Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  Copyright © 2017 by Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to reuters.com c/o PARS International Corp. for permission to reprint “Family of Florida Boy Killed by Neighborhood Watch Seeks Arrest” by Barbara Liston from reuters.com, March 3, 2012 © 2012 reuters.com. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. Reprinted by permission.

  ISBN 9780812997231

  Ebook ISBN 9780812997248

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Book design by Liz Cosgrove, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover illustration: Paul Ryding

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Sybrina

  Chapter 2: Tracy

  Chapter 3: Sybrina

  Chapter 4: Tracy

  Chapter 5: Sybrina

  Chapter 6: Tracy

  Chapter 7: Sybrina

  Chapter 8: Tracy

  Chapter 9: Sybrina

  Chapter 10: Tracy

  Chapter 11: Sybrina

  Chapter 12: Tracy

  Chapter 13: Sybrina

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION

  Sybrina Fulton

  For all that is secret will eventually be brought into the open, and everything that is concealed will be brought to light and made known to all.

  —Luke 8:17

  How can I show you the hole in my heart?

  How do I write about the death of my son?

  Words can be weak instruments. It’s almost impossible to convey the devastation and pain, the bottomless loss, heartbreak, and helplessness—the feeling of being broken into pieces that will never come back together again, not all the way. One piece of me has gone missing and it will stay missing, forever. There is nothing in its place.

  The child I lost was a son, a boy who hadn’t yet crossed the final threshold to becoming a man. He had been seventeen for only three brief weeks, still in the beautiful and turbulent passage through childhood’s last stages, still on his way to becoming. Instead, he will be remembered for the things he left behind.

  The bullet that pierced his heart.

  The blood that stained the ground.

  The crime-scene photographs of his corpse.

  And the famous hoodie picture.

  The fight to find an answer to the question of why he died, in a place where nobody seemed to care and where even the people whose job it was to care were eager to move on, to forget.

  I can never forget. Nobody ever “gets over” the death of a child. All I can do is remember, and in remembering I pay homage to my son in the hope that the truths I tell can help others and that maybe, someday, through God’s grace, what happened to my son will never happen to another mother’s child.

  His is the story of a life cut tragically short, but it’s also the story of a boy who in death became a symbol, a beacon, and a mirror in which a whole nation came to see its reflection. It’s the story of a young life that at its seeming end was transfigured into something else. The truth is that my son took his last breath and that will never change. The hole in my heart will never heal. They say when an adult dies you bury the past; when a child dies you bury the future. But though his physical life ended, he isn’t yet finished leaving his mark on the world. And so I will never stop saying his name and telling others the story of his life and his death, and all that followed. His spirit lives on, and even his death may yet be redeemed.

  This is the story of my son, Trayvon Benjamin Martin.

  The call comes at the start of a workday. I have just left my desk at the offices of Miami-Dade County’s housing agency, a cluster of cubicles in a downtown office building, and retreat to my car where I am now sitting, Miami sunshine flooding in through the windows. But I don’t notice the sunlight and haven’t even turned the car on. On the other end of the phone is my ex-husband, Tracy Martin. It’s the second time he’s called me today. He says something about our son I don’t quite understand, which will soon become clear: the previous night, on Sunday, February 26, 2012, at approximately 7:17 P.M., our son, Trayvon Martin, was shot to death in Sanford, Florida, sprawled out on the wet grass of a Florida townhouse complex, a single bullet hole in his seventeen-year-old heart. The call shuts out the sunlight and the sounds around me. I feel myself falling down a long, dark shaft, in silence, alone.

  —

  My name is Sybrina Fulton, and in that moment one life for me ended and another began. Before that day—before Trayvon’s death—chances are I would’ve lived and died without you ever hearing my name. I am one of the mass of Americans living an anonymous life of infinite complexities in the struggling suburb of an American city—one of the unheralded people whose weeks go by in a predictable rhythm of work and school, church and picnics, week after week, from cradle to grave. Happily. Before that phone call, there had been very few dark days. I’ve suffered through deaths of older relatives, like most people, and persevered through the tragedy of my brother Ronnie’s car accident, which left him a quadriplegic. But I felt that God had always protected me, watched over me. Sundays found me in church in Opa-Locka near our home: Sunday school at 9:30 A.M., church services at 11:00. We believed in the Lord and believed we were blessed. We also saw enough chaos and pain around us to know that life is fragile and happiness isn’t guaranteed. But nothing—no blessing or fear—prepared me for this.

  Trayvon’s funeral was on March 3, 2012, less than a week after I’d received that shattering call from Tracy. I thought that call was the worst moment of my life. I was wrong. The news over the phone, as devastating as it was, was just words, an abstraction. Burying my son’s one and only body—a grotesque reversal of the usual order of life and death—was many times worse. I couldn’t fully grasp then, and can only barely remember now, the details of the terrible day when Trayvon’s body was put to rest. I walked through the day in a daze. We had celebrated his birthday only twenty-eight days before, on February 5. Just a week earlier, I had been thinking about Trayvon getting his driver’s license. I had been thinking about his junior prom. I was thinking about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Now, instead, we were preparing our son for his eternal rest.

  We buried him in white: white suit, powder blue accents, and white shoes. And we sent him off in a baby-blue casket, with his name engraved on the side. With his fresh haircut and smooth, unblemished skin, he looked like he was going to his high school prom. The body was placed in a mausoleum drawer in a Miami cemetery. Yet I never believed that he was there. From the minute I learned that he had died, I always felt his presence. We buried his shell, but his spirit—who Trayvon was and who he always will be—remains. I believe this with all of my heart. That was the one thought on my mind from the moment I heard the news of his death. It’s what I wanted, wished, and prayed over, and it came true. Trayvon Martin was soon everywhere: in demonstrations, marches, and rallies; from Miami, the city where he lived, to Sanford, Florida, the small town near Orlando where he was killed, to the Million Hoodie March in New York City, to hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and millions of tweets and Facebook posts, to endless
prayers from untold supporters, and, soon, all the way to the White House. Whenever a child walks in darkness, danger, and fear, and wherever people honor my son’s life and protest his death, his presence lives.

  —

  It is now four years since my son’s death. In the midst of indescribable devastation, my favorite Bible passage, Proverbs 3:5 and 3:6, always comes to guide me, and it reads:

  Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He shall direct your path.

  After the funeral, in the midst of the trial of the man who shot Trayvon and the tribulations that followed, none of which I would ever fully comprehend, I put my faith in God, and a path was laid before me. We brought the tragedy of Trayvon Martin to the world, using his death as a call for change. We tell Trayvon’s story in this book, along with our own story of how two ordinary parents from Miami, Florida, became activists in bringing their son’s case to the world, in the hope that there won’t be any more heartbreaking cases like his anywhere else.

  Not in Sanford, Florida, where my son was shot dead on February 26, 2012.

  Or Jacksonville, Florida, where Jordan Davis, seventeen, was shot dead by a forty-five-year-old man who objected to the music Jordan and his friends were playing in their car.

  Or Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown, eighteen, was fatally shot by a police officer.

  Or Cleveland, Ohio, where Tamir Rice, twelve, was shot by a police officer as he played with a toy pistol in a park.

  Or Staten Island, New York, where Eric Garner, forty-three, died after being put in a choke hold by an officer during an arrest for selling single cigarettes from a package without a tax stamp.

  The list goes on and on, one tragic case after another, for too many years, and with too many victims to count or properly remember. Our case is far from the first incident of senseless gun violence; it was definitely not America’s first racially motivated killing. But it was the first in a wave that reignited people’s passion for the cause of injustice. I never imagined that my voice would be not only heard but heard by so many, and that it would become one of a chorus of voices shouting “I am Trayvon Martin!” in support and solidarity of our fight to make his death matter and not be forgotten. I could never have imagined that my son would become, in death, a symbol for injustice.

  —

  We tell this story in the hope that it will continue the calling that Trayvon left for us to answer and that it might shine a path for others who have lost, or will lose, children to senseless violence. We tell it in the hope for healing, for bridging the divide that separates America, between races and classes, between citizens and the police. Most of all, we tell it for Trayvon, whose young soul and lively spirit guide us every day in everything we do.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sybrina

  Our Lives Before

  Who was Trayvon Martin? I’ve been asked that question a million times since his death. In death, Trayvon Martin became a martyr and a symbol of racial injustice, a name and a face on T-shirts, posters, and protest signs.

  When he was alive, of course, he was none of those things. He was simply a boy, growing into a young man, with all of the wonder and promise and struggle that that journey entails.

  What else was he? He was loved. Trayvon had struggles—academically, even behaviorally at times—but he loved his friends and family, sports, music, and his dreams of flight. And he saw that love returned and those dreams coming within his reach. In other words, he was a boy, and because he was mine, he was (along with his brother) one of the most important and cherished boys in the world.

  His story begins with my own.

  My mother named me Sybrina with a y. When I was born, Sabrina with an a was a very common name. “I wanted her name to be different,” my mother said. And so it was Sybrina, and if our given birth name is an indication of our destinies, then from the beginning I was blessed and cursed to stand out.

  I was born in Miami, but we soon moved to Opa-Locka, which was a working-class Miami suburb. My mother worked at the post office as a clerk. My birth father was a longshoreman, who died young from heart failure. In 1978, when I was eleven, my mom remarried to a police officer who worked on the streets of Miami. I was a flower girl at my mother’s wedding, dressed in a flowing ivory gown, hair styled up in a bun, and happy. My stepdad was a powerful, strict, and taciturn presence in our house. We lovingly called him Dad.

  I was the baby, the youngest of six children, with two brothers who always looked out for me; an older sister; and two stepsisters. We weren’t rich, but my parents made sure we were all well provided for. We never had to worry about our electricity being turned off or not having a place to stay or a car to drive. We had big Christmases, went on summer vacations, and always attended church on Sunday. We were taught the importance of work. My parents had good jobs and high expectations, and they expected me to get a good job, too. Nobody gave anything to me. I had to earn and work for everything I wanted.

  We lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, although within the neighborhood there was a blend of different nationalities: Cuban, Jamaican, Bahamian, and Haitian. Back then, in the 1970s, Opa-Locka was a paradise. Children played everywhere: in the street, at the school, in the park. There was a house where a lady sold candy and a corner store where we would get soda and chips. Early on, my mom and dad taught me and my two older brothers the proper way of doing things. As soon as I came home from school, I had to change into my play clothes, and before I was allowed to go out and play I had to clean up and do my homework. Then and only then would I be allowed to go outside. We’d play tag and run up and down the street. Even then my dad, the disciplinarian policeman, gave us our perimeters: we had to stay within the two stop signs on our street.

  Opa-Locka was changing during the 1970s, like a lot of America at the time, suffering from an influx of drugs and an escalation of street violence. Despite that, my mom and dad created a loving and safe environment for us: what went on outside our doors was different, separate, foreign. There were problems raging out there, but we didn’t see or feel them. We were protected. I never saw the violence; I never saw drugs.

  By the time I was in my teens, my dad had become a detective, but he didn’t bring the energy of his job home. He was always polite with us, but still very strict. I had a curfew. People couldn’t just walk through our home. Sometimes I’d go to other people’s homes and their parents would allow the children’s friends to just walk all over the place. My friends had to be in the same room where I was: if I was in the den, they had to be in the den.

  And, of course, I wasn’t allowed to start dating until I was sixteen.

  I felt comfortable in the easy flow and ordinary rhythm of our humble community, but the truth is I didn’t want to be like everybody around me. From a young age, I craved something different, and for me education was the path to a less ordinary life. In middle school, I pursued a series of passions, always backed by my parents. I took classes for acting, etiquette, and modeling, and even learned how to play the piano and clarinet, and I also ran track. When I graduated from high school, there was no question that I would attend college.

  My dream was to go to school in Tallahassee, where I had friends—until my older cousin told my mother that everybody went there. So she decided that I needed something different.

  “I’m not sending my money—or my daughter—there,” my mother said. “Sybrina, pick another school.”

  I flipped through a book of colleges and, almost at random, settled on Grambling State University in Grambling, Louisiana, a place I had never visited, where I knew no one, and that, honestly, I knew nothing about. I just picked it because I wanted to get away from Miami, do my own thing, be my own person, and follow my impulse to do something different. I had never been away from home before, without my parents, other than to attend summer camp.

  My mother, impressed with my determination, approved.

  My mom, m
y Auntie Leona, and my brother Mark drove me to Grambling. When we arrived, I checked in to the freshman dorm and got my room key. My family and I went upstairs to my standard dorm room: two beds, two desks, four walls, small space. Okay, it’s just like summer camp, I thought. My mom, my aunt, and my brother helped me move in. We cleaned up everything, made up my bed, plugged in the clock, unpacked my clothes, and hung them in the closet.

  It was time to say goodbye.

  We all hugged, and Mama kept up a patter of encouraging talk as she slowly moved toward the door: “Sybrina, you will be fine”; “You’re going to do great”; “You’ve always liked to do things on your own”; “You always did like to be adventurous.

  “This is awesome and I’m so proud of you,” she said at last, as they were leaving.

  I walked out after them down to the sidewalk and watched their car start to pull out, when suddenly it all hit me at once like a big wave: this wasn’t a good thing. In fact, it was the worst thing in the world. I started sniffling. Then crying. Then boohooing. Then screaming. Making all this horrible noise in front of the entire freshman dorm. I don’t know where it all came from, but soon I was screaming so loud that my family could hear it from their car, and they turned around and drove back to where I stood. My mother popped open the door and came over to me.

  “Sybrina, what’s wrong with you?” my mother asked.

  I felt like a puppy that had been left alone in the woods. I looked at her with pitiful eyes.

  “Sybrina, look at all these people staring at you!” my mother said, gesturing to the students and parents now watching at us.

  “I don’t care, I don’t know these people,” I said, getting back into the car with them, ready to drive away from Grambling forever, and go back home. Instead, they took me to Captain D’s, a fast-food seafood restaurant, for lunch.