Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “That’s impossible. We haven’t even sent a public-records request yet, so the suit is not ripe [meaning ready to be filed],” Jasmine said. To which Crump responded, “Well, write a public-records request for the 911 tapes, fax it, and then write the lawsuit.”

  “But don’t we need to give them time to respond before I file the lawsuit?” Jasmine asked.

  Crump’s answer was simple. “No.” The message from Bill Lee earlier that day was all he needed to hear in order to know what he now needed to do.

  Two days later Crump received a call from the Sanford Police Department’s attorney. They wouldn’t release the tapes, they said, because the case was still an active investigation. Jasmine already had the lawsuit ready to file, demanding that we, as Trayvon’s parents, had the right to view any photographs of him and listen to any audio recordings of his last moments, including visual or audio depictions. “I want them to know I mean business,” Crump told me and Sybrina. “They’re not going to sweep Trayvon Martin’s death under the rug.”

  —

  I met Benjamin Crump for the first time in person in Sanford a few days later. He was an interesting character. He was clearly well educated and wore a sharp business suit, but he also had the sort of deep Southern accent that some people associate with uneducated individuals. But the words would just flow—not like honey, but in a sharp rhythm like the beat of a drum. He wasn’t aggressive or edgy or slick—he was polite but efficient, clearly a dogged, hard worker. He apologized several times for telling me in our first encounter that they were going to arrest the man who killed my son. “Hey, man, I apologize,” he said. “I figured a kid with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea, getting shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer? I thought it was a no-brainer that they would arrest the man who shot your son.”

  It was less than two weeks after Trayvon’s death and Crump, as we came to call him, had already come up with a strategy on how to bring attention to Trayvon’s death, apply pressure on the police to arrest the man who had killed him, and expose the truth of what happened that night in Sanford.

  His plan was to take the case to the media.

  Attorney Crump put me on the phone with Ryan Julison, a media specialist who had previously worked with an attorney named Natalie Jackson—a lawyer who worked with Crump on cases from her office in Orlando. Julison ran a one-man public relations consultancy in Orlando. Even over the phone, I immediately had confidence in Ryan Julison, who seemed like a smart and savvy media wizard ready to bring his time and experience to our case. Julison had been in the public relations business for more than twenty years, but the economic crisis of 2008 wiped out his job as the head of communications for an Orlando real estate company. He decided to start his own media consulting firm, and along with his normal clients he found a sector that desperately needed a person of his expertise working with attorneys who represented regular people in need of assistance. He had worked with a variety of families—not in civil rights cases but what he called “regular people in trouble.” When Julison heard our story, he wanted to help and he began volunteering his time, connections, and knowledge.

  On the phone with Ryan, I was still emotional, feeling helpless and still having trouble expressing myself. I managed to tell Ryan that I was frustrated that the media didn’t seem interested in the death of my son. Ryan told me that he and Ben Crump might be able to change that and shine a national spotlight on my son’s death. Both of these men felt so strongly about this that they would donate their time to our cause for free.

  But in exchange, we would have to be willing to go in front of the media and tell our story.

  As I said before, I’m a truck driver.

  I had never spoken into a media microphone, never done a newspaper interview. Not local, or regional, much less national. But I was prepared to do whatever it took to get answers and, hopefully, find justice.

  “It’s not going to be easy; you’re going to have to relive your grief every day, answering the same question over and over again,” Ryan Julison told me right there at the beginning. “Every one of these media interviews can be invasive, but this is the only way for you to find justice. You are going to have to express your emotions and your inner grief. You’re going to have to be incredibly strong to go out and bare your soul in your quest for justice.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  I’m not sure I was. At that point, Trayvon was an unknown teenager killed with a can of fruit tea and a bag of Skittles. We had to put a face to that story and give it an emotional life. We had to make people care.

  The media was interested in photos of Trayvon. We gave Ryan Julison what we had that was easily accessible: the photos we used in his funeral program. He sent those photos to various members of the media. The one that would turn out to be published the most was the picture of him in his red Hollister T-shirt. Some would later accuse us of trying to confuse people by using a photo of him when he was much younger, to pretend that he was smaller and less developed than he really was. But that’s not the case. We simply provided the media with photographs we had access to, and they chose what they wanted to run.

  That was the first move.

  But we couldn’t stop with a photo or a press release. Now that people had a face to attach to the name, we needed to tell the story of the human being behind that picture. It wasn’t an easy story to tell, initially. Some editors, reporters, and producers weren’t interested. Others were reluctant to be the first to make a story out of the case of a young black man shot by a white neighborhood watch volunteer. We heard that one editor called it a simple, everyday story of a “fight gone bad.” The media didn’t go looking for the story, so we had to go looking for the media.

  The fuse began burning on March 7, ten days after Trayvon’s death, when the first national media coverage about the case appeared on the Reuters news service, followed the next morning by a report that aired on CBS This Morning.

  Family of Florida Boy Killed by Neighborhood Watch Seeks Arrest

  BY BARBARA LISTON | ORLANDO, FLORIDA

  The family of a 17-year-old African-American boy shot to death last month in his gated Florida community by a white Neighborhood Watch captain wants to see the captain arrested, the family’s lawyer said on Wednesday.

  Trayvon Martin was shot dead after he took a break from watching NBA All-Star game television coverage to walk 10 minutes to a convenience store to buy snacks including Skittles candy…the family’s lawyer Ben Crump said.

  “He was a good kid,” Crump said in an interview, adding that the family would issue a call for the Watch captain’s arrest at a news conference on Thursday. “On his way home, a Neighborhood Watch loose cannon shot and killed him.”

  Trayvon, who lived in Miami with his mother, had been visiting his father…in a gated townhome community called The Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, 20 miles north of Orlando.

  As Trayvon returned to the townhome, Sanford police received a 911 call reporting a suspicious person.

  Although names are blacked out on the police report, Crump and media reports at the time of the shooting identified the caller as George Zimmerman, who is listed in the community’s newsletter as the Neighborhood Watch captain.

  Without waiting for police to arrive, Crump said, Zimmerman confronted Trayvon, who was on the sidewalk near his home. By the time police got there, Trayvon was dead of a single gunshot to the chest.

  “What do the police find in his pocket? Skittles,” Crump said. “A can of Arizona ice tea in his jacket pocket and Skittles in his front pocket for…Chad.”

  Zimmerman could not be reached for comment on Wednesday evening at a phone number listed for him on the community’s newsletter.

  Crump said the family was concerned that police might decide to consider the shooting as self-defense, and that police have ignored the family’s request for a copy of the original 911 call, which they think will shed light on the incidents.

  “If
the 911 protocol across the country held to form here, they told him not to get involved. He disobeyed that order,” said Ryan Julison, a spokesman for the family.

  “He [Zimmerman] didn’t have to get out of his car,” said Crump, who has prepared a public records lawsuit to file on Thursday if the family doesn’t get the 911 tape. “If he never gets out of his car, there is no reason for self-defense. Trayvon only has Skittles. He has the gun.”

  Since Trayvon, a high school junior who wanted to be a pilot, was black and Zimmerman is white, Crump said, race is “the 600-pound elephant in the room.

  “Why is this kid suspicious in the first place? I think a stereotype must have been placed on the kid,” Crump said.

  That article got our story out of Florida. In one stroke, it was a national story. Reuters gave us credibility and national distribution for our message: this was a story of justice denied an innocent child, shot to death in the night with no one arrested, no one held accountable. On the same day the Reuters story was published, Ryan Julison had arranged for me to be interviewed about the case on CBS This Morning. Unbelievably, the next morning, March 8, Charlie Rose, at his desk in the New York City studio of the nationally televised show, was talking about Trayvon.

  “The parents of a teenager who was shot and killed near Orlando last month will hold a news conference today,” he said. “They are outraged that no one has been arrested in a case that has serious racial overtones. Mark Strassmann is in Sanford, Florida. Mark, good morning.”

  I was standing with the reporter at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. This was my debut on television, but I wasn’t yet out of the fog of grief—just a few weeks ago, I never would’ve conceived of any of this, of my son’s death or the official stonewalling that followed it. Or me standing by the patch of grass where my son was killed, speaking to the entire nation on television.

  “He was lying right here, wasn’t he?” the reporter asked me, adding, “It must be a little…still kind of odd to be here?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, it is,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  The reporter then told the national television audience the facts of the story: “Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, Tray to his family, lived in Miami. He loved horses and dreamed of becoming a pilot. This high school junior was visiting relatives last month when he was shot and killed inside this gated subdivision of townhomes.”

  “He meant the world to me; he meant the world to his mother,” I said. “And it’s just sad that he’s been taken away from us. He was just up here, just to relax. He wasn’t up here to return home in a body bag, and that’s just the part that really tears me up.”

  I was starting to find my voice, even though I knew it wasn’t coming out exactly right. The reporter went on.

  “When Tray was only nine he pulled his father from a burning kitchen,” said the reporter.

  I hadn’t expected this—but the camera was on me and I knew I had to say something. I just didn’t know what was going to come out of my mouth. Or if I could even hold it together to talk. We had been told by Crump and Julison that there might be tough questions, but I hadn’t had time to prepare. I looked at the reporter and felt something uncontrollable welling inside me.

  I broke down and cried on national television. “He was my hero; you know what I am saying?” I said. “My son saved my life, and for me not to be able to save his life is just…it’s hard.

  “My kid went to the morgue, and this guy went home and went to sleep in his bed,” I said. “There is no justice in that.”

  The reporter finished by telling the television audience, “Sanford police hope to finish up their case and get it to local prosecutors by this weekend. They are not releasing the half-dozen 911 calls until that investigation is complete. And, Charlie, we’re told on one of those calls you can hear the sound of the gunshot.”

  The fuse was now burning faster. After the CBS This Morning taping we received calls from many more media outlets. At this point I had no idea what was ahead of me. I knew that it would take more than me to get the world to hear me out, or care about my son’s story. I knew that Sybrina would have to gather herself and accompany me to tell our side of the story. And that would take some convincing.

  The day after the CBS This Morning segment aired, we held a press conference, with attorneys Ben Crump and Natalie Jackson; my nephew Boobie, who held Trayvon’s framed football jersey; Brandy Green; and me in front of Natalie Jackson’s office in Orlando. I told the cluster of mostly local newspaper and television reporters about Trayvon, what had happened to him, and how it seemed that nothing was being done about it. My emotions were raw and my words passionate, and I hoped that the reporters could feel my love and grief for my fallen son.

  “It’s senseless,” I said at the press conference. “We feel justice hasn’t been served.”

  Crump called the killer “a loose cannon.” And then he said, “Why?”: Why did he follow Trayvon? Why did he confront him? Why was a neighborhood watch volunteer patrolling his neighborhood with a gun? And if Trayvon did fight back after being confronted, what was wrong with that? As the attorney Natalie Jackson said at the press conference: “Trayvon didn’t know the neighborhood watch captain had a gun.”

  Shortly after our first press conference in Orlando, Crump called Reverend Al Sharpton. Crump and Sharpton knew each other from the case of Martin Lee Anderson, the fourteen-year-old black boy killed at the boot camp–style detention center in Panama City, Florida, but Reverend Sharpton had never been to Sanford before Crump called him asking for his help in our case. And he certainly had never heard of us or Trayvon.

  But he recognized injustice when he heard it, and he listened as Crump spoke his usual blue streak the first time they discussed the death of our son.

  “I want you to talk with the father,” Crump had told Reverend Sharpton, and I got on the phone and told the famous reverend what happened, and how there was no recourse with those in authority. I began crying on the phone, and Reverend Sharpton was moved to action. He booked us on his MSNBC television show Politics Nation, and Crump and I taped a segment from Sanford. “The family is calling for justice,” I said on the show. “We don’t want our son’s death to be in vain. We’re looking for answers. I don’t have an understanding as to why my son is dead to this day.”

  Not long after that show, Reverend Sharpton told Sybrina and me he didn’t believe in “drive-by activism.” “If we’re gonna be in it, we’re gonna be in it until we win,” he said. “And we’re gonna win because we have no other choice. We cannot allow a legal precedent to be established in a city [meaning Sanford] that tells us it is legal for a man to kill us, tell any story he wants, and walk out with the murder weapon.”

  The reverend’s words were true—and we didn’t have to fight just against a legal precedent, but a cultural one, too. One thing this case revealed to us was that a kid could be killed in this country and people would step up and defend the killer. Not only some twisted members of the public, online bloggers and racists, but even some police officers. What is it about this country that allows that to happen? But we also discovered that we weren’t alone in thinking this was crazy. So many people at this rally drove two hours, eight hours, to make a statement that, no, this won’t stand. And people like Reverend Sharpton have stood behind us the whole way.

  Soon, the Sanford Police Department would claim that the killer hadn’t been arrested due to the Stand Your Ground law. I came to understand that the law meant that if you feel your life is being threatened, you can defend yourself by shooting your assailant.

  The problem that I had with this was: If this was a Stand Your Ground case, if the killer was in true and immediate fear for his life, why did he follow my son? Why did he trail and confront the person who caused such fear?

  “Outrageous,” Sharpton said of the Stand Your Ground defense. “I can’t for the life of me understand how they can justify not making an arrest! Arrest does not mean conviction, but there is pro
bable cause here even with this [Stand Your Ground] law that we would question. This is a national outrage to many of us.”

  Then the show was over, and, once again, the silence began. No arrest. No justice. Nothing.

  I did hear from some of my friends, who had seen me—and attorney Crump—on television. “Who is this dude?” one of them asked, mentioning Crump’s accent and manner of speaking.

  They didn’t understand the brilliance of this man. The police, despite their initial assurances, had given up on the idea of arresting the killer, claiming that Florida law prevented it. The recommendation of the Sanford Police Department investigator Chris Serino had been to at least charge the killer with manslaughter—but even that recommendation was not addressed. When the lead investigator is essentially telling you, “I have enough information and evidence to at least arrest this individual for manslaughter,” but then his superiors seemed to be saying to you, “No; we’re not going to do anything,” it left us with nothing in hand at all, least of all any trust in the judicial system to bring light to the crime committed against our child. We didn’t have faith in that process at all.

  We were being told, both in words and in actions: It’s already happened. There’s nothing to do or see here. Go back home to Miami. Don’t worry about this.

  But Crump said no, we’re not going away. We’re going to make the world pay attention. And it was working.

  —

  After the show with Reverend Sharpton, Crump told me that I did fine on television. Still, I was only half the story. The other half, Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina, was still in her house in Miami, still unable to fully understand, much less speak publicly about, the terrible events that had left her son dead.

  “We have to get Sybrina involved,” Crump told me. “She’s the mother, and people need to hear from her. They need to hear from both of you.”