Morgue

by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

  Seven thirteen. The watchman’s call to police had lasted exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds.

  In the next three minutes, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman would collide in a life-or-death struggle.

  And one would die.

  What happened next is murky. Accounts differ.

  After he lost sight of the hooded teen, Zimmerman said he was walking back to his truck when the kid seemed to materialize out of the dank air. He was pissed, and angry words were spoken.

  “Yo, you got a problem?” the hooded teen yelled.

  “No, I don’t have a problem,” Zimmerman answered.

  “You got a problem now,” the kid growled as he punched Zimmerman in the face, breaking his nose.

  Stunned by the blow, Zimmerman stumbled and fell on his back. Trayvon leaped on top of him. Zimmerman couldn’t push him off, and soon the kid was repeatedly slamming Zimmerman’s head against the concrete sidewalk that ran between the rows of townhouses.

  Zimmerman screamed long and loud for help.

  Trayvon clamped one hand over Zimmerman’s nose and the other over his mouth, yelling at him to “shut the fuck up.” In the commotion, Zimmerman’s shirt and jacket were yanked up, revealing his Kel-Tec 9mm handgun, holstered on his right hip.

  Trayvon saw it.

  “You’re going to die tonight, motherfucker,” he said.

  Zimmerman screamed again for help.

  Nobody helped, but several startled witnesses called 911 to report the ruckus. In the background of their calls, dispatchers could hear desperate human howls.

  “Does he look hurt to you?” the dispatcher asked one of the callers.

  “I can’t see him,” the woman answered. “I don’t want to go out there. I don’t know what’s going on, so…”

  “So you think he’s yelling ‘Help’?”

  “Yes,” the frightened woman answered.

  “All right,” the dispatcher said calmly. “What is your…”

  A single shot rang out.

  The screaming stopped at seven sixteen.

  A minute later, the first cop rolled up on the scene.

  A young black man lay facedown in the wet grass, his arms under him, his hood pulled back. No pulse.

  A red-eyed Zimmerman stood nearby, bloodied but responsive. His jeans and jacket were wet and grass-stained in back. He admitted he’d shot the boy. He raised his hands and surrendered his handgun to the officer, who handcuffed him and seated him in a squad car.

  Later, he told investigators that in the struggle, the teenager had reached for his exposed handgun, but Zimmerman had been faster. He grabbed his 9mm and pulled the trigger. The kid slumped into the grass, face forward, startled.

  “You got me,” he said. His last words.

  The stunned Zimmerman told police he’d quickly gotten up and moved the boy’s arms out to his side, to make sure he had no weapons. He couldn’t see any wounds, nor the boy’s face.

  Other cops soon arrived, followed by paramedics, who all tried unsuccessfully to revive this nameless kid, although they had no idea at the time who he was. Still no heartbeat. They pronounced him dead at precisely seven thirty.

  One officer lifted Trayvon’s hoodie and felt the heft of a large, cold can—the unopened AriZona watermelon juice drink—in its front pouch. He also found a package of Skittles, a lighter, a cellphone, forty bucks and some change, but no wallet or ID.

  So the unidentified teen’s body was sealed in a blue body bag and given a number before it was carted off to the morgue. Sadly, he was just a hundred yards from his house.

  The paramedics examined Zimmerman and noted abrasions to his forehead, some blood and tenderness at his nose, and two bloody gashes on the back of his head. His nose was swollen and red, probably broken.

  Zimmerman’s wounds were cleaned up back at the station, he spoke freely in a voluntary interview, and later he walked detectives through his movements that night.

  Days passed. The Sanford police followed up and were genuinely sad for the kid’s family because, despite his teenage missteps, he seemed to be generally pointed in the right direction, but they couldn’t prove Zimmerman committed any crime. In fact, all the evidence suggested his account was truthful.

  The ordinary stuff in a dead kid’s pockets didn’t seem especially pertinent to their shooting investigation at the time, but the importance of any single thing is not always apparent at first glance.

  The morning after the shooting, Volusia County’s associate medical examiner Dr. Shiping Bao unzipped the blue body bag on his table in the Daytona Beach morgue and began his autopsy of Trayvon Martin.

  Bao, who was fifty years old, was born and raised in China, where he got his medical degree and a graduate degree in radiation medicine. He became a naturalized American and eventually did a four-year residency in pathology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. After three years at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office in Fort Worth, he came to Florida for more money. He’d been on the job less than seven months.

  Before him now was the corpse of a handsome, well-developed black teenager, neither scrawny nor stocky. Apart from the bloodless bullet hole in his chest and the sooty ring of stippled skin around it, Trayvon Martin looked fit, trim, and healthy.

  Ah, but that hole.

  The single 9mm bullet that killed him entered his chest square-on, just to the left of his breastbone. It pierced his heart sac, punctured the lower right chamber of the heart, and passed through the lower lobe of his right lung, fragmenting into three pieces along the way. Around the hole itself was a halo of soot, a powder tattoo measuring two by two inches.

  His wounded heart had continued to pump, and each contraction gushed blood into his chest cavity, filling it with 2.3 liters of blood—more than two quarts, or about one-third of a normal person’s total blood volume.

  Bao didn’t write it down, but he said later that he believed Martin had remained conscious for as long as ten minutes after he was shot, and was likely in great pain.

  One thing is almost certain: Conscious or not, Trayvon Martin probably lived very briefly after being shot.

  Most gunshot wounds to the heart are not instantaneously fatal. In fact, no matter what you see on TV or in the movies, only gunshot wounds of the brain are likely to be instantaneously fatal … and even then, not always. Unconsciousness depends on three factors: the organ injured, the extent of the injury, and the psychology/physiology of the wounded person. Some people immediately lose consciousness from a minor wound; some are shot through the heart and keep going. One can stay conscious at least five to fifteen seconds from a heart shot.

  But we know for sure that when paramedics arrived on the scene ten minutes later, he was dead.

  Other than the fatal wound, Bao’s autopsy found only a small, fresh abrasion on Martin’s left ring finger below the knuckle. He didn’t cut into the knuckles of either hand to look for internal bruising around the knuckles that might have proven whether the boy had punched anyone. It might not have proven conclusively that he was the aggressor, but it might have proven he was in a fight.

  Martin’s blood and urine also contained low levels of THC—the active ingredient in marijuana—but nobody knows exactly when he used the drugs or if he was high the night he was killed.

  This struck Bao as a routine shooting case. He wrapped up his examination in ninety minutes.

  “The wound,” Bao wrote in his final autopsy report, “is consistent with a wound of entrance of intermediate range.”

  Those two words—intermediate range—quickly reverberated in the echo chamber of American media, which didn’t really know what they meant but seized on the phrase as somehow important. If the muzzle of George Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec wasn’t against Trayvon Martin’s chest when he fired, how far away was it? Was this “intermediate range” shot fired into the kid’s chest from an inch away? Five inches? Three feet? Different forensic experts (and a slew of inexpert commentators) couldn’t seem to agree o
n the precise meaning of the term.

  Worse, the angry drumbeat against Zimmerman was becoming deafening, and this single phrase—intermediate range—only turned up the volume. One side saw “intermediate range” as proof of a summary execution; the other side saw it as a validation of self-defense.

  They were both wrong.

  When a gun’s trigger is pulled, the firing pin strikes the bullet’s primer, creating a tiny jet of flame that ignites the powder in a cartridge. That sudden ignition creates a burst of hot gas that propels the bullet down the barrel of the gun. It all bursts out—the bullet, hot gases, soot, vaporized metals of the primer, and unburned gunpowder—in a spectacular and deadly plume.

  How far this cloud of superheated debris travels varies by gun, barrel length, and the type of gunpowder. Gunshot residue can be found on the clothing and the body of a human victim. It might leave a film of soot, or tattoo the skin around the wound with unburned or partly burned particles of gunpowder that puncture the top layer of the skin, or produce nothing at all. The pattern of this damage—or lack of it—can tell us how far away the gun’s muzzle was when it was fired.

  That tattooing (sometimes also called stippling) is the hallmark of an intermediate range gunshot. Shots within a foot or less might leave soot residue. Without stippling, without soot, and without any other residue on the skin or clothing, a gunshot will be classified as distant. A contact wound, in which the muzzle is touching the skin when fired, leaves a completely different wound.

  In Trayvon Martin’s case, this tattooing or stippling encircled his wound in a two-inch pattern. The examiner noted soot, too. The pattern suggested to me that the Kel-Tec’s muzzle had been two to four inches from the boy’s skin—intermediate range—when George Zimmerman pulled the trigger.

  But while the media-sphere haggled over what the stippling proved, few people noticed a tiny fact in another report hidden deep inside the mountain of documents investigators and prosecutors had dumped on the public before trial.

  On this obscure little detail, the whole case pivoted.

  * * *

  Amy Siewert was a firearm and gunshot expert in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s (FDLE) crime lab. With a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute, she’d worked in the FDLE’s forensic toxicology section before transferring to the firearms section, where she’d been an analyst for three years.

  Her job was to examine George Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec 9mm handgun and the teenager’s light gray Nike sweatshirt and the dark gray hoodie he wore over it. Her main job was to connect all the dots that proved this was the gun that fired the bullet that penetrated the clothing and pierced the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy the world knew as Trayvon Martin. She’d also examine the garments microscopically and chemically for telltale gunshot residue that might suggest how the shooting happened.

  The first thing Siewert noticed was an L-shaped hole in Martin’s hoodie, about two by one inches. It lined up perfectly with the boy’s wound. She noted soot around it, both inside and out. Frayed fibers around the hole were also burned. Chemically, she discovered vaporized lead. And a large, six-inch orange stain surrounded it all—Trayvon Martin’s blood.

  Martin had worn a second sweatshirt underneath the hoodie. It, too, was sooty and singed from the muzzle blast. Its bloodstained two-inch bullet hole bore a star shape.

  But what Siewert couldn’t find in two separate tests was a pattern of gunshot residue around and away from the holes.

  The stellate hole, soot, vaporized lead, and no discernible pattern from the powder led Siewert to only one possible conclusion: The muzzle of George Zimmerman’s pistol was touching Trayvon Martin’s hoodie when he pulled the trigger. Not just close, but actually against the fabric.

  But few people, much less the national media, realized the significance of Siewert’s brief report. Intermediate range fit the narrative so much better. If they noticed Siewert’s findings at all, they didn’t grasp the forensic distinction between contact and intermediate range, or ask the vital question: How could a gun’s muzzle be touching a sweatshirt but still be as much as four inches away from the skin of the person who wore it?

  It was chalked up to a simple, minor contradiction. The media quickly moved on to the more emotional events swirling around Trayvon Martin’s death.

  The question nobody was asking would provide the answer nobody was expecting.

  * * *

  That single shot in the night set a tragedy of mythic proportion in motion, quietly at first but slowly building toward a deafening din.

  For more than a week, the shooting of Trayvon Martin wasn’t even much of a story. Local TV stations ran short items about it, the Orlando Sentinel published two news briefs, and the twice-a-week Sanford Herald ran just 213 words. But then on March 7, Reuters News Service circulated a 469-word wire story, based mainly on an interview with a lawyer for Trayvon’s family, that made it sound more like a white vigilante had purposely hunted down an unarmed, innocent black child and shot him in cold blood, a murder being covered up by local cops. The wires carried an old childhood photo of Trayvon, provided by his parents, leaving the impression that the victim had been a happy, harmless, baby-faced middle schooler.

  It was the first blood in the water, and the national media smelled it.

  Reporters swarmed to Sanford, both covering and cultivating the burgeoning conflict. When black leaders began to cry racism, the stakes grew instantly more intense; ratings and readership soared. Tapes of Zimmerman’s call to dispatchers were edited by one news network to make it appear he used a racial slur before the shooting; Martin’s parents endorsed a petition on Change.org calling for Zimmerman’s arrest and it got 1.3 million “signatures”; Reverend Al Sharpton and the rest of the racial-grievance industrial complex showed up to stir the pot; members of the New Black Panther Party offered a $10,000 reward for Zimmerman’s “capture”; and the newest parlor game became “Guess what slur George mumbled in his 911 tape” when no such slur was apparent.

  A lot of bloggers and TV talking heads became armchair crime scene specialists, offering forensic theories that came more from Hollywood whimsy than medical school.

  President Barack Obama elevated the case to a presidential issue when he said, “Trayvon Martin could’ve been me thirty-five years ago,” and “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” as he called for nationwide “soul-searching.” Instead of tamping down the rage, the president fueled it.

  Angry rallies converted bags of Skittles into flags of protest. Hoodies and cans of tea became symbols of American racism.

  “He may have been suspended from school at the time, and had traces of cannabis in his blood,” wrote London’s Guardian newspaper, “but when you look behind the appearance of a menacing black teenager, those Skittles say, you find the child inside.”

  Celebrities, politicians, and throngs of ordinary people demanded justice for Trayvon, but the only suitable justice they would accept seemed to be the arrest, conviction, and swift execution of that vile racist George Zimmerman.

  * * *

  On April 11, 2012—more than six tense weeks after Trayvon Martin was shot dead and a local district attorney found no evidence to file criminal charges—a special prosecutor ordered the nearly broke George Zimmerman arrested and charged with second-degree murder. A new defense team volunteered: Mark O’Mara and Don West, both well-known legal veterans and both top-notch defenders. The old friends made a good team: O’Mara was a masterful litigator, dignified and unflappable; West was a fighter who didn’t apologize to anyone for feeling that the case against Zimmerman looked like mob justice.

  And both had long experience in self-defense and Stand Your Ground cases. In fact, the deceptively affable Pennsylvanian West quit his job as a federal public defender in death-penalty cases to take Zimmerman’s case.

  He wasn’t born yesterday. Regarded as one of the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers, he’d worked some to
ugh cases with even tougher clients. He knew defendants sometimes lied. He knew the evidence wasn’t always perfect. He’d seen how the genuine facts in a shooting could be twisted beyond recognition by media.

  But after spending time with Zimmerman, he barely recognized the public’s monstrous caricature of him.

  And soon both O’Mara and West recognized that the fanatical public clamor and local politics threatened to capsize some serious legal questions.

  Many court watchers expected Zimmerman to claim immunity under Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law, which said a victim under attack wasn’t required to retreat and could legally use lethal force in self-defense.

  But for many Trayvon supporters recalling the image of that smiling child, the possibility that George Zimmerman had feared for his life seemed absurd. To them, Stand Your Ground was a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Outside of the courtroom, this case was more about race than self-defense, and blacks vocally decried a law they believed gave white people carte blanche to kill black folks. They demanded the immediate repeal of Stand Your Ground, and many politicians stood ready to accommodate.

  Ironically, at the time of the Martin shooting, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law had benefited blacks disproportionately. Since poor blacks who live in high-crime neighborhoods were the most likely victims of crime, the law made it easier for them to protect themselves when the police couldn’t arrive fast enough. Blacks make up only about 16 percent of Florida’s population, but 31 percent of the defendants invoking Stand Your Ground were black, and they were acquitted significantly more often than whites who used the very same defense.

  The tumult didn’t matter. O’Mara and West decided against a Stand Your Ground defense simply because they believed Zimmerman had a solid traditional self-defense case: He was on his back and couldn’t retreat from Trayvon Martin’s vicious pummeling. The law was irrelevant.

  Even if Zimmerman had screwed up, they believed he had no evil intent. Would a killer call the police before he murdered someone?