Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  Finally, Rachel Jeantel entered the courtroom. The door opened like a curtain on a theater stage, and here she came: a young black woman, swinging her arms back and forth, and wearing black from head to toe. Her hair was in a bun with bangs, and she wore large hoop earrings and high-heeled shoes.

  When she was sworn in she affirmed the oath in a low, flat monotone, so faint that I strained to hear her. I wondered if she had even said it. Being the last person to speak with Trayvon, Rachel could shed light on exactly what happened that night—that’s what we were hoping for; that was what a lot of the prosecution’s strategy hinged on. But things wouldn’t go as hoped or planned.

  She took the stand, and I could see she was more than a little nervous; she was terrified. But I could also see a glint of steely determination. I hung on to that glimpse of something hard inside her.

  Bernie de la Rionda began his examination, establishing that Rachel and Trayvon had met in elementary school, and they had been talking and texting on and off on the phone throughout the entire day and into the night of February 26, 2012. And when Trayvon walked to the 7-Eleven, Rachel was on the phone with him.

  De la Rionda then moved on to when Trayvon returned to the Retreat at Twin Lakes.

  “Did he describe when he was at the complex something happening?” de la Rionda asked.

  “Yes,” Jeantel said.

  “Tell us if you can what he described happening.”

  “A man was watching him,” she said.

  “When he told you that a man was watching him, did you say anything to him?”

  “No. I didn’t think…” and then she trailed off.

  The court reporter stopped and asked her to repeat herself.

  “No. I didn’t think it was a big [deal],” Jeantel repeated, but it was still difficult for anyone to hear what she said.

  “You’re doing fine,” the prosecutor reassured her. “You have to get close to the microphone so everybody can hear you.”

  This kind of exchange became common during her two days of testimony. She was misunderstood either because she spoke too softly or because she used slang that the lawyers and the jury just didn’t understand—sometimes I didn’t understand her words, either. The defense would try to use this against her character, but it was just who she was, a shy teenager speaking the way she always did.

  “Did he then say something was happening?” de la Rionda asked.

  “Yes. He said a man kept watching him,” Rachel answered.

  “Did you say anything back to him…?”

  “Yes, I had asked him how the man looked like. He just told me…the man looked creepy…excuse my language, ‘cracker.’ ”

  A commotion rose up in the courtroom, but it was unclear if this was because people just couldn’t hear her or they were shocked by her use of the word “cracker.”

  “They’re having trouble hearing you,” de la Rionda said. “So take your time.”

  “ ‘Creepy-ass cracker,’ ” Jeantel repeated, and then was made by the judge and de la Rionda to repeat it so the jury and court reporter could type what she was saying into the record. De la Rionda didn’t ask her to clarify that “cracker” in a situation like this wasn’t meant as a strong racial slur—it was just like saying “creepy-ass dude.” Instead, he just asked her to repeat it again. “I had asked him how the man looked like. He looked like a creepy-ass cracker.”

  “Does that mean to you like a white individual?”

  “Yes…”

  “What did you say to him or what did he say to you after that?”

  “He kept telling me the man was looking at him. So I had to think it might be a rapist.”

  Again the court reporter complained that she couldn’t hear her answer, and Rachel was asked to repeat it. Only minutes into the testimony and her body language was already suggesting she was fed up. She rolled her eyes and took a deep, annoyed breath.

  “What did you say to him or what did he say to you?” he asked.

  “He said, ‘Stop playing with him like that.’ ”

  Again she was asked to repeat herself.

  “He said, ‘Stop playing with him like that,’ ” she said.

  “Did Mr. Martin say the guy kept looking at him?”

  “Yeah. And then he just told me he just wanted to try to lose him. By starting walking back home, back home because the rain calm a little bit.”

  She began describing how Trayvon said he was going to start walking home, but the man kept following him. Again, she had to stop after being asked to repeat herself. By now, everyone in the courtroom—judge, lawyers, jury, and, especially, Rachel Jeantel—was visibly upset over her first twelve minutes on the witness stand.

  “Give us your answer as slowly, and clearly, and loudly as you can,” Judge Nelson said.

  As Trayvon began walking home, she said, they started talking about the NBA All-Star game that was coming on television that night.

  “And then what happened?” de la Rionda asked, referring to their conversation as Trayvon tried to make his way home.

  “He said, ‘That nigga is still following me around.’ ”

  The judge again asked her to repeat her words.

  “ ‘That nigga [is] still following me around,’ ” she said.

  “Pardon my language,” de la Rionda said. “But did he use the word ‘nigger’ to describe the man now?”

  “Yes. That’s slang.”

  “That’s slang?”

  A juror raised her hand and again asked Rachel to repeat herself. The introduction of the N-word was unsettling, but, again, I knew that if Trayvon said it, there was nothing racial about it. The killer clearly isn’t black. I knew that Trayvon, Rachel, and other teenagers use words like “nigga” and “cracker” and “dude” interchangeably, which would be impossible if they were racially specific slurs. But the defense tried to interpret this as meaning that Trayvon, not his pursuer, was a racist, and used this intentional misunderstanding to sway the jury’s emotions, even though if anyone interjected race into what happened on February 26, 2012, it was the defendant.

  Rachel continued her testimony through a number of objections by the defense. Soon, she was forced to repeat herself after nearly every statement. The judge ordered someone to move the microphones closer to Rachel. But it did little to help. Through it all Rachel managed to explain that she told Trayvon to run, but he said he didn’t need to run, because he was almost back to Brandy’s townhouse. But then Rachel testified that he said the killer was suddenly right next to him. She heard a sound, and the phone hung up. She called back and Trayvon answered, saying he had run away from his pursuer.

  “I asked him where he at, and he told me he at the back of his daddy’s fiancé house,” she testified. “I said, ‘You better keep running.’ He said, ‘Nah.’ He lost him.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “A second later, Trayvon said, ‘Oh, shit!…The nigga behind me.’…I told him, ‘You better run!’ ”

  But again Trayvon assured Rachel that he was almost back to Brandy’s townhouse.

  She then described hearing Trayvon say to his pursuer, “ ‘Why are you following me for?’ And I heard a hard breathing man say, ‘What you doing around here?’ ”

  She started screaming, “Trayvon! Trayvon! What’s going on?” But before he could answer she heard a bump from his cellphone’s headset. She heard what she described as the sound of “wet grass,” and she kept calling my son’s name.

  “Trayvon! Trayvon!” she testified as saying.

  She said she heard Trayvon yelling, “Get off. Get off.” That was the last she would hear. Because his phone cut off at 7:16 P.M., and Trayvon was dead about a minute and a half later. Not much time for a fight. She tried calling him back, but no answer. She didn’t know for certain that Trayvon was dead until the following Tuesday when she got a text at school with a link to a news article about the shooting, she testified.

  De la Rionda ended his examin
ation asking Rachel why she didn’t go to Trayvon’s wake, although she had originally said she had.

  “I didn’t want to see the body,” she said, reaching for a tissue and beginning to cry.

  Why did she lie to Tracy about why she didn’t go to the funeral or the wake, saying she was in the hospital? she was asked.

  “I felt guilty….I was the last person that talked to his son.”

  After asking her about whose voice she believed was crying for help on the 911 tape—“Trayvon,” she said. “Sounds like Trayvon’s.”—the prosecution rested after only thirty minutes of questioning.

  West’s cross-examination for the defense was highly charged.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Jeantel,” he said.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Don,” she said, rising up in her chair.

  West began by establishing how long she’d known Trayvon, how they had reconnected on February 1, her birthday, and the nature of their friendship. Then he continued with questions about what she heard on the phone between Trayvon and his pursuer that night.

  He introduced Defense Exhibit 16, the records of the cellphone calls between Rachel and Trayvon from February 26, which he handed to Rachel and asked her to confirm each of the calls, from 5:09 P.M. leading up to the last call between 7:12 and 7:15 P.M. Next came an exhausting series of questions about the calls, questions about what she knew of Trayvon’s movements while she was on the phone with him that night.

  “I’m confused,” she said at one point.

  “After he told you that he saw the man again,” West said later, “the next thing you heard him say was, ‘Why you following me?’ ”

  “Next thing I heard?…I heard [Trayvon say,] ‘Why you following me?’ ” Rachel said.

  There was a brief moment of silence in the courtroom as the defense lawyer paused to consider his next question. Rachel must have felt that the sudden silence was odd.

  “You can go,” she told West, encouraging him to keep going with his questioning. “You can go!”

  “I’m sorry,” said West with a small smile. “It takes me a little bit of time sometimes to come up with the next question.”

  “You can go!” she said again.

  “Okay,” said West. More questions followed. I was nervous and hoping that the cross-examination of Rachel would close out soon—she was shaky on the stand, and I was worried about her, but even more worried about what the jury was making of her testimony. West continued to drill into Rachel’s story even more.

  “After the event on February 26,” West continued, “then a day or two later you realized that Trayvon Martin had died [and] you realized that you were the last person to have talked with him and you didn’t report that to anyone.”

  “They said they had got the person who shot Trayvon,” she said, meaning she believed the killer had been arrested that night.

  “But you did not report it to law enforcement?”

  “No. I thought they were supposed to call you. Call the person. Like, track the number down, see who the last person [he talked to] was if somebody got shot.”

  “You thought they were supposed to call you?”

  “Yeah…They already had the person that shot Trayvon.”

  “You thought, ‘Case closed’?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Do you watch First 48?”

  “I’m sorry, First 48?” asked Don West.

  “A show,” Rachel said. “First 48. When a victim dies, they call the number that the victim called before. And they hadn’t called my number, so, and they had already gotten the person. So, case closed, I thought.”

  I started to wonder if this nineteen-year-old young lady was smarter than anyone thought—like, was she making the attorney look foolish? Had she turned the tables? She was asking him flippant questions in her flat monotone, antagonizing West the same way he had seemingly tried to antagonize her. I didn’t really know how to read the situation—it was a strange interaction, a kind of battle of opposites. But my nerves were on edge.

  “I told you I do not watch news!” she exclaimed at one point as West repeatedly asked her if she’d seen the news reports of Trayvon’s death on television. “I do not watch news!”

  West then walked her through “the sequence” of the events that happened immediately after the shooting and up to her first being contacted by Tracy on Saturday, March 17. She explained how she didn’t want to meet with us at first, how she felt guilty about being the last person to speak with Trayvon before he died, and how she didn’t want to meet with us “because of the situation.”

  With the courtroom television cameras catching her every pause, stumble, and expression, and the defense using the lies she told out of guilt and fear to whittle away at her credibility, Rachel told the convoluted story of how she asked her mother for permission to meet with me and tell me “what happened that night when her son died.”

  “You didn’t really want to?” West asked.

  “I’m not the kind of person who want to see people crying…emotional…her son dead…and I was the last one to even talk to her son.”

  He asked her about our first meeting, and she told him about the letter she gave me and how “Trayvon was being followed that night.”

  “Is that partly why you didn’t go to the memorial service?” West eventually asked. “Because you didn’t want people there to know you were the last person and that you didn’t want to talk to Ms. Fulton about that?”

  “The funeral?” she asked. “Why I didn’t go?…I didn’t want to see the body. You got to understand. You got to understand! You’re the last person to talk to the person, and he died on the phone after he talked to you. You’ve got to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I’m the last person…You don’t know how I felt.”

  Her voice began to crack. She looked like she was close to crying again.

  “You think I really want to go see the body after I just talked to him?” she continued.

  “I understand what you’re saying, but—” West said.

  “I didn’t even know he was out!” Rachel said of the killer.

  “And then what you did, in order to explain that…under oath…was that you created a lie, and said that you’d gone to the hospital?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  West seemed to be attacking her credibility, pushing her hard about why she lied about her age, and about being in the hospital as an excuse for not going to Trayvon’s memorial. Eventually, he asked her about the recorded phone interview she did with Crump, which would be broadcast on ABC News, pointing out various discrepancies.

  “I can explain the Crump interview,” she said. “I really did not want to do the interview with Crump, so I hurried up on [the] Crump interview. Because I really didn’t want to be on the phone talking about a situation, a deadly situation. I don’t talk about death…I had told you from when we met I rushed. I told the state. I rushed the Crump interview. Crump interview…don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “You didn’t take it seriously?”

  “Nope.”

  “You were at your home, right?”

  “In a closet! You think I want to be in a closet that long?”

  West approached the witness stand and showed Rachel her transcripts of both the interview with Crump on ABC News and her deposition. He was getting ready to point out the discrepancies between the two. As he walked back to his spot in the courtroom, Rachel gave him a sideways look. Her patience, I knew, was growing thin.

  “I had told you and it said on the depo paper that you have right now that I had rushed on the interview between me and Crump,” she said.

  He showed her the transcript of her deposition again and asked her what she had said she heard the killer say “in the deposition, under oath” after Trayvon said “Why you following me?”

  The defense attorney said she had previously said the killer responded, “What [are] you talking about?”

  “No,” Rachel said, tapping her fingernails for emphasis on the des
k, trying to clarify what she heard: that Trayvon was the victim, the one who had been pursued. But she couldn’t get the right words out. “I had told you. You listening? I had told you what happened to me and Crump interview I had rushed on it. Are you listening?”

  “Are you saying you rushed through it and you didn’t think about it carefully enough to be sure you told it accurately?” West asked.

  “Yes,” said Rachel.

  West let her answer just marinate for a second. He wanted a moment to let the discrepancies in her testimony really sink in with jurors. I felt my nerves fraying again. He then moved on to question her consistency in identifying Trayvon’s voice on the “911 call with the screams for help.”

  It was getting late in the day, Bernie de la Rionda objected, saying that the lines West was referencing in her deposition, which he asked Rachel on the witness stand, didn’t include Rachel’s full response to the question.

  “Take as much time as you want,” West told Rachel over de la Rionda’s objection. “Or maybe we could take a break until the morning if that’s what you would like—”

  “No!” Rachel exploded forcefully before West could finish his statement. “I’m done today,” she said. “I’m leaving today. Nope.”

  “Are you refusing to come back tomorrow?” West asked.

  “To you?” Rachel asked.

  We braced ourselves for Rachel’s response. But the judge was quick to interrupt.

  “We need to keep this a question-and-answer about her testimony,” the judge said. “Any other matters dealing with scheduling, I will make that decision. So if you’ll continue to keep reading, please.”

  Rachel sat back in her seat and continued to read her deposition.

  “Do you admit then that you were asked, ‘Who was screaming for help?’ and you answered, ‘It could be Trayvon,’ ” Don West asked Rachel.

  After some back-and-forth, she said, “I told you it sounded like Trayvon, because Trayvon has kind of a baby voice.”

  They continued like this for a while.

  West then asked to recess for the day.

  “How much more time do you think that you need to finish your cross,” Judge Nelson asked West.