“Chad will be home later,” Brandy told Trayvon before leaving for work that afternoon. “Make yourself at home. Whatever you want in the refrigerator, it’s all yours.”
When she returned that evening, Brandy found Trayvon and Chad asleep. Chad was in his room; Trayvon was in the spare bedroom. Friday would be the start of a very big event for Orlando: the NBA All-Star Weekend. Brandy bought Trayvon and Chad tickets for one of the highlights of the weekend, a game featuring the best rookies and second-year players. That day she picked the boys up after the game and drove to meet me at Orlando’s DoubleTree hotel, where the Masons’ convention would be held.
I knew Trayvon was in great hands with Brandy because they got along from the first time they met. When they arrived at the DoubleTree, and I saw Trayvon’s big smile, it made my day.
Throughout the weekend, as we always did, Trayvon and I talked: about his school suspension, about what he would do when he returned to school that following Monday, and about his future.
“What do you want to do with your life?” I asked him at the hotel.
“Well, I want to go to college, but I know I have to work hard to get there,” he said.
He said he wanted to go to the University of Miami or Florida A&M University. He wanted to go to aviation school, but was also interested in Florida A&M, one of the largest historically black colleges and universities in the country.
Today, the pieces of those final few days come back to me like the prelude to a nightmare. At the time, though, it seemed so normal. Brandy and I went to the convention on Friday, and Trayvon and Chad ordered room service in the DoubleTree hotel room we booked for them to stay in that day.
We went to the room and checked on them: he was wearing cargo shorts with multiple pockets, flip-flops, a T-shirt, and, as always, his hoodie. I sat with him awhile, and talked more about his problems at school, his slipping grades, and his suspension, how he needed to get down to business when he returned to school if he wanted to go to college.
“Because if you don’t get into college, what are you going to do?” I asked him.
He mentioned his cousins who were working at the Port of Miami, loading cargo ships.
“Dad, if I don’t get into college, I could get a job at the port,” he said. “Some of the guys working there make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.”
“Coming out of high school and going straight into the workforce shouldn’t be your goal,” I told him. “You should aim higher than that. You’re only seventeen. You only have a couple of teenage years left. And your expectations should be getting higher as you get older. You don’t want to get stuck in Miami all of your life. You need to take whatever chance you have to see the world.”
The Port of Miami is a great way to earn a living. But I wanted more for my kid.
“I know, Dad,” he said.
On that Friday evening, after the convention was done for the day, the four of us drove back to Sanford. We dropped Chad off at his grandmother’s house because his father was taking him to a youth football game the next day, and Brandy, Trayvon, and I went back to her house and went to sleep. The next day, the three of us drove back to Orlando for the convention, and we sent Trayvon back up to the hotel room, where he went back to sleep. Later that afternoon, we went to watch Chad play his football game at a public park thirty minutes outside Sanford.
When Chad’s football game ended, Brandy and I headed to a surprise birthday dinner for one of her friends from high school, leaving Trayvon with Chad and my nephew Steve, who everybody calls “Boobie.” Boobie had borrowed his sister-in-law’s car so that he could drive Trayvon and Chad wherever they wanted to go. We felt the kids were safe with Boobie, who was twenty-one and had a day off from his job, and was happy to take care of the boys. Neither of them were any trouble, and later Boobie would say that he understood why some of his friends called Trayvon “Mouse.” Because he wasn’t afraid of anything, because he could fit in with any group, and because, most of all, he was just so calm and quiet.
We gave the boys money for food and a movie, but Chad was tired after the game, so Boobie decided they’d skip the movie and just relax at Brandy’s townhouse. They went into the garage, where Brandy had set up some furniture and a television so the kids would have a place to hang out. Boobie and Trayvon played the card game tunk for a dollar a round, while watching movies and calling friends on their cellphones. By the time we returned, after midnight, everybody was asleep: Chad in his room, Trayvon in the spare room, and Boobie in the garage.
The next morning, Sunday, February 26, Brandy and I went to visit some of my friends, leaving Trayvon and Chad with Boobie. Around eleven A.M., Boobie wanted something to drink, so he searched his cellphone for nearby stores on Google Maps, and the closest to pop up was a 7-Eleven at 1125 Rinehart Road, no more than a half mile from Brandy’s apartment.
“I’m going to the store to get something to drink,” Boobie told Trayvon.
“I’ll ride with you,” Trayvon told Boobie.
Trayvon put on his white Air Jordans, beige jeans, a sweatshirt, and his gray hoodie. The cousins drove to the 7-Eleven, where Boobie went inside and bought a soda while Trayvon stayed in the car. Then Boobie drove Trayvon back to Brandy’s house. It was now 11:30 A.M. Boobie gave him a hug inside the car and said, “Okay, Bro, see you next time I’m in Miami.
“Love,” said Boobie.
“Love,” repeated Trayvon, and he got out of the car and walked back into the townhouse.
Somewhere between five and six P.M., while they were watching the pregame show for the All-Star game, Trayvon asked Chad if he wanted anything from the store.
“I’m going to walk to the 7-Eleven,” he told Chad, meaning the 7-Eleven where he and Boobie had driven earlier that day.
Chad said he wanted some Skittles.
Trayvon left the townhouse and walked for about ten minutes to the 7-Eleven. As always, his earbuds were in his ears and he was surely listening to his music or talking to a friend on his phone.
He arrived at the 7-Eleven shortly before 6:23 P.M., according to the store’s security camera, which showed him inside the store in his hoodie, buying a can of Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice and a bag of Skittles. Then he left the store to walk back toward the house, talking to his school friend Rachel until a few seconds before 7:16 P.M., when the call was suddenly disconnected as he walked through the Retreat at Twin Lakes.
Trayvon was outside, which is where he always loved to be.
It was raining.
And someone was watching.
“Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood,” the neighborhood watchman told the Sanford Police Department dispatcher, “and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, it’s Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is one-eleven Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around, looking about.”
“Okay, and this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?” asked the dispatcher.
“He looks black,” replied the neighborhood watchman.
We returned to Brandy’s townhouse at ten-thirty that night, and immediately checked on the kids.
Chad was asleep upstairs in his bedroom, but there was no sign of Trayvon.
“He went to the store,” Chad said once we awakened him.
“Store?” I said. It was late for a trip on foot to the store. “How long has he been gone?”
Chad had lost track of the time.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Brandy checked all of the doors. The sliding glass door to the backyard was unlocked. There was no sign of Trayvon, inside or outside. She locked the sliding door. We looked around. Everything seemed secure.
I called Trayvon’s cellphone. It went straight to voicemail.
I called my nephew Boobie’s cellphone. It went straight to voicemail, too.
Well, maybe they decided to go to the movie and they turned of
f their phones, I thought. Or, even more likely, their phone batteries were dead.
I kept calling both of their phones and kept getting both of their voicemails.
I had been up since three or four that morning. A seventeen-year-old out past eleven P.M.? Again, normal. Surely, Trayvon would be back soon. And since he had a key to Brandy’s house, he could let himself back inside. I took a hot shower. I lay down on the bed and was soon fast asleep.
At seven A.M., Brandy woke up, and immediately went to check on Trayvon. She checked Chad’s room. Nothing. Trayvon’s room. Still nothing. Downstairs. The kitchen. The garage. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
“Baby,” she said, waking me up. “Trayvon’s not here.”
Now, I was worried. Again, I called his cellphone. Again it went straight to voicemail. I called Sybrina in Miami, and told her that Tray hadn’t come home, and she told me to call Boobie, who would surely know where Trayvon had gone.
I called Boobie’s cell and, finally, he answered.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Man, I’m at home,” he said.
“Where’s Tray?”
“He should be home,” he said, meaning Brandy’s townhouse.
“What time did you see him last?”
“I left him at the house at eleven-thirty in the morning,” Boobie said.
I began babbling. “Boobie, he’s not here, he hasn’t been here, not since early evening.”
I called another nephew, Kevin, who lives in nearby Oviedo, Florida, thinking, now praying, that maybe Trayvon had gone up to visit him. He hadn’t seen Trayvon, either. We woke up Chad and began grilling him, and he kept telling us the same thing: “He was going to the store to get something to drink, and I asked him to get some Skittles for me.”
Brandy began making calls. She called her job at the juvenile detention center in Orlando. Has someone named Trayvon Martin been arrested? “No,” she was told. She called the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and asked the same question. Again they said nobody arrested.
I called 911 and said, “I need to file a missing person’s report.”
They asked me all the particulars: name, age, description, last seen, et cetera, et cetera. I told the dispatcher, “He’s not from this area, and he has just turned seventeen.”
“Okay, sir, we’re gonna dispatch somebody out there,” the operator said.
I went outside to wait, expecting Trayvon to come walking up at any moment with an explanation of where he’d been and what he’d been doing all night.
Instead, within thirty minutes, several police officers came driving up to Brandy’s townhouse.
It was still early morning when Detective Chris Serino, an investigator for the Sanford Police Department’s general investigative section, introduced himself and the two officers who came with him.
Serino was a stocky guy who looked like a television detective: close-cropped dark hair, sunken eyes that seemed to have seen pretty much everything, and a button-down white shirt with a tie that was loosened at the neck.
I gave him all of the details: that my son, Trayvon, hadn’t come home from the store the night before; that he wasn’t from this area; that he didn’t have a driver’s license or other form of identification.
Detective Serino asked me if I had a recent photograph of Trayvon. Of course I did, I told him, and showed him a picture on my digital camera that I had taken of him a week before. The detective looked at it and then went outside to his car and returned with a folder. It had started drizzling by then, so he asked if we could all go into the townhouse.
We sat down at the kitchen table.
“I’m going to show you a photo, and you tell me if this is your son,” he said in his deep, gravelly voice.
He pulled out a picture, and laid it on the table in front of me.
“Is this your son?” he asked.
I looked at the picture, and today, four years and an eternity later, I still find it hard to describe how I felt. My mind spun. My chest ached. My eyes spilled over with tears. And I began sobbing and screaming. Later, Brandy, who was upstairs, told me that the scream was like nothing she had ever heard before, a bloodcurdling shriek that shook the house and could probably be heard in all two hundred and sixty-three townhouses at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, and for blocks, miles, worlds, around.
The picture burned a hole in my heart. It showed my seventeen-year-old son, as lifeless as a broken rag doll, on the wet grass, no more than a hundred yards from Brandy’s townhouse. One of his legs was folded back on itself, and his eyes were slightly open, staring into a stranger’s camera. The sweatshirt he wore beneath his hoodie was stained blackish red with blood from the gunshot wound to his heart.
Trayvon was dead.
By the time I regained my composure, a police department chaplain had arrived. But I couldn’t be consoled. Not now. Not over this.
I asked the detective what happened.
All he said was that there had been an altercation, that Trayvon had been shot, and that the person who shot him “has made an assertion of self-defense.” He asked for my cooperation, patience, and understanding. No one, it seemed, had been arrested. I knew immediately that the killer wasn’t black.
And that is where it all began.
CHAPTER 3
Sybrina
February 27, 2012
Tracy Martin and I were divorced in 1999, but we remain bound forever by our two sons: Jahvaris, now twenty-five, and Trayvon, forever seventeen.
Friends would sometimes say, “Oh, they get along so well for them to be divorced.” And I would say, “Listen, I’m still trying to get rid of my ex-husband. Everybody else can get a divorce and their ex-husband is gone and they’re done with them. Mine is still always around me, mainly because of Trayvon’s tragedy. But we’ve always respected each other.”
The telephone call that came on February 27 would bind us together in ways I would never have imagined.
It was the start of my workday. After twenty-four years in various government positions in Miami-Dade County, I had become a program coordinator for the Miami-Dade Housing Agency, working to bring housing back to residents who had been moved out of their homes in recent years. Dilapidated public-housing projects had been torn down, displacing generations of residents.
By that February some new housing had finally been completed on the acres of empty lots. The former residents, who had to undergo background checks and an additional screening to qualify for the new units, were skeptical and, in some cases, scared to come back because of various qualifications they needed to return. I was assigned to bring the displaced residents back to a new mixed-income housing development called NorthPoint at Scott Carver, built where the projects had once stood. These were new two-, three-, and four-bedroom apartments and townhouses, and I was on a mission to do whatever I could to bring people back and give them a better and nicer place to live. I had a community office in Liberty City, and Trayvon and Jahvaris would frequently come along as I hosted meetings for former residents so we could explain what was going on and hear their feedback. I wanted my sons to see what my work was about, see how communities were built and sustained, and appreciate that they always had a roof over their heads, and a wide extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins who would always care about them.
—
I was in my cubicle office in downtown Miami when my cellphone rang. “Trayvon didn’t come home last night” was all that Tracy, in his deep, East St. Louis baritone, said. Everyone was busy at work in the other cubicles around me. I couldn’t talk in the office. So I took my cellphone into a conference room and stared out the window. Another sunny Miami day. Trayvon didn’t come home, I thought, which in and of itself alarmed me. It wasn’t like either of my sons to stay out and not let us know where they were. Even Jahvaris never stayed out without calling—and he was then a grown man at age twenty-one. Tracy said he wasn’t sure what was going on. He said his cousin Steve, who we call “Boobie,” h
ad been with Trayvon the day before.
“Call Boobie,” I said. “He’ll know where Tray is.”
“I’ll call you back,” Tracy said.
I don’t remember exactly how long it took him to call me back or exactly what I did while I waited. I know I went back to my desk, where I couldn’t do anything. I know I called my sister, and told her what Tracy said about Trayvon not coming home.
“Do we need to go up there to Sanford and help him look for him?” she asked.
I said, no, that Tracy was handling it. But I kept thinking, What’s happened? I started stressing. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on work until Tracy called me back. It was so unusual for Trayvon to stay out all night without calling. I knew there was no point in being at work with all of this uncertainty. So I got up from my desk and went to my supervisor’s desk.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have an emergency at home. Something’s happened to my son. I don’t know what it is, but I need to leave.”
I didn’t give him any more information than that. Because I didn’t have any more information to give.
“Okay, Sybrina,” my supervisor said.
I picked up my purse and my things and I left the office. To this day, I’ve never returned.
I took the elevator down to the lobby, walked out of the building and into the parking lot, where I climbed into my car. I just sat there thinking, Where could he be?
He’s probably with Boobie, I told myself. Maybe they were watching a movie or something and he fell asleep and didn’t call his dad to let him know where he was.
He’s with Boobie, I just kept thinking. He just went somewhere with Boobie. They got in late. They fell asleep. They’re at Boobie’s house. They went to the movies and it was late and he didn’t want to go all the way back to the house. So he stayed with Boobie and fell asleep. And he planned to call his dad the next morning.
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