Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  Patricia was also a family member. She had known Trayvon since the day he was born.

  “Tracy, what’s going on?” Patricia asked me over the phone.

  I tried to explain—the shooting, the aftermath, the confusion, the lack of an arrest. I could barely talk about it. The shock was still too fresh. Patricia shook me from my stupor.

  “Something’s not right, Tracy,” she said after I told her the story the best I could. “We have to apply some pressure.”

  “Okay,” I managed to say. “But how?”

  “I need you to call Ben Crump,” she said.

  Then she told me a little about Benjamin Crump. Crump, at the age of forty-two, had already become one of the most prominent African American attorneys in the country. He was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, the oldest of nine kids. He had first noticed racial inequality in fifth grade the same way a lot of us first notice it. He looked around. He asked his mom, “Why do people on that side of the tracks have it so much better than people on our side of the tracks?” Since 1997, he had fought—and won—some of the most important recent civil rights cases, along with Daryl Parks, his partner at their Tallahassee law firm, Parks and Crump. Crump had taken on a wrongful-death case against the state of Florida for the parents of Martin Lee Anderson, a fourteen-year-old who died in early 2006 after being kicked and beaten by guards at the Bay County Sheriff’s Office Juvenile Boot Camp in Panama City, Florida, and won more than $10 million in settlements. After the guards who beat Anderson were tried and acquitted, Crump told the media, “You kill a dog, you go to jail. You kill a little black boy and nothing happens.”

  Crump’s law firm’s motto is “We help David fight Goliath and win.”

  Patricia told me she would contact Benjamin Crump on my behalf.

  In early March 2012, Crump was busy in court as usual, working on another civil rights case. But Patricia kept calling him, leaving messages, sending texts and email. She became a thorn in his side. Finally, Crump called back.

  “What is it?” he asked Patricia, during a lunch break. “Why do you keep calling me?”

  “Well, you’re the only person for this case,” said Patricia.

  “But what’s the case?” Crump asked.

  She gave him the background about Trayvon’s shooting and then asked Crump if he would talk to me, so I could give him the story from my point of view.

  Shortly after that, I was on the phone with Attorney Crump. I was still in shock, and my manner was meek and mild. I was still barely able to speak about what had happened to my son.

  “Trayvon was seventeen years old,” I told him. “He was walking from the 7-Eleven, and a neighborhood watch volunteer pulled a nine-millimeter pistol and shot and killed him. The police said Trayvon was unarmed, and the police also said they aren’t going to arrest the man who shot him. All my son had was a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea.”

  “Hold on,” said Crump. “Let me make sure I understand this. Your son was walking home. He was unarmed. The neighborhood watch volunteer had a nine-millimeter pistol?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “And he shot my son in the heart.”

  There was a long silence. “You don’t need me on this case,” Crump finally said. “I’m an officer of the court and we see people all the time, people with no evidence against them at all, get arrested on an innuendo, on a suspicion, on a ‘somebody said you look like somebody….’ But here, you’ve got a person who has the proverbial smoking gun in his hand, with an unarmed teenager dead on the ground.”

  He took a breath. “Of course, they’re going to arrest him,” he said. Then he repeated, “You don’t need me on this case, Mr. Martin. Give it a couple of days. They are going to arrest him.”

  Crump went back to his case. I went back to trying to get my son’s body released for his funeral in Miami, believing justice would prevail and the killer of my son would soon be arrested.

  —

  I have a close and longtime friend at Roy Mizell & Kurtz Funeral Home in Fort Lauderdale, Cameron Mizell. I called him from Sanford asking for a favor.

  “Trayvon was killed and we need to get the body back home,” I told him. “Could you pick him up in Volusia County, drive him home, and get him ready for a funeral on Saturday?” I asked, meaning Saturday, March 3, which was only a few days away.

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  Before I drove back to Miami, I made one last call to the Sanford Police Department, letting Detective Serino know that I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I had received about Trayvon’s death, and that I would be back after I laid my baby to rest.

  The funeral home sent what’s called a “First Call Car,” a van without windows, specially fitted with a stretcher on the inside to hold a body that’s being transported to a funeral home for embalming. They picked up the body at the morgue in Volusia County, and transferred it to the van, and took my son on his last ride back home. The funeral home’s representatives called me once they were on the road. Only after I knew for certain the body had been picked up did I start driving back home. On the way, I asked the funeral home director if it would be okay for me to see Tray as soon as they got him back home.

  He warned me that it wouldn’t be a good idea, because the body had been in the cooler and it would not be a pretty sight. “You wouldn’t want to see a loved one in that state,” he said. “That’s not how you would want to remember your child.”

  The idea of my son’s body sitting in a cooler for days—“in that state”—hit me like a punch. But I took his advice and waited until they prepared him.

  As soon as I pulled into town, I drove over to Sybrina’s house, carrying the picture that the police detective had given me of Trayvon lying dead on the ground. Even though Trayvon’s body was now back in Miami, Sybrina and her family still couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe that he was dead.

  “Tracy, are you absolutely sure?” Sybrina’s sister asked me.

  I asked her if she wanted to see the picture that the police had shown me.

  She said she did, and one of Sybrina’s brothers did, too, so I showed them the picture. But Sybrina couldn’t look at it. She wasn’t in a state to do anything. I gave two friends a shopping list, and they went out to buy Trayvon’s last outfit, the clothes he would wear in his casket. I wanted him to wear white with powder-blue accents because those are the colors Trayvon told me he wanted to wear to his high school prom. My friends found him a white suit and a powder-blue necktie and vest at the mall in Fort Lauderdale. I met them at the mall, then Sybrina and I went to the funeral home, where we picked out a baby-blue casket lined in white, with his name engraved on it.

  Now I had to choose his grave site. I went to the Dade Memorial Park in North Miami, where my mom, dad, and grandmother and other family members were laid to rest. A member of the cemetery staff drove me around on a golf cart, looking for what he called “a decent plot.”

  We rode around for a while and eventually pulled over. We got off the golf cart and walked toward an empty plot, a path forcing us to walk over other people’s graves.

  I stopped. “No. I don’t want Trayvon buried in the ground.” I didn’t want to imagine anyone walking across his grave.

  A member of the cemetery staff told me about their mausoleum, where, by coincidence, Trayvon’s great-grandmother Nettie Spotford and his cousin Cory Johnson were buried. Cory’s fiancée had purchased a space in the mausoleum right next to Cory’s. Once she’d heard about Trayvon’s shooting, she’d offered to help us however she could. While we were still at the cemetery she called me up and said, “Tracy, I heard you are looking for a plot?”

  I offered to purchase the plot in the mausoleum next to Cory from her. We would lay Trayvon to rest there.

  —

  Our fight to find the truth about what happened to our son continued throughout the preparations for his funeral. Attorney Crump still hadn’t agreed to work on our case, but he did send his associate, a young civil rights attorney n
amed Jasmine Rand, down from Tallahassee to meet with us. On the day she came, the house was filled with family and food, and a feeling of almost unbearable grief. Being a young attorney she was nervous about meeting us: not just because it was such an emotional time, but also because Jasmine is white. She later told me that before she opened the door, she was anxious about how she would be perceived, and wondered if we’d be resentful toward her because, as far as she knew, a white person had just killed our son.

  But the last thing on our minds was the color of her skin. We were still shell-shocked, still numb, but already some of our strength was returning—we were focused on getting answers, and if Jasmine was going to help, we welcomed her.

  Jasmine Rand called my cellphone from her car on her way to meet us. She was headed to Sybrina’s house, and I had to apologize: we were running late because I was in the mall picking out the suit in which to bury Trayvon. For a moment no one spoke: I think the pain of that surreal moment radiated from one end of the phone to the other. Jasmine asked me to please not apologize and said that she would be ready to meet whenever it would be convenient for us.

  We met later that same day. Sybrina, Jahvaris, and I took the attorney to Jahvaris’s room, where we told her what details we knew about what had happened to our son—and then she told us what she thought she and Parks and Crump could do for us.

  “If they decide to accept the case, I can promise that Benjamin Crump, Daryl Parks, and I will fight harder than anybody to have the killer arrested,” she said, adding that even with those efforts, no specific outcome could be guaranteed. “But if it is going to happen,” she said, “it will happen with Ben Crump.”

  We signed the papers for the Parks and Crump law firm to take our case.

  —

  The viewing, at Richardson Funeral Home in Miami, was on Friday, March 2. So many people came to view the body: Trayvon’s family, friends, and classmates, as well as friends of the family. Our family arrived last. I walked through the crowd of mourners and began the longest walk of my life: down the funeral home aisle toward my son’s open casket. I approached the casket and saw Trayvon lying there, his face placid, his body uncharacteristically still, in his white suit. Showing no sign of the violence that had prematurely snuffed out his young life, he actually looked at peace.

  I leaned over and kissed him on his lips.

  They were cold.

  I rubbed his hands.

  Cold.

  I broke down. Sobbing. I stood there, holding on to the casket, feeling that something deep and essential, something irreplaceable, had been stolen from me that I could never get back. I fell hard into a dark, dark place. As much as I wanted to speak to all the people gathered there to join us in mourning and comfort, I couldn’t speak. I felt that no one could fully understand the pain of what I was going through, and I didn’t have the words to make it clear. I was being eaten alive—I was so close to his body, but would never see my son again in this life. My best friend, Tommie Liddell, stood by my side, and as close as we were, he couldn’t even find a way to comfort me. I was trying to be strong for my family, and they were all right there for me: Brandy and her family, my brothers and sisters, Sybrina and Jahvaris, all of my family and friends. But nothing and nobody could save me from my sorrow now.

  The next day, our family arrived at the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Miami Gardens for the funeral in two limousines provided by the funeral home—I rode with Sybrina, Jahvaris, and two of my other children, Takira and Demetrius. As other family members walked out of the first limo and into the sanctuary, we gathered our thoughts and tried to calm our emotions. The church could hold more than a thousand people, we were told, but it had apparently swelled past its capacity and people were lined up outside. A lot of them were there for us, and to see Trayvon, who many knew as “Slim,” for the last time. But there were strangers, too. As of yet, nobody really knew the story of what brought us to this point, only the stray details that were being passed along by word of mouth and in a handful of sketchy news stories that had come out: a young man had been shot and killed. But they had all come to bear witness. I was dazed, but moved that so many people had come to remember our son. I looked over at Sybrina, who seemed closed inside herself, her face lined with the suffering of the previous days. I looked down at the flower on my suit to make sure it was on straight. Sybrina and I—and our whole family—all wore white; my suit was in the same style as the one Trayvon wore. I took off my suit after the funeral and placed it in a plastic bag with the flower still pinned to the lapel. I would never wear it again.

  Finally, our limo door was opened and we got out and walked up the front steps of the church. We were all crying. The doors to the church opened and the choir was singing, but I couldn’t hear or see anything but the casket resting at the altar at the front of the church. I was led to my seat, too hurt to even know what I was doing. I only vaguely remember the funeral service, led by Pastor Ludence Robinson.

  He recited Psalms 89, 90, and 91, psalms about strength, trust in God, and the power we have to rise, even above death. Although he didn’t know Trayvon or the circumstances of his death, the pastor read from Job 36:15, which deals with unexpected tragedy and loss: “But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering; he speaks to them in their affliction.”

  The congregation rose and one by one passed by Trayvon’s casket, taking a last moment to pay their respects to our son, who was also a son of our community, a son of our city. Many of the mourners stopped by the first row, where we sat, to give us a hug or a kiss and offer words of comfort. I accepted it all in a daze. As we prepared to leave the church for the cemetery, I broke down again, knowing that when that casket closed, I would never see Trayvon again. Not in this life.

  We left the church and climbed back into the limousine. Sybrina, Jahvaris, Takira, Demetrius, and I were driven to Dade Memorial Park, passed through an alley of glorious old trees and up to the sturdy mausoleum, a pink granite wall of graves.

  The pallbearers, which included two of my nephews, Sybrina’s nephews, and a few of Trayvon’s friends, lifted his casket from the hearse and walked it to the wall, as the pastor began reciting verses and prayers.

  “As much as it pleases God Almighty to take upon himself the soul of our dear brother Trayvon Martin, we now commit his body to the ground,” said the pastor.

  “Earth to earth.

  “Ashes to ashes.

  “Dust to dust.

  “In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,” he continued. “For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise.”

  At that, Trayvon’s casket was slid into the mausoleum drawer and sealed up. We all stood there for a moment and felt something missing from among us. An absence. An aching.

  And then there it was again, the silence.

  No trumpet calls. No shouts of outrage. No arrest.

  Nothing. Only silence.

  —

  After the funeral, my sense of hopelessness and despair deepened, and I called Benjamin Crump again.

  “Attorney Crump, it’s Tracy Martin,” I said. “When we talked before you said that if they didn’t do anything, to call you back and you would help me.”

  “They didn’t arrest him?” Crump asked. I could hear shock and surprise in his voice.

  “No, sir,” I said, reporting back to him what I’d heard from the Sanford police. “They told me that because of this thing called the Stand Your Ground law, they’re not going to arrest him.”

  Crump said that was odd. Stand Your Ground, I’d come to find out, is a law in Florida and more than two dozen other states that allows the use of force when someone is faced with the “fear of death or great bodily harm.”

  “Mr. Martin, I’m going to help you,” he immediately said.

  Crump would later tell his associates that he was going to try to help us, the family of Trayvon M
artin, a seventeen-year-old killed by a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida. Apparently, that news didn’t exactly bring cheers of support. It was another “non-high-producing” case, in lawyer terms, in which the attorneys would spend their time, money, and resources on a case in which probably no arrest would ever be made or settlement won.

  “You’re probably right,” Crump told his associates. “But we’ve got to do something about this.”

  He instructed Jasmine Rand to “try to put some pressure on the Sanford police to do the right thing.”

  Crump still hadn’t officially taken on the case, but he called me back for more information, and I told him everything I knew, which at that point was still very little. “I went down to the Sanford Police Department,” I said. “And they let me hear a 911 tape to identify the voices.”

  He cut me off. “There are 911 tapes?” he asked.

  “Yes, there are 911 tapes where you can hear screaming and a gunshot.”

  Shortly after that, Chief of Police Bill Lee held a press conference to announce that there were no immediate plans to arrest the killer for the shooting of our son. That’s the moment Crump fully committed to taking on our case, I would later discover. I was on the phone with him at the time and heard him yelling down the hall of the law office to Jasmine Rand.

  “Draft the lawsuit!” he said.

  “What lawsuit?” Jasmine asked.

  “The chief of police just announced he’s not arresting George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon; he held a press conference,” Crump told Jasmine. “Can you believe it? A press conference to remind the people of Sanford that our people’s lives don’t matter. Now it’s time for us to remind him that we do matter.”

  Crump told Jasmine to write the public-records lawsuit to sue the Sanford Police Department for a copy of the 911 tapes.