“Who is saying they shot who?”
“The people out there—um—a guy is raising his hands up, he’s saying he shot a person. I think it’s a police officer that’s with him right now. Oh, my God.”
The neighbor seemed as distraught as we were as we listened to her cries.
“I can see somebody’s killed!”
“Listen, we don’t know if they’ve been killed…,” the dispatcher said.
“The person is dead, laying on the grass!” said the caller.
“Just because he’s laying on the ground doesn’t mean he’s passed,” said the dispatcher. “We have an ambulance on the way, as well. We’re gonna probably pick him up and take him to the hospital.”
At first tears had been running down my face, and the faces of everyone who had stayed in that room. But soon, as we listened to recording after recording, my sadness turned to anger. How did this happen? I thought. Why did this man kill my son? And why is he walking around free?
The neighbor kept talking, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “I didn’t see it because it was too dark and I just heard people screaming, ‘Help me, help me.’ And this person shot him. He was like wrestling with him, you know what I mean? On the ground, from what I could see. It was very dark…”
“You don’t have to worry right now. We have many officers on the way and I think about two officers on scene at least right now. So we are on scene, okay?”
One more neighbor called that night on the 911 tapes.
“Sir, what exactly did you see?” the dispatcher asked.
“I saw a man laying on the ground that needed help that was screaming and I was gonna go over there and try to help him but my dog got off the leash so I went and got my dog and then I heard a loud sound and then the screaming stopped,” he said.
“Okay, did you see the person get shot?” he was asked.
“No,” he replied. “I just heard a loud gunshot sound and then the screaming stopped.”
The screaming stopped for the neighbors.
It would never stop for us.
Now, however, we knew much more than we had before. We knew the shooting was heard by at least seven neighbors. We knew that the cries for help came from our son. And we knew that even the 911 police dispatcher felt sure they had the man who shot our son in police custody. I also knew with more clarity than before that someone needed to be held accountable for this crime.
—
When we finished listening to the tapes, I was enraged. I wanted an arrest right then. Those tapes needed to be released so that the public could hear what happened that night.
But to release or not to release the tapes would be decided by Mayor Triplett.
The mayor had an immediate decision to make because the media was waiting outside Sanford City Hall at that very moment.
The media had been following us all day, all week long. From the press conference on the courthouse steps, when Crump filed the public-records lawsuit, to our press conference outside Natalie Jackson’s office. Everywhere we went, the media was there.
On this night Mayor Triplett had to address the media outside city hall.
He asked our attorney Natalie Jackson, who was born and raised in Sanford, what he should do.
Meaning, What should we do about the tapes? Should we release the tapes or not release the tapes?
The mayor, to his credit, and against the urging of his police chief, city manager, and others who did not want the tapes released, said, “I’m going to do it.”
Soon the media played the tapes to the public—and, like everything in this case, we were totally unprepared for what came next.
Out in the parking lot, on the night we heard the 911 tapes, our attorney Jasmine Rand shared the reaction had by many. She had arrived later than the rest of the legal team, so she didn’t have time to make it inside the mayor’s office to hear the tapes with us. But someone brought her a copy outside, and she and the journalist Trymaine Lee, who would write many insightful columns about our case, sat in his car. He popped the CD into the player, and they listened to the sounds of the night Trayvon died for the first time. Jasmine Rand is a lawyer; she doesn’t cry easily. But as she listened, tears began rolling down her face. “It turned into an uncontrollable sob, my whole body was shaking,” she would later tell us. “I was embarrassed to cry in front of Trymaine. I have never heard a client cry for ‘help’ before. To hear his pleas and cries and know that I was already too late because the shots had already been fired, well, for a moment I wondered about the purpose of the legal system. I realized that there was no winning in this case. I could never give our clients what they wanted most in the world: their son. The best we could ever do would be to bring them justice, honor to his legacy, and to try to save other people’s children from the same fate.”
The 911 recordings ricocheted around the world. It was still too real and raw for us. Sybrina refused to read the newspapers or watch the news. But I followed it closely, reading the articles and watching the news reports that dominated the media over the next several days.
Rock Center with Brian Williams featured several NBC anchors and commentators describing how they felt when they first heard the 911 tapes.
“The first time I heard the 911 tape I was actually at home,” said anchorwoman Tamron Hall. “And I clicked on the audio.”
She took a deep breath.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” she continued.
The TV segment cut to the 911 tapes, with the screams and the neighbor saying, “There’s just someone screaming outside.”
Then the scream and the shot rang out.
“To hear the gunfire, the shot, and to know that at that moment or soon after that sound, a boy the same age as my nephew had died,” Tamron Hall said, and I could see the grief on the elegant anchorwoman’s face.
Next came Tony Dungy, the NBC Sports analyst and former NFL head coach: “You see a young man, and to me, that’s the tragedy of this, a young man who could have been any of the guys that I coach, could have been any of my sons. Just to see that life taken away, it’s stunning.”
“Listening to the 911 tape, you heard somebody applying all the stereotypes that you were afraid that people out there are applying to us: on drugs, violent, up to no good,” MSNBC contributor Touré said. “All these sort of things that we fear people are seeing at a distance and [saying about] a boy who’s just walking down the street on the phone.”
We began seeing Michael Skolnik, a young man living in New York City, speaking about Trayvon on television. First a few shows, then more, then he was everywhere, talking about justice for Trayvon. Soon, he was with us in Sanford, for marches and rallies, at our side, both physically and spiritually, writing about our case, appearing on television, doing whatever he could, as, he would later say, our actions for justice for Trayvon began to grow into something bigger, a movement: Black Lives Matter.
But at the time, I had something else on my mind.
It was Saturday, March 17, two days after we’d heard the 911 tapes, and I was at home. I kept thinking about Trayvon’s last night. There were so many unanswered questions bothering me. By then, we knew the timeline of when everything happened. But though we knew when our son died, we certainly didn’t know everything about why he had died, or even exactly what had taken place on the last night of our son’s life. So I kept thinking, What could Trayvon have been doing just before he was shot?
Then it hit me: Trayvon was on his phone.
I knew that my son, like almost every seventeen-year-old, stayed on his phone. But who was the last person Trayvon talked to on the night that he was killed? And what might that person know that we didn’t? Trayvon’s phone bill was on the same T-Mobile plan as mine. So I called T-Mobile and asked them to set up my account so I could view my call records on my computer.
Text messages couldn’t be viewed, but calls could. And Trayvon’s calls scrolled down seven or eight pages of my T-Mobile bill. T
here were incoming calls, outgoing calls, with both the time of the call and how long the call lasted. Several of the calls dated February 26, 2012, stood out: more than a dozen incoming and outgoing calls of around thirty minutes all to the same number. Especially interesting was a call at 7:12 P.M. The police put Trayvon’s time of death at 7:17, which would mean this call happened a few minutes before he died.
The person with the number on the T-Mobile bill was the last person Trayvon spoke to by phone right before he died.
I dialed the phone number.
“Hello?”
It was the voice of a young woman, a deep, sad, somber voice. I explained that I was Tracy Martin, the father of Trayvon Martin, and I was looking over his phone records.
“I noticed that you were the last person who talked to my son,” I said. “I was hoping that you could shed some insight into what happened to Trayvon the night he was murdered.”
There were a few seconds of silence.
“Who am I speaking with?” I asked.
“This is Diamond,” she said after some time.
She sounded hesitant. I could tell it wasn’t an upbeat time for her. She almost sounded like she was grieving as much as I was.
“Did you hear anything?” I asked, trying to lead her into a conversation. And pretty much the first thing that came out of her mouth was, “A man was following Trayvon.”
She said that she and Trayvon had been on the phone all day, talking back and forth. They were talking that night as he was returning to the Retreat, and he told her that there was a man following him.
“I asked him, ‘Who’s following you?’ And he said, ‘This creepy-ass cracker.’ I told him to run.
“And he told me he hadn’t did anything, so he wasn’t going to run,” she continued. “He said it had started drizzling and that he was going to put his hoodie up on his head and he was going to walk fast back to the house.”
She said she then heard Trayvon asking somebody, “Why are you following me?”
“And I started yelling into the phone, ‘Run! Run, Trayvon, run!’ And then I heard a scuffle and then the phone went dead.
“I never heard from him again,” she said. I thought I heard her crying on the other end of the line.
I kept asking her, “Are you sure? Is that all you remember?”
And she said, “That’s all I know. That’s all I heard.”
I finally told her that she was the last person to speak with Tray while he was alive, other than his killer. She told me that she had heard that Trayvon had been killed. But she didn’t know he had been killed while she was talking to him. She didn’t know she was the last person to speak to him.
She got real quiet and she didn’t say anything else. I told her I’d call her back. I hung up and immediately called Crump and then Sybrina. I gave them her contact information, and they started trying to reach her.
Diamond was a young girl who would quickly become caught up in somebody else’s tragedy. We couldn’t have known at the time that she would play an extremely important role in understanding what had happened to our son. There were other things we didn’t yet know about Diamond. Like her age. She said she was sixteen, but she was actually eighteen. We would also learn that her name wasn’t Diamond.
It was Rachel Jeantel.
—
Rachel spoke English, Creole, and Spanish, but her English poured out in a slang that was all her own.
She first said she hadn’t attended Trayvon’s funeral because she was in the hospital, but later admitted that she had lied about the hospital part. She didn’t go to the funeral, not because she was sick or scared, but because she felt guilty.
“I could have [done] something,” she would later say in her deposition in the case. “I kept calling Trayvon when the phone hung up. I kept calling him. I should have called 911 after I heard the bump, really. And I should have talked earlier to her [meaning Sybrina] about what happened….I found out that Trayvon’s killer did not get charged, really on that Saturday when the dad called me. I thought he was in jail. And I felt guilty.”
Rachel was hurt. She had known my son since elementary school. Later we found out that people used to pick on her at school. They teased Rachel about how she spoke, how she dressed, and more. But Trayvon befriended and defended her. He tried to help her through her feelings of insecurity. He saw how people treated her, and he wanted to let her know that there were people who cared about her. They had reconnected only that February, less than a month before his death, when he rode over to her house on his bicycle. It was February 1, her birthday, and their friendship was reignited.
It might have gone further than friendship. “It was getting there,” she would later say, meaning a relationship might have blossomed. But for now, they were friends. “For fun,” she said. And conversation. Endlessly long telephone conversations. On the last day of Trayvon’s life, they spoke on the phone at noon, throughout the day, and into the night, on and off for about five hours total.
“That morning, he had text me,” Rachel said of February 26, 2012. Since it was a Sunday, she was in church. “I told him I’d call him later,” she said. “And I had called him on the afternoon….That was the whole day I was talking to him.”
“Do you remember what happened?” she was asked by the attorney after an extended discussion of other things.
“Yes,” she said, and she went into great detail, opening a window onto that dark, rainy night.
“This what happened,” she said in the distinctive way that Rachel spoke. “He told me the dude was now following him. Now the following start…He, he said, ‘Oh, oh shit, oh, he following me….I was shocked, and I said, ‘Okay, run.’ He said nah, he gonna try to lose him. And then…I think a second or a minute later, he say he gonna run from back, and then I said okay. And then, as I know, he ran, ’cause I heard the wind, and then…I lost contact with him again.”
I heard the wind. I thought about that for a long time. She heard the wind rushing through the phone as Trayvon ran from this man, this stranger with the gun, following him.
Still, Trayvon didn’t seem worried. Once Trayvon felt he had lost the man who had been following him, he felt safe enough that he asked Rachel to check on the All-Star basketball game, which was starting any minute. And Trayvon talked about her devotion to her hair. Rachel later told the author Lisa Bloom that he found the time to say, “You’re gonna die with those hot rollers on, Rachel!”
Trayvon wasn’t looking for trouble.
He was only trying to get home.
Then his pursuer reappeared.
The rain was falling, and Rachel said, “He told me he gonna put the hoodie on so he can lose the dude.” She lost contact with him as he ran.
“I had [to] call him back, he had answered and he was breathing hard. And I say, ‘Where you at?’ He say he in back of his daddy girlfriend house…And I told him keep running, he say nah, he lost the dude and he just walk fast, to his daddy, his daddy at the house. It’s just right there. That’s where I thought, Okay, he’s close to his house. Okay, he’s safe….Then, then a second later I hear Trayvon come and say, ‘What you following me for?’ Then the dude come and say, ‘What you doing around here?’ I was saying ‘Trayvon, Trayvon, what happen, what happen, what’s going on, what’s going on?’…Then I heard a bump….
“Somebody…had to hit Trayvon, for the headset to fell. ’Cause all I was hearing, in the background, grass, somebody saying, ‘Get off.’ And I was calling Trayvon. ‘What’s going on?’ And then the phone just”—at this she clapped her hands once—“hang up.”
Rachel knew it was Trayvon’s voice saying “Get off,” she would say, because Trayvon had a high-pitched voice—she called it a “baby’s voice,” which is what the voice screaming on the 911 tapes sounded like: a high-pitched wail. And, after all, Rachel had been speaking to Trayvon for five hours on the phone that Sunday.
“I was still saying, ‘Trayvon, what’s going on?’ ”
&n
bsp; But Trayvon didn’t answer. His phone went dead.
Trayvon was dead.
At first, Rachel didn’t know it, never heard about it, not from the news, because she never watched television news, except for the weather. “To make sure I don’t get wet,” she said.
She found out about Trayvon’s death when she went to his Facebook page many days after that Sunday, and saw a long line of messages from Trayvon’s friends scrolling down his wall.
“RIP, Trayvon.”
Rest in peace, Trayvon. Rest in power.
—
A day or two after I called her, Sybrina tried to reach out to her. But Rachel didn’t answer. She was in school. Then Sybrina texted her, asking to speak with her and her mother, saying, “All I want to know is what happened to my son.” Rachel texted back: she’d have to speak to her mother about it. And while her mother approved, Rachel wasn’t sure about getting involved, especially when it came to speaking to Sybrina—she later said that she didn’t “like to see people get emotional.” And, of course, she was still feeling guilty. So instead she decided to write a letter and drop it off at Sybrina’s house. But she was too nervous to do that—she told us her hands shook when she tried to write. So she dictated a letter to a friend who worked as a nurse. The nurse knew Sybrina—she had been to her house when she cared for Sybrina’s brother Ronnie. Once she’d dictated the letter, Rachel asked a friend to drive her over to Sybrina’s house, where she planned to drop off the letter and leave.
I first saw Rachel when she came to deliver the letter to Sybrina, a young woman visibly stressed-out and so nervous that she didn’t even want to come inside the house. You couldn’t blame her. The house was full of family, lawyers, mourners, people with questions, and Rachel was terrified. So she sat in her friend’s car parked by the curb outside Sybrina’s house with that letter, a first account of what she heard just before Trayvon died.
Rest in Power Page 13