Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “Did you plan for your son to be murdered so that you could gain whatever amount of money has been obtained for the foundation here?” he asked.

  Now O’Mara objected, but the prosecutor moved forward.

  “Did you plan for your son to be murdered by somebody so that you could make you yourself or anybody in your family get this money?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Have you had a hard time living in this world knowing that your son who you bore or brought into this world is no longer here?” asked the prosecutor. “Have you been able to live like you normally lived before his death?”

  “No, nothing is normal anymore,” I said, and that summed up everything that I felt that day, as a mother, and now as a witness heading into a trial.

  During this same time, that strange bulge in my neck kept growing, sapping my strength, draining my energy, while also making my heart race so fast I was unable to sleep.

  I thought it was part of the depression of losing my son, coupled with the constant traveling, interviewing, being forever on the go, and now this upcoming trial.

  I returned to my doctor, and he examined my neck, specifically the bulge in it. As soon as he felt it, he immediately knew. “You have a thyroid disorder,” he said, adding, “an extreme case. Most likely from the stress. Your heart is racing so fast I’m surprised you didn’t have a heart attack.”

  Surgery was required to remove part or all of my thyroid, he said, as soon as possible. I told him I would have to wait until after the trial, for which I needed to appear strong, even though I was physically suffering.

  —

  On Monday, June 10, 2013, jury selection began. My sister was driving us to Sanford from Miami the Sunday before. The mood in the car was solemn but hopeful. We had some anxiety about what the trial would bring, what feelings and memories it would stir up, but we were ready to begin the process with full belief that justice would be done.

  Suddenly, just outside Sanford, our car was flooded with lights and sound. Red and blue lights. And the screaming of a police siren. The Florida Highway Patrol was right on our tail. My sister pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road.

  She rolled down her window when the stone-faced patrol officer approached.

  “License and registration,” he said.

  She handed the documents over without question, and we waited while he ran her license back in his patrol car.

  The minutes dragged on, until, finally, the officer returned, handed my sister back her license and papers and told us that we were free to go.

  We drove the rest of the way under the speed limit, past Sanford and to the hotel in Lake Mary that would be our home for the next month. To me, every place seemed to be dreary, but it was very clean and well kept and the staff treated us kindly there.

  We didn’t know if the fact that we were pulled over just outside Sanford on our way to the first day of the trial was a strange coincidence or had been done intentionally. We knew there was a large contingent of law enforcement in Florida that didn’t like us. Some supported what the killer had done. I guess they didn’t understand because Trayvon wasn’t their seventeen-year-old son. Others, even if they weren’t sympathetic to the killer and even disagreed with the way the case was handled by the police, still didn’t like their procedures being aired in a public courtroom. They didn’t like the spotlight we brought to their internal processes.

  Sanford is a relatively small town, and of course many people knew we would be heading into town that day. But I’d still like to think that being stopped was just a coincidence. Even as a coincidence, though, it shook us up. And the real drama of the trip hadn’t even begun.

  Jury selection began early the next morning. Parks picked us up from the hotel, and Tracy, my sister, my nephew, and I all climbed into his rental car. The courthouse had reserved a couple of parking spaces for us across the street, and every day there was a deputy waiting for us there to provide security as we entered and exited the courthouse. Everyone knew we were in town, so having security only at the courthouse seemed like a waste of time and money.

  When we arrived at the courthouse for the first day of jury selection, I saw a mass of media tents and satellite trucks in what was called a “media village,” which would be there for the duration of the trial. I hardly even noticed the media anymore, they’d become such a regular presence in our lives. The media showed up unannounced at my house, waiting for someone to come out, and sometimes knocking on the door and leaving letters or business cards on the door. My private life was over. My home was not a sanctuary anymore. But I couldn’t be mad; the media had made all the difference in our case. The media—print, television, and social media—had been our ally from the beginning. Now the spotlight had become relentless, around us practically all the time.

  When reporters saw us getting out of the car at the courthouse that first day, they quickly sprang into action, chasing us down, following us to the courthouse entrance, trying to get any reaction they could from us.

  “How do you feel about your son being killed?” they yelled, as if the answer wasn’t obvious and I hadn’t answered it a hundred times before.

  “How do you feel having to go through a trial?”

  “How does it feel to sit in a courtroom with the man who killed your son?”

  They were all yelling at once, a confrontation lit by the blindingly bright flashes from their cameras.

  The simple act of walking into the courthouse could be overwhelming because of the increasingly expanding throng of lights, cameras, and reporters chasing after us, hurling questions about the case against our son’s killer. Often when we got out of the car, there was such a large crowd waiting for us that we had to link arms and walk as closely together as possible to avoid being torn apart in different directions. I remember one time a reporter, running backward, shouting questions at us, fell over. Another time, when Tracy and I were flanked by Attorney Jasmine Rand on one side of us and Attorney Crump on the other, a reporter got so close to Crump that he stepped on his shoe and ripped the sole off. Attorney Rand tried to quickly grab the piece of Crump’s shoe, but he told her to just leave it, and we hurried into the courthouse.

  We eventually had to start coming into the courthouse through the back door. For lunch, at first we went to various restaurants just down the street from the courthouse. But as the trial ramped up, the media pressure became so intense it became impossible for us to leave the courthouse for lunch. Attorney Parks was able to get us a small witness room in the courthouse, where we could relax during breaks and eat lunch.

  Once inside the courthouse and through security, we would have to wait a moment while an officer checked to make sure we weren’t about to run into the killer or a member of his family since there was only one way in and out of the courtroom. Though this normally was successful, it didn’t always work, and several times we would find ourselves face-to-face in really tight quarters with the killer’s attorneys.

  When the judge was almost ready for the day’s proceedings to begin, a bailiff would knock on the door and say, “Five minutes.” We never wanted to be late for the judge out of respect for her and the court. We would all rise without delay and hold hands, and either Crump or Parks, or a visiting pastor, led us in a short prayer.

  On the first day of jury selection, my pastor, Arthur Jackson III, prayed for us. Many pastors from Miami traveled to the trial for support, including Reverend Gaston E. Smith.

  “God, please continue to cover us in our quest for justice for Trayvon,” Pastor Jackson prayed. “And keep us safe and strong, keep us out of hurt, harm, and danger’s way. In your son Jesus’s name. Amen.”

  “Amen,” we all repeated. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. Together we walked into the courtroom.

  —

  Our first shock was the seating arrangement. We were seated near the front, but between us we only had one row for me, Tracy, our attorneys, Tracy’s family, and my family. I count
ed the seats: six. On some days, we would squeeze in seven. But that was it. There was no room for family or friends, who all had to watch the trial in our little side room on closed-captioned television. Meanwhile, the media always had at least twenty people in the courtroom and were given several rows of seats. We were never given an explanation for any of this, and were forced to rotate family members and friends who knew Trayvon personally and wanted to be there for us.

  Throughout the trial, Tracy and I wrote notes on a scratch pad, which we passed between us. We went through so many notepads! It was the only way we could share our private thoughts in the middle of the trial’s action because the cameras inside the courtroom, and those outside, were watching our every move.

  So we confined our comments to the pad. We would read what the other had written and then scratch it out to keep it from prying eyes once we had read it. As we began passing that scratch pad back and forth with notes, suggestions, reflections, and, okay, more than a few curse words, I knew why the Lord had brought us together. We had been unlikely people from different corners of the world who had come together in marriage and then to raise two sons. We had been there for our children, during our marriage and after. We had stayed friends for a reason, and this was it: not only the tragedy that had befallen our son, but now this trial, for which we would look to each other for strength and support.

  It began with jury selection, where our notes just summarized what we were thinking about the potential jurors, who sometimes defied whatever stereotypes we might have assumed about them just from their appearance, its own case against profiling. The story had already left its mark on a number of the potential jurors.

  Juror B55: white female looked very young….a student, I wrote on the scratch pad.

  Juror B65: black female navy blue shirt. Lived in Sanford for 16 years and her pastor prayed for both sides. She had three kids, 21, 16 and 12. She had no cable and no Internet.

  Juror E54: white tall male, blue shirt. Said he joined the protest about why Zimmerman wasn’t arrested. Had a teenaged stepson 16 and 28. Said his sons wear hoodies.

  Juror B35: black male, red shirt, pink hat, Crocs, 21-year-old son in Tallahassee. He said Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson coming to Sanford interrupted traffic. He said Congressman Wilson said the person who shot and killed Trayvon hunted him and he didn’t agree.

  “I’ve never heard of the Trayvon Martin tragedy,” one potential juror said.

  What rock has she been hiding under? I wrote on the notepad and handed it to Tracy. A number of potential jurors who gave this answer were just too busy or didn’t care about following the case. But we felt some of them, including a few who eventually made it onto the jury, were not telling the whole truth.

  “Trayvon would be alive today if his father was involved in his life,” another potential juror said. This really got to Tracy, who was as close to his son as a father could be. She didn’t know us at all, and was already judging Trayvon based on her perceptions of us. I would soon learn that this type of thing wasn’t uncommon.

  Jury selection stretched past one week and into another. At the end of every day, we would climb back into Daryl Parks’s rental car to return to the hotel, where we’d spend what was usually a sleepless night, and then return again the next morning, where we would start all over again: we went through the back door of the courthouse, bypassing the media village, and into the courtroom, where we squeezed into our allotted six seats, our every move scrutinized.

  Once the jury was set, after nine days, I felt somewhat hopeful.

  “We walk by Faith, not by sight. Second Corinthians 5:7,” I tweeted. “Yes, the jury was selected yesterday and I still believe God has his arms around us. Be encouraged!”

  In most states there are twelve people on a jury in felony trials; in Florida there are six (except for capital cases). The jury that would decide the fate of the man who killed our son was composed of six women: five middle-class white women and one Hispanic woman.

  Tracy felt sure that at least three of these women would sympathize with us.

  How did he know that? I asked.

  “You can tell by the look,” he told me.

  I kept faith in the fact that five of them were mothers, and would surely have compassion as mothers. I prayed they could see the hurt and the pain I was dealing with, and that, as mothers, they could see Trayvon through my eyes, could see that an unarmed seventeen-year-old was no match for a twenty-eight-year-old man with a loaded gun. I also prayed that they would listen to the evidence and find the truth.

  The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman began on June 24, 2013, 485 days after our son was taken from us.

  “The process begins,” I posted on social media that morning. “I plead the blood of Jesus to cover my family. Amen.”

  Our road to justice had begun with media coverage. Media coverage had propelled it every step of the way. So it was fitting that before the court proceedings began, Crump had organized a press conference at the courthouse so we could address the mass of local, national, and even international media that had gathered.

  “There are two important facts in this case,” Crump told the reporters outside the courthouse, as our family stood behind him. “Number one, George Zimmerman was a grown man with a gun. And number two, Trayvon was a minor who had no blood on his hands, literally no blood on his hands. There was none of George Zimmerman’s DNA found on Trayvon Martin’s hands or under his fingernails. We believe the evidence is overwhelming to hold George Zimmerman accountable for killing Trayvon Martin. As these formal proceedings begin that Tracy and Sybrina have fought so hard over this past year and a half to get to, we understand that now it is time for the jury to do their duty and base the verdict and their decision on the evidence, the instructions of the court, and the law.”

  Tracy and I gave some very brief comments, ending with a request that our supporters pray for us, and with that, we headed into the courthouse, went through security, and met with the rest of our family members and attorneys. We gathered in a little circle, according to our tradition now, and joined hands to pray.

  “Amen,” we all said at the end of the prayer, and then each of us hugged one another, holding each other a little longer and tighter than usual. We then filed into the courtroom in a procession led by our attorneys.

  The courtroom was filled to capacity, every seat taken, and even more people were watching from home, thanks to the ever-present, all-knowing eyes: the courtroom television cameras. In 1979, the Florida Supreme Court decided to allow cameras in the courtroom. For good or bad, those cameras would transmit every second of the trial—tears, rage, testimony, everything—to the world.

  We felt confident. We knew that the defendant had killed our son. We knew that Trayvon was the victim. We believed we had a strong chance at a conviction.

  We also knew it would still be a very tough battle. Our lawyers laid out the difficulties of turning what we knew to be true into a legal judgment. For the jury to convict on the charge of second-degree murder, the prosecution would not only have to prove that the killer didn’t shoot Trayvon in self-defense—to get around Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows the use of deadly force by someone fearing for their life—they would also have to prove that he shot Trayvon in the grip of a “depraved mind,” meaning he shot my son with hate and evil intent.

  We thought the prosecution could prove the depraved-mind part of the charge. But we knew that the killer would also try to prove his claim of self-defense. That meant that he would not be the only one on trial.

  Trayvon would be on trial, too.

  Our family sat behind the prosecution’s table on the right side of the courtroom, just behind State Attorney Angela Corey, who sat on the bench in front of us, taking notes and advising the prosecuting attorneys if they needed her for anything. The defense, led by Mark O’Mara and his fellow attorneys, sat on the left, with the killer at the table beside them—only he didn’t look like the same killer we had s
een at the bond hearing less than a year ago.

  At the time he shot my son, the killer was a chunky 194 pounds; he had trained in kickboxing and mixed martial arts, which, it would be revealed, he practiced several times a week. Now he carried more than 300 pounds on his five-foot, eight-inch frame. His hair, shaved at the time of the shooting, had grown in, and he parted and slicked it down on the side. He was only twenty-nine, but the extra weight made him look at least forty.

  O’Mara claimed the weight gain was due to stress and his client’s inability to go out in public. But other media outlets wondered if the weight gain was a defense strategy. Would a heavyset defendant be more sympathetic to a jury? Would a heavyset, sluggish defendant seem more like a man that couldn’t—or wouldn’t—attack a seventeen-year-old?

  Either way, all I saw when I looked at him was a killer. They could dress him up in a suit and tie, they could grow out his hair and put weight on his frame trying to make him look cuddly and innocent, but there has never been any doubt about who killed our son.

  As the trial officially began, Judge Nelson, who we’d been told was a tough, firm judge, appointed to the bench by former governor Jeb Bush, ordered any witnesses in the courtroom to be sequestered from the proceedings. As the victim’s family, Tracy and I were allowed to remain, but Jahvaris and Crump, who were on the witness list, were asked to leave. Later in the proceedings, O’Mara would argue that Tracy and I should be removed from the courtroom, since we were on the witness list and were expected to testify.

  However, that request was overruled by the judge, and we were in the courtroom every single day. But we felt the absence of Crump and our son Jahvaris, who had been with us every step of the way.

  There was another matter granted by the judge, which could be seen as yet another victory for the defense. Before opening arguments began, Judge Nelson ruled that the word “profiling” could be used in the opening statements, but not “racial profiling.”

  I thought back to the confusing questions about profiling at the bond hearing. The judge’s decision not to bring racial profiling or any kind of discussion of race into our case, even while that was what much of our case was about, was the first important victory for the defense. We later found out that the defendant was looking for an African American burglar who had been breaking into houses at the Retreat. Racial profiling at its worst. A witness would be allowed to testify for the defense about being burglarized by two African American men as she and her infant hid in an upstairs bedroom—even though the only thing that Trayvon shared with the burglars was the color of his skin. So, even as our son was once again having his innocence undermined by implied racial associations, the prosecution couldn’t talk explicitly about race, and especially not about the killer racially profiling Trayvon.