“But what other kind of profiling could possibly have been involved here?” wrote the attorney Lisa Bloom, summing up our feelings in a column for the New York Times. “Could jurors—and the public—seriously imagine that Mr. Zimmerman considered Mr. Martin a criminal solely because he was walking slowly in the rain as he chatted on the phone?”
—
We hoped that the jury would be able to see the racial aspects of the case through what the killer said on the 911 tapes. But we knew that the deck was stacked against that—and against us—from the beginning.
The jury was ushered in, and at last the trial was about to begin. The prosecution team had decided that John Guy—charismatic and tough—would give the opening statements for the state.
“Good morning,” he said and then…
“ ‘Fucking punks. These assholes, they always get away,’ ” he began, dramatically quoting Zimmerman’s crude comments to the 911 operator on the night of Trayvon’s killing.
Two seconds in, and the trial was off with a bang.
“Those were the words in that grown man’s mouth as he followed in the dark a seventeen-year-old boy who he didn’t know,” the prosecutor continued, turning to point at the killer, wagging his finger at him with every damning word. “And, excuse my language, but those were his words, not mine.
“ ‘Fucking punks,’ ” he continued. “ ‘These assholes, they always get away.’
“Those were the words in that man’s chest when he got out of his car armed with a fully loaded semiautomatic pistol and two flashlights to follow, on foot, Trayvon Benjamin Martin, who was walking home from a 7-Eleven armed with twenty-three ounces of Arizona brand fruit juice and a small bag of Skittles candies.”
The prosecutor paused for a moment to let that sink in, and then he said those words again.
“ ‘Fucking punks. These assholes, they always get away.’
“Those were the words in that defendant’s head just moments before he pressed that pistol into Trayvon Martin’s chest and pulled the trigger. And then as the smoke and the smell of that fatal gunshot rose into a rainy Sunday Sanford night, Trayvon Martin, twenty-one days removed from his sixteenth year, was facedown in wet grass, laboring through his final breaths on this earth.”
I looked over at the defendant. He sat stone-faced in his chair. No emotion, expression, or reaction. He didn’t move his face or shuffle in his seat. He only sat there, staring back at John Guy.
“And that defendant, at that same time, was upright, walking around, preparing,” John Guy continued. “Preparing to tell law enforcement why it was he had just profiled, followed, and murdered an unarmed teenager. Ladies and gentlemen, the truth about the murder of Trayvon Martin is going to come directly from his mouth. From those hate-filled words that he used to describe a perfect stranger and from the lies that he told to the police to try to justify his actions.”
John Guy then began retracing the events of the night of February 26 in detail.
“The murder of Trayvon Martin was the product of two worlds colliding,” he said. “In one world, a seventeen-year-old boy from Miami, Florida, a visitor to this town, who had gone to the store to get something to drink for himself and some candy for a twelve-year-old friend. But in the other world,” Guy said as he turned around to face the defendant, “a twenty-eight-year-old grown man. Somebody who wanted to be a police officer. Somebody who had called the police numerous times about crime in his neighborhood. Someone who had become the neighborhood watch captain. And someone who believed, most importantly, that it was his right to rid his neighborhood of anyone that he believed didn’t belong.”
The prosecutor created a picture of our son for the jury: a teenager visiting his father and doing what young people do, watching TV and playing videogames. He was a kid out for a drink, picking up candy, and, “as teenagers are wont to do,” talking with a girl “the entire way home” on his cellphone.
But there was another picture to be painted, he said, a picture of the defendant, an adult driving around his neighborhood with a loaded Kel-Tec 9mm semiautomatic pistol tucked inside the waistband of his pants, with a “live round in the chamber,” said Guy. The defendant didn’t see a “young man” out for snacks talking to a girl, Guy told the jury, he saw someone that was “real suspicious,” “up to no good,” a “fucking punk” that he didn’t want to get away.
Get away with what? I often wondered. What was he doing besides walking while black?
Again, I looked over at the defendant. He remained stone-faced, unmoved by this extremely emotional retelling of the events.
Guy continued to list the defendant’s fateful decisions on the night of February 26, 2012: ignoring the instructions of Sean Noffke, the Sanford Police Department dispatcher, who told him, “We don’t need you to” follow Trayvon; deciding against meeting police at a bank of mailboxes as he had originally said he would. “Tell the officer to just call me and I’ll tell him where I am,” Guy quoted the shooter as saying. “Because George Zimmerman wasn’t going back to the mailboxes, and he wasn’t going back to his truck. He was going after Trayvon Martin.” Guy picked up with Trayvon’s call to Rachel Jeantel less than four minutes later, who heard Trayvon say to the killer, “What are you following me for?”
“And then Trayvon Martin’s phone went dead,” said the prosecutor, “and Trayvon Martin went dead.”
He described the reactions of the first responders, who found Trayvon lying facedown in the grass, his hands clutching his chest, his phone beside his body…its earbuds near his head, with a bullet through his heart. He told the jury of the officer who quickly attempted CPR, pressing down on Trayvon’s chest in an attempt to “push life into him,” Guy said. And he mentioned the emergency medical technician who was unable to detect a heartbeat in Trayvon’s body, and the officer who covered him with a yellow medical blanket.
Hearing the last moments of our son’s life described in that level of detail broke my heart all over again. Every time I thought I’d heard it all and nothing could move me again, there was a new detail, a dramatic retelling, a tape, a document, a witness, that would bring me back to the moment. I put my head down and closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to watch or listen. Tracy was shaking. I saw him biting his lip, trying to clamp down on his emotions. But we both were crying.
“God is using me,” I later tweeted. “Because how in the world am I able to listen to all this…by God’s Grace.”
John Guy continued. At the moment the EMT placed the blanket over Trayvon’s dead body, the killer was full of life, talking and walking around. His injuries—a bloody swollen nose that was later proven not to be broken, and two cuts on the back of his head only a few centimeters long, neither requiring sutures—were minor enough that he refused medical attention. Guy recounted what he called the “tangled web of lies” that the killer told the police: about when the altercation occurred, his description of Trayvon’s movements, why he got out of his truck, and how he said Trayvon attacked him, holding his hand over the defendant’s mouth.
The prosecutor said the evidence would show there was no blood found on Trayvon’s hands, and none of the killer’s DNA was found on the cuffs or the sleeves of Trayvon’s hooded sweatshirt.
I never believed it was a true fight.
He continued with what he called the lies the defendant told about what Trayvon said to him, never heard by witnesses. Lies about what the defendant said he did with Trayvon’s body seconds after killing him, which would be disputed by photographs taken by a witness. Lies about Trayvon reaching for the defendant’s gun that, when tested, showed no DNA evidence that anyone but the defendant had handled that gun that night. Lies about their verbal confrontation and where their physical struggle began.
Next, the prosecutor described the neighbors’ 911 calls—the screams for help, and the gunshot that killed my son. “Listen carefully when the screaming stops,” he told the jury. “It’s right when the gunshot goes off. Trayvon Martin w
as silenced immediately when the bullet that the defendant fired passed through his heart.”
Lastly, Guy turned to the defendant himself. He described him to the jury as a person who “wanted to be a police officer,” a criminal justice major who took classes in the law of self-defense. He described his role as a self-appointed neighborhood watch “coordinator” who ignored his training “to see and report,” “observe and call” the police, a man who instead became a vigilante who profiled Trayvon as a criminal in his neighborhood.
“That is just some of the evidence in this case,” Guy concluded. “We are confident, that at the end of this trial, you will know, in your head, in your heart, in your stomach, that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to, he shot him for the worst of all reasons—because he wanted to.”
It was so dramatic, exact, and, I believed, true, that I was almost unable to breathe.
John Guy thanked the jury and returned to his seat at the prosecution’s desk. A short recess was called. Then the defense began their case, led by attorney Don West.
“This is a sad case, of course,” he said. “As one of your fellow jurors commented during the jury selection process, ‘A young man has lost his life. Another is fighting for his. There are no winners here.’ ” Then, a few minutes into his opening statement, West decided to tell…a joke. “Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. So let me, at considerable risk, let me say I would like to tell you a little joke. I know how that may sound a bit weird in this context, under these circumstances. But I think you’re the perfect audience for it, as long as you, if you don’t like it or don’t think it’s funny or inappropriate, that you don’t hold it against Mr. Zimmerman. You can hold it against me if you want, but not Mr. Zimmerman….Here’s how it goes.”
Then he said, “Knock, knock.
“Who’s there?” he answered his own question.
“George Zimmerman.
“George Zimmerman who?” he asked.
“All right, good, you’re on the jury!” he said.
The courtroom turned silent. The defense attorney’s joke, at the start of a murder trial, had fallen flat.
“Nothing?” West asked. “That’s funny.”
Don West may have thought it was funny, but I didn’t and neither did, I hoped, the six members of the jury. The joke felt like a slap of disrespect to the court, to us as a family, to Trayvon, to everyone who was in support of us. This was the most tragic, serious moment of our lives, and the defense attorney was trying to turn it into a joke. The joke was so unprofessional and inappropriate for a murder trial, with the victim’s family sitting right there. I thought, How heartless and unfeeling can you be?
I looked over at the defendant at the defense table to see his reaction. Again, nothing.
West allowed the tension in the air to dissipate, then continued.
“George Zimmerman is not guilty of murder,” he declared. “He shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense after being viciously attacked.”
On a large projection screen on the wall opposite the jury, West displayed an aerial view of the Retreat at Twin Lakes. He described Zimmerman as an average citizen headed to the grocery store to buy food for his workweek, when on his way out of the housing development he saw Trayvon entering from an area where most residents do not enter.
“Little did George Zimmerman know at the time,” West said, “that in less than ten minutes from his first seeing Trayvon Martin that he, George Zimmerman, would be sucker punched in the face, have his head pounded on concrete, and wind up shooting, and tragically killing, Trayvon Martin.”
West also recounted the events of that evening and the defendant’s role in the neighborhood watch program. He said reports that the defendant disobeyed police orders not to pursue Trayvon were untrue. He mentioned the defendant’s call to the nonemergency line, Trayvon’s calls with his friend Rachel Jeantel, and the 911 calls from neighbors, building a timeline and pointing out on his aerial view the neighborhood where each event happened as he prepared to play the tapes of the 911 calls for the jury. Then the courtroom sound system erupted with the sounds I dreaded.
The defendant sat quietly and listened to his own voice on the nonemergency call. Still, no expression.
His defense attorney continued to re-create the moments just before Trayvon’s death, using the map and the defendant’s nonemergency call to help the jurors listen to the call and visualize the scene. He played the moment in the 911 calls when the defendant got out of his truck. We could hear the tones indicating the door open, and the quickening of the defendant’s breath as he pursued my son.
When the dispatcher told the defendant that he didn’t need for him to follow Trayvon, the defendant said, “Okay.” He gave the dispatcher his name, phone number, and address, immediately regretting giving his address because he had lost Trayvon and didn’t want anyone else to overhear where he lived. The dispatcher promised to have a police officer call the defendant to let him know his whereabouts. And the defendant hung up the phone.
Trayvon meanwhile, West said, was still on his phone with Rachel Jeantel.
“Second-degree murder requires an act reckless, indifferent to human life,” West said. “A depraved-mind act, ill-will, hatred, spite.”
He paused for a breath. “What Rachel Jeantel will tell you in her conversation with Trayvon Martin at the moment that this actually became physical was that Trayvon Martin, I’ll use my words, that Trayvon Martin decided to confront George Zimmerman.”
West claimed that instead of going home, Trayvon hid and then turned on his pursuer, out of the darkness, and said, “Why are you following me?”
I tried to write the word “Jackass” on the notepad, which had become my trial diary, but I was too upset. I couldn’t write. I knew what was coming next: the 911 call from the neighbor Jenna Lauer, which included the sound of the gunshot that killed Trayvon. I didn’t want to hear it again, not in public with so many reporters’ cameras bearing down on me. I rose from my seat. Leaving on live television was better than breaking down, I figured, so I left the courtroom, which, surely, the cameras captured. Almost immediately my mom, watching from home, texted me, “Are you okay? I just saw you walk out of the courtroom.” I told her that wasn’t true; I’d just gone to the restroom, but I didn’t feel so well. She wrote me back: “You’ll be fine.”
—
Tracy told me what came next. West said Jenna Lauer and her husband heard a verbal exchange, then a shuffling in the grass followed by screams for help. That was when she decided to call the police. The court heard the phone call, which recorded the struggle and the screams, and then the loud bang that went through Trayvon’s heart and ended his life.
At the sound of the shot, the defendant still remained stone-faced.
“All of the witnesses,” West continued, “whether they agree to anything else, they all agree those are the screams of someone in a life-threatening situation, someone screaming repeatedly, over and over and over, for help.”
By the time I got back into the courtroom, West was going through a list of every witness from the Retreat at Twin Lakes. They were divided into two parts: those who believed the defendant’s story, like John Good, who said he saw Trayvon “mounted” on top of the neighborhood watchman. And those who didn’t believe him, like Jayne Surdyka, who said she thought the cries for help were Trayvon’s.
The attorney weaved the story of a vulnerable defendant screaming for help, pleading with anyone who could hear his cries to stop Trayvon’s supposed attack—“the most traumatic event in his life,” West said.
And I thought, Who yells for help with a loaded gun? That just doesn’t make sense to me.
Soon after, the judge called a lunch recess.
—
When we returned to the courtroom after lunch, Don West told the court:
“No more bad jokes, I promise that,” he said, apologizing to the jury if he offended any of them, but never apologizing to us. “I’m co
nvinced it was the delivery, though. I really thought that was funny. I’m sorry if I offended anyone.”
West proceeded to prop up neighbor John Good’s claim that Trayvon was on top of the defendant. He said that the forensic evidence showed the hole in Trayvon’s hoodie was made when the gun was pressed up against it, but the hole in his body was consistent with a shot made at a distance. This meant, West claimed, that Trayvon’s hoodie was pulled away from his body the moment he died. Which meant that Trayvon could only be on top of the defendant, leaning forward.
West told the jury the fact that Trayvon had no blood on his hands—his pursuer’s or his own—didn’t matter, because the police at the scene never bagged his hands to preserve the evidence. And the lack of DNA evidence on the gun and on Trayvon’s hoodie proved nothing, he said. Because Trayvon’s clothing was wet from the rain and police officers failed to store the evidence properly, using a sealed plastic bag instead of a paper one, which caused the clothes to mold and destroyed any DNA evidence that may have been on the clothing.
I’m no detective, but I’ve watched enough criminal trials on television and shows like Law & Order to know that rain can’t totally wash all the DNA away.
He brought up the scream on the 911 call, saying that the defendant insisted to police it was him yelling for help and that we couldn’t prove anything through science or voice-recognition experts. Because there wasn’t enough of a voice sample to come to a definitive conclusion.
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