense attorney Mark O’Mara returned to Bertalan as “the face of the frustration that George was feeling.” He reminded the jury that all those arrested at the Retreat at Twin Lakes for various crimes had been young, Black males. He presented them with a six-foot-high cutout silhouette of Trayvon Martin, and placed it next to a five-foot-eight silhouette of George Zimmerman. He spoke of Martin’s “muscle tone,” saying that autopsy photos could not capture it, because Martin’s body had lost half its blood.
Then O’Mara showed two more pictures. The first was a surveillance shot of the hooded Martin purchasing his Skittles and fruit drink, appearing as a dark shadow in the fluorescent convenience store glare. The second was perhaps a selfie, taken from a low angle. Trayvon loomed large, half-lit, cap high, chin up, lips tight, shirtless. “This is the person who George Zimmerman encountered that night,” said the defense lawyer. “This is the person who attacked George Zimmerman.”
O’Mara then showed a final photo from that dark, fatal night—stunning in both its banality and inscrutability—the kind of photo that might have been taken by mistake, as if a cellie’s camera function had been pressed accidentally. In this photo, the only visible objects were a thin gray line across the middle—perhaps the sidewalk through the Retreat at Twin Lakes or the yellow police tape stretched across the back porch of a townhouse—a square light in the top right-hand corner—perhaps someone’s lit window—and a small indistinct gray rectangle in the bottom corner—perhaps an electrical box. Most of the photo was an impenetrable black. Out of this darkness, the defense could conjure demons.
“It was out of this darkness that Trayvon Martin decided to stalk—I guess—plan, pounce, I don’t know,” O’Mara said. “Out of the darkness, Trayvon Martin came towards George Zimmerman.”
“Out of this,” he said, waving the photo. “And we know what happened.”
O’Mara brought out a large, sharp-edged cement block, carried it over carefully like a workman hauling a heavy paver, and deposited it in front of the jury. “Now that is cement, that is a sidewalk, and that is not an unarmed teenager with nothing but Skittles trying to get home,” O’Mara said. “That is somebody who used the availability of dangerous items, from his fists to the concrete, to cause great bodily injury.”
The wet pathway was no longer a wet pathway, it was Martin’s deadly weapon. The teen himself was a deadly weapon.
Rock paper scissors. He deserved his fate. Fist concrete handgun.
And so the jurors would come to see the events of this almost moonless night solely through George Zimmerman’s eyes. Late on July 13, George Zimmerman was found not guilty both on the charge of second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin, and on a lesser, hastily added charge of manslaughter.
Per Judge Nelson’s basic jury instructions, O’Mara and the defense team only had to show that Zimmerman had not demonstrated “a depraved mind without regard for human life.”44 On the charge of manslaughter, they simply had to prove that Zimmerman had not intended to kill Martin—that he had fired by accident or under the threat of serious injury. They did not need to prove their wild assertion that it was Martin who had been stalking Zimmerman.
After the case, one of the jurors, a white female dubbed Juror B-37, went on CNN to speak to Anderson Cooper—her identity shrouded in partial darkness. She made clear where her empathy lay. Of Trayvon Martin, she said, “Oh, I believe he played a huge role in his death. He could, he could have—when George confronted him, and he could have walked away and gone home. He didn’t have to do whatever he did and come back and be in a fight.”
George Zimmerman, she said, “started the ball rolling. He could have avoided the whole situation by staying in the car. But he wanted to do good. I think he had good in his heart.”45
Cooper asked her: “Even though it’s he who had gotten out of the car, followed Trayvon Martin—that didn’t matter in the deliberations? What mattered was those final seconds, minutes, when there was an altercation, and whether or not in your mind the most important thing was whether or not George Zimmerman felt his life was in danger?”
“That’s how we read the law. That’s how we got to the point of everybody being ‘not guilty,’” she said. “I had no doubt George feared for his life in the situation he was in at the time.
“I think he was frustrated with the whole situation in the neighborhood, with the break-ins and robberies,” she said. “I think he’s learned a good lesson.”
Cooper asked her if she minded that he would be getting his gun back. She said, “It doesn’t worry me. I think he would be more responsible than anyone on the planet now.”46
Soon another juror—the panel’s only woman of color—also stepped into the media spotlight. She had been known as Juror B-29, and ABC’s Robin Roberts introduced her as Maddy. She was Puerto Rican—she called herself, in contrast to George Zimmerman, “a Black Hispanic.”
She had eight children, including teenagers around Trayvon’s age. She said she had threatened to hang the jury because she wanted to see Zimmerman punished. But she gave in because she could not find a way to meet the standards of the law. And she stood by her decision.
Yet Maddy had been overcome by strong feelings of guilt, especially at the thought of Trayvon’s mother’s anguish over her son’s death. After the verdict, she said, “I literally fell on my knees and I broke down. My husband was holding me. I was screaming and crying and I kept saying to myself, ‘I feel like I killed him.’ And I feel that if maybe if they would put the law and a lot of people would read it they would understand the choices that they gave us.”47
Both the verdict and the jurors’ public statements regarding the law consoled conservatives who believed the case had come to trial only because of the despicable efforts of the professional racial grievance class. Cornell law scholar and blogger William Jacobson argued, “[I]f the jury were correct under the law, how can the case be about race since the law is race neutral?”48 But this hermetic, circular logic suggested that legal formalism was not unlike art-world formalism—it denied its blindness even as it infected the entire discourse with the same blindn
ess.
Maddy told ABC’s Robin Roberts that she had stepped forward to speak publicly because she felt Juror B-37 implied that she wanted to quit the jury rather than acquit Zimmerman because of her racial sympathies.49 “The way she made a lot of it sound was, ‘We walk by color,’ and that’s not what I do,” Maddy said. When Roberts asked her what she wanted to tell Trayvon’s parents, she answered, “I didn’t know how much importance I was in to this case because I never looked at color. And I still don’t look at color.”50
In his closing, Prosecutor John Guy repeated his claim that the case was not about race. He asked the jury to consider the question, “What if it was Trayvon Martin who shot and killed George Zimmerman? What would your verdict be?” He then concluded, “That’s how you know it’s not about race.”
At the time many liberal pundits praised Guy’s gambit. Any rational person, they said, would immediately know the answer to Guy’s question—Martin would be found guilty. In the same sense, the jury would have to find Zimmerman guilty. It was a classic “post-racial” reversal—one had to think race to deny race. It flattered the race-conscious-yet-colorblind conscience. But Guy and his fellow prosecutors had only twisted themselves up in their own logic. They never saw it coming.
In this verdict, the casual violence of racial profiling, the formal violence of color-blindness, and the physical violence afforded by a loaded semiautomatic had converged. Now the question of how to build “beloved community” seemed suspended. The race conversation that national leaders would inevitably call for, raged the cultural critic Frank Rich, was a farce. “We’ve had that conversation,” he said. “It’s gotten us nowhere.”51 Indeed if the race conversation could only be had in the context of court cases—as in the killing of Emmett Till or the beating of Rodney King—defined by formal blindness and set within an oppositional mode, how much could it really accomplish?
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