Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

“Okay. Do you have an approximate amount?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I repeated.

  “Okay, less than ten thousand dollars, more than ten thousand dollars?” he pressed.

  I shook my head, no. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t know how much came in.” I explained that we had produced two events—a sit-down candlelight dinner in remembrance of Trayvon and a Peace Walk (and a Peace Talk) to let youth in the community and around the country know that they have a right to walk in peace without being followed, profiled, chased, or shot and killed.

  “As we go through this,” he said, “I’m certain that it is going to bring to the forefront memories of Trayvon’s passing. We as lawyers are sort of trained to stay distanced from the emotions of what’s going on around us. Sort of like doctors with blood, I guess. I don’t mean to be insensitive when I ask you questions about Trayvon, his passing, what you’ve done about it, and things like that. But I know it’s very emotional for you, so as we go through this, again, if there’s a time you want to take a break, I’d rather we take a break, let you gather your thoughts, and even if you say to me that you’d rather talk about that some other time…’cause it’s going to sound somewhat insensitive as I go through this, but I’m trying to balance that insensitivity, the way it presents itself, with my job, as getting some information, okay?”

  Very soon, I would become aggravated that they kept asking me the same things over and over again. They would ask once, then go on to something else, and then go back to the same thing. But I tried to hang in there, stay calm. I believed that if I answered their questions, the justice system would work and the man who shot my son would be held accountable.

  “How much of your time is spent dealing with the Trayvon Martin Foundation?” O’Mara asked.

  “Twenty-four hours,” I replied.

  How did I spend that time? he asked after a while.

  I tried to explain my work, which involved research, contacting other families whose children had died from gun violence, speaking engagements, and the events I attended to get the word out about my son, his death, and the upcoming trial of his killer. I explained that after the trial, we wanted to help families of victims of gun violence through community outreach and to revise the Stand Your Ground law, to create a “Trayvon Martin amendment.”

  “The Trayvon Martin amendment would just simply say that you cannot pursue or follow anyone, be the aggressor, and then get in a fight and shoot and kill ’em and say you [were] standing your ground,” I added.

  I thought he might ask me more about that. But O’Mara kept returning to a single theme: fundraising and what we did with the money.

  Crump objected to some of these questions.

  “Are you paid any salary from the foundation for your work on behalf of it?” Mark O’Mara asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay. How are you making your daily bills and monthly bills?” he asked.

  “Friends and family,” I replied.

  “I’m gonna ask you first, how are things going financially?” he asked.

  “Financially, I have friends and family that’s been helping me out,” I said.

  He asked about the Trayvon Martin Trust, the Trayvon Martin Foundation, how donations worked and who benefited from them. He asked about my coworkers’ generosity in donating their vacation time to me, how I stayed afloat financially without working following Trayvon’s death—and I answered: my friends and family, my own built-up annual leave, and eight or so months of annual/donated time, which would end a few months after the deposition, in December 2013. I’d spent my time working to spread the word about the tragedy, but we were never paid to speak or appear on any television show. He asked me to recall the largest deposit into the foundation ($1,000 to $2,000) and the largest withdrawal ($5,500, which was transferred to the Miami Foundation, which was the entity handling our Foundation). He asked who owned my home, had I purchased real estate within the past year, had any real estate been purchased on my behalf in the past year.

  After practically every penny, nickel, and dime were accounted for, O’Mara turned the questioning toward Trayvon, beginning with his academic history, including—especially—his trouble in school.

  “Trayvon was just a month into his seventeenth year when he passed? Is that correct?” O’Mara asked.

  “Not even a month,” I replied.

  Then: questions about his character, his transfer from Carol City High School to Michael M. Krop for his eleventh-grade year, his falling grades, his truancy, his suspensions, and our parent–teacher conferences.

  “I don’t remember who contacted me from the school, but one of the things they told me that although we were actually in walking distance of the school, they said that he was late to school a lot,” I said at one point. “So what I did was, [I] started taking him to school.”

  They had a student case management referral, which they called Exhibit D, from the school, which listed all of Trayvon’s problems, something that I, as a parent, had never seen.

  O’Mara handed it to me.

  I read from the report, dated September 26, 2011, five months before his death. “The concern is excessive tardiness and failure to comply with school rules,” it read, and indicated a recommendation in a comment: “Indoor suspension.”

  “I’ve never seen this before,” I said.

  When asked about Trayvon’s tardiness, I again told the attorney that once the school had contacted me about it, “that’s when I decided to start taking him to school.

  “That continued until his death,” I added.

  They had the records to reflect the precise number of times Trayvon had been tardy, the number of times he had been absent, and other information from various reports that, again, I had never seen.

  “In your mind, as his mother, do you think that Trayvon was going through any type of—my mom used to call it ‘growing pains,’ I think,” he asked. “Not physical, but the emotional kind of growing up, and not grown up yet? Do you think that Trayvon was going through any type of growing pains when he was in maybe the end of tenth and into the eleventh grade?”

  I was once again feeling like my son was on trial instead of the man who killed him.

  “Well, he was growing up, yes,” I said. “He was transitioning from boyhood to manhood, so I’d guess he was, you know, maturing. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure he went through some different changes.”

  “And in your mind, was he having some trouble with some of those changes?” he asked.

  I shook my head no. “I mean, looking back on it, I would say that maybe he had problems with it, but at the time, I just thought that he was a teenager,” I said.

  He drilled in on the tardiness, the suspensions, and the reasons for the latest one: being in an unauthorized area and finding jewelry in his backpack, as well as a screwdriver, which, O’Mara said, “they identified it as a weapon or something.”

  “Did they ever show you the stuff?”

  I shook my head. “A lot of stuff is cloudy because it’s been a long year, but I wanna say that he [the school administrator] had the jewelry there, because he asked if it was mine and…it was not mine, but I’m not remembering what the jewelry was,” I said.

  The attorney asked what concern the incident gave me “about what Trayvon was getting into.”

  I thought back to the afternoon I picked him up from school after being told about what had happened, and I told O’Mara that the ride home from school was “ugly.”

  “I asked him whose jewelry it was and where did he get the screwdriver, and of course he said his friend.

  “He continued to say his friend, his friend,” I went on. “And I asked him what friend this was, and he gave me a name. I don’t remember a name, but, you know, it was a mother–son conversation I had with him about that…because that was, to me, the first serious incident in school.”

  He finally asked, “Did that give you a concern that Trayvon was going down a path that you w
ere worried about?”

  “When the school calls, that’s serious…and, yes, I was concerned,” I said.

  He moved on to a disagreement that Trayvon and I had had, and suggested that in November 2011 I demanded that Trayvon move out of our family house—which wasn’t true, no matter how many times O’Mara asked it. He had read texts from Trayvon, which seemed to say that I had asked him to move out—or had kicked him out. “I don’t know why he would say that,” I said.

  O’Mara finally came around to the time just two weeks before Trayvon’s death, on February 13, 2012, when he was suspended from school.

  “It had to have been close to Valentine’s Day,” I said. “And I always buy [my two sons] a gift for Valentine’s Day, and I bought a gift for both my boys and, usually when I get home from work, Trayvon is there at the door….And he walked me inside the house and I told him, because I was all excited, I told him, you know, I got gifts for them again for Valentine’s Day and so I was pretty excited. But he told me that I wouldn’t be happy with the information he had….He said, ‘It’s about school.’ And I asked him what happened. And so we sat down in the living room, and he told me that he had been suspended, and that the school found an empty bag in his book bag. And so I asked him, ‘Where did you get it from?,’ and he said that it was his friend’s. And I was really disappointed with him, because with the last suspension he mentioned these friends, this friend. I was just really disappointed in him that he had been suspended again.”

  After more questions, O’Mara asked how I punished Trayvon for the suspension.

  “He loved the outside, and he wasn’t allowed to go outside. And play basketball or ride his bike or any of those things,” I said. “He wasn’t allowed to watch television. The only thing he had access to was his telephone.”

  Then, he asked about Tracy’s fateful decision to take Trayvon to Sanford in the second week of his suspension.

  At noon, after two and a half hours of questioning, we took an hour lunch break. In the afternoon session we returned to the subject of “street fighting.” The killer’s attorneys had texts of Trayvon’s conversations with numerous friends, and O’Mara read extracts of them to me.

  Was I aware of a text conversation Trayvon had on social media with one of my nephews before he went to Sanford “about getting a twenty-two handgun”? he asked.

  “No,” I said, and he asked me if I would have been surprised if such a conversation took place.

  “Yes I would,” I said. Because I had never heard this before, and I was certain that my son was not a thug, much less a criminal. Bernie de la Rionda cleared the air about Trayvon’s problems in school—specifically the jewelry found in his backpack, which Trayvon insisted wasn’t his—by producing a Miami-Dade school police department document. He had me read from it: “…no arrests in Miami-Dade” it read in part about that incident, which cleared up any intimation, or confusion, that my son was ever arrested for anything.

  And I had never heard anything about him wanting to get a gun.

  Anyway, the biggest question: why wasn’t I being asked about the only gun that mattered in our case, the gun that was used to kill Trayvon?

  Similar probing and repetitive questions would be asked of my son Jahvaris, then twenty-two, a fourth-semester information-technology student at Florida International University, starting a few minutes after my deposition was done, at 5:00 P.M. that same day.

  “Were you aware that Trayvon was tardy often and sometimes would skip school altogether?” Jahvaris was asked by the attorney Don West.

  “Tardy, yes,” he said. “Skipping, I didn’t know anything about that.”

  Was he aware that Trayvon was smoking marijuana? (No.) Was he aware of any fighting that his younger brother was involved in? (No.)

  “Are you aware of any money being paid to anyone in your family for an appearance fee, separate from just the cost involved in making the appearance?”

  “No,” said Jahvaris.

  “You do have a lot of time invested in these events,” he was informed.

  Yes, Jahvaris answered, but he had taken off from college since the day of his brother’s death, on February 26, 2012, to support the movement.

  Finally, after several hours of questioning, I was at last asked about the shooting of my son. I had done my best to keep my composure, but now, for the first time that day, I began to cry.

  “Aside from the person not being arrested, I, particularly [as someone] who worked in a capacity of code enforcement for eleven years, did not think that it was proper for a neighborhood watch captain to do something other than watch and record or take down notes or something and wait for the police,” I said. “I just thought that was strange that he wasn’t arrested. I thought it was strange later finding out that they didn’t have any procedures in place that said that they needed to do a drug and alcohol test on the person who shot and killed my unarmed son.”

  I paused.

  “I just didn’t think that the Sanford Police Department handled this properly, because he wasn’t arrested and that he went home that day and my son did not…” I said, now crying. “I thought that it was inappropriate that they didn’t provide enough information to us as the family, because Trayvon was a minor and we just felt like we needed more answers and…”

  Later, O’Mara turned the questioning to our media appearances, specifically one on the Today show on April 12, 2012, when I misunderstood a question and used the word “accident” in regard to the meeting of Trayvon and George Zimmerman. The media—and now the attorney—incorrectly interpreted that as meaning that I thought the murder of my son was an accident, which was absolutely something I never believed.

  “What did you mean on the Today show, when you said on TV that you thought that this event was sort of an accident that got out of control?” O’Mara asked.

  “I meant that them actually meeting was the accident,” I said. “I didn’t ever say that I believed that the actual gunshot was an accident. So, that was something that I cleared up because I think people misunderstood what I meant, but I meant that them actually meeting was the accident, not that the accident was the gunshot.”

  They then moved on to the 911 tapes.

  “So tell me what happened when the tape was played,” the attorney said.

  I said I heard “noises” at first, “people calling in.” And then I said, “The tape that I heard was the tape that, um, actually had the gunshot on there, that actually had the yelling on there.”

  “Tell me what went through your mind,” he asked.

  “I recognized the voice that’s on there,” I said.

  “What voice was that?” asked the attorney.

  “It was Trayvon’s voice,” I said.

  “What did you hear him say?” he asked.

  “I heard him say ‘help,’ ” I said. Now I heard his cries for help all over again in my mind, again and again and again. I started to cry.

  “How many times did you listen to the tape before you were able to determine that that was Trayvon’s voice?”

  “I heard the tape once and that was it,” I said.

  “What did you say to anybody who was there?” he asked.

  “I told them that was Trayvon,” I said.

  “Told who?”

  “Everybody that was in the room,” I said.

  “The mayor, Tracy, Mr. Crump, Ms. Jackson,” he said. “Is that true?”

  I was crying harder now. “Yes,” I said, pausing to wipe my eyes.

  “Want to take a couple minutes?” the attorney asked.

  I didn’t want to take a couple minutes, because this was my life every day, twenty-four hours, and it wouldn’t get better in a minute, an hour, or a lifetime.

  “No,” I said.

  “Was it only played once?” he asked again of the tape.

  “I only listened once,” I said. “I don’t know how many times they played it, but I heard it once and I left the office. That was enough for me.”

>   He began hammering away on my dead son’s voice. Did I have evidence—tapes, voicemails, et cetera—of Trayvon’s voice? Did family members have audio samples of his voice?

  “You are aware that we have subpoenas out to you and Tracy about trying to get some of that, correct?” he asked.

  “To get some of what?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry…to get recordings of Trayvon’s voice,” said the attorney. Finally, toward the end of the deposition, after several objections from Crump and de le Rionda, O’Mara said: “All right, if it gets to a point of a 1.310 violation ’cause I’m harassing her let me know and we can stop the deposition, but I’m just really trying to get through the last couple of questions.” Then he returned to the subject of money, the trust for the Trayvon Martin Foundation: Was I responsible for the money that came in and out?

  “Yes,” I said.

  He had been skipping all over the place with questions.

  And then we were, mercifully, done—at least done with the questions from the defense attorney.

  Now the prosecutor, de la Rionda, cross-examined me, asking me to clarify answers I had made, which, I assume he felt, the killer’s attorney was using to make a point, which he—and surely I—felt wasn’t correct.

  “Ms. Fulton, I think we spent probably the first forty-five minutes of the questioning of, in this deposition of you regarding your finances, regarding the money that was gathered, either through the Trayvon Martin fund or the Miami Foundation or whatever, entities that are out there, whatever we call them,” he said. “I’m going to flat-out ask you because the way the questions were asked it implied like you gathered all this money to steal it. Is, is that what, what you were trying to do?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Did you take advantage of the fact that your son was murdered in order to make money?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Is that why you’ve done this? To get money here…to gain from your son’s death?” the prosecutor asked.

  “No, I would much rather have my son back,” I said.

  “Did you wish that February 26 your son would’ve been murdered?”

  “Absolutely not.”