“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I would think we should plan on at least a couple of hours.”
I looked over at Rachel, who let out a frustrated “What?!” and dropped her head into her hands, shaking her head. Her personal nightmare wasn’t over. She would have to testify for another day.
—
Rachel entered the courtroom on the fourth day of the trial a different young woman. The high heels she wore the day before had been replaced with flat shoes, making her at least comfortable. She wore a ruffled bronze-colored blouse under a black blazer. She sat erect in the witness chair. Her speech had slowed and she spoke more deliberately. She began answering questions with a simple yes or no, followed by the word “sir”—without the ad-libs and slang flourishes that heated so much of her testimony on the day before.
“Are you okay this morning?” West asked Rachel a half hour into her second day of testimony. “You seem so different than yesterday. Just checking. Did someone talk with you last night about your demeanor in court yesterday?”
I knew she had spent the night in a hotel room with no television or radio. “No,” she responded. “I went to sleep.”
West began Rachel’s second day on the stand by questioning her about the letter she wrote to me shortly after Trayvon’s death.
The defense had learned about the letter Rachel gave to me in her March 19 deposition. She had not mentioned it in any of her previous statements, because she felt it was a personal letter to me and didn’t understand the relevance it might have on the case.
West approached the witness stand and gave Rachel a copy of the letter to read to the court.
“I want to object to this witness, and the letter,” Bernie de la Rionda said, standing.
Lawyers from both sides met at the judge’s bench and discussed the objection in private. But I couldn’t figure out why; West was allowed to continue.
“Ms. Jeantel,” he began, asking Rachel to take a close look at the copy of the letter, “do you recognize that letter as being one that you said earlier was prepared to be given to Ms. Fulton?”
She said yes.
“And that letter was prepared with the assistance of a friend of yours?”
“Yes,” she repeated. She told her friend what she wanted to say in the letter. Her friend then wrote the letter by hand because Rachel was worried that if she wrote it, she said, it wouldn’t be legible. The contents of the letter were entirely Rachel’s, but it was written in her friend’s handwriting—and her friend wrote it in a cursive script.
Don West knew what was coming next, and he must have known it would be dramatic, something that could devastate the jury’s perception of Rachel. I again worried for the young lady on the stand.
—
West had asked Rachel about the letter during her deposition, saying, “I’d like to hand it to you and have you take a look,” he had said back then, handing her the letter.
“I have one problem about this,” Rachel told West during her deposition.
“Sure, that’s what I’d like to know,” said West.
“I don’t read cursive,” she said. “I don’t know how to read cursive.”
“Do you have enough difficulties reading that you wouldn’t be able to proofread it to see if it is accurate?” he asked.
“I already told you, I don’t know how to read cursive,” she said.
—
Now, in court, West was asking her the question again.
“Are you able to read that copy well enough that you can tell us if it’s in fact the same letter?” West asked.
“No,” said Rachel, characteristically quiet to the point of shyness.
“Are you unable to read that at all?”
“Some of them, I do not—”
“Can you read any of the words on it?” West said.
“I don’t understand, um, cursive,” Rachel said, even more quietly now. “I don’t read cursive.”
The weight of the world would come down on that line—“I don’t read cursive”—and unfairly cast Rachel as being illiterate, which wasn’t true. I wanted to read it for her. I kept thinking that this is someone’s daughter, who has to go through this at such a young age.
“Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?” West would later ask.
“I don’t understand you,” Rachel would reply. “I do understand English.”
“My question is when someone speaks to you in English, do you believe that you have any difficulty understanding it because it wasn’t your first language?”
“I understand English really well,” she would say. It was only reading cursive that was difficult.
“I’ll read the letter then,” said West. “I was on the phone when Trayvon decided to go to the corner store. It started to rain, so he decided to walk through another complex because it was raining too hard. He started walking then noticed someone was following him.”
He paused at one point, as if struggling to read the letter himself. “Then he decided to find a shortcut because the man wouldn’t follow him. Then he said the man didn’t follow him again. Then he looked back and saw the man again. The man started getting closer. Then Trayvon turned around and said, ‘Why are you following me?’ Then I heard him fall, then the phone hung up. I called back and text, no response. In my mind I thought it was just a fight. Then I found out this tragic story. Thank you, Diamond Eugene.”
“Is that the letter that you and [your friend] prepared to give to Sybrina Fulton?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And contrary to what you said at the deposition,” West continued, “this letter does not, in fact, contain any response that the person gave to Trayvon Martin when he said, ‘Why are you following me?’
“Yes,” she replied.
“Further, you say that you thought this was just a fight?”
“Yes,” she said.
Soon West decided to pull out the word that had gone mostly unspoken until now. He asked if she had heard about the national conversation on race that Trayvon’s death had triggered on the news—or if someone else had informed her about it. Again, Rachel told West she didn’t watch the news, and that no one had told her how the case had grown into a national story about what West called a “racially charged event.”
“What did you base your answer [on] that you thought it was a ‘racial thing’?” West asked.
“Because [of] how the situation happened,” she said.
Unbelievably, it seemed the defense was trying to turn the question of racism against us. Because if they could show that the event was racially motivated—and that it was Trayvon who was the racist, calling Zimmerman “a creepy-ass cracker”—then perhaps they could lead the jury into believing that Trayvon would attack the neighborhood watch volunteer.
“Tell me, what is it about this event specifically that convinced you it was racially based?” West asked.
“Trayvon was being followed,” Rachel responded. “And it was around seven, and it’s not that late. And it’s in the rain. Like, come on now.”
“Everything that you’ve told us is based upon whatever Trayvon Martin told you that you could remember and then what you interpreted it to mean,” said West. “So when you say it’s a ‘racial event,’ what did he tell you that made you think it was a racial event?”
“Somebody was watching him, and then he described the person that was watching him and following him,” said Rachel. “And that was kind of strange that a person [kept] watching you and following you. Like he’s being stalked.”
“What makes that racial?” asked West.
“Describing the person,” she said of Trayvon’s description of his pursuer.
“Describing the person is what made you think it was racial?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“And that’s because he described him as a ‘creepy-ass cracker’?”
“Yes,” said Rachel.
“So it was racial, but it was because
Trayvon Martin put race in this?”
“No,” said Rachel.
“You don’t think that ‘creepy-ass cracker’ is a racial comment?”
“No,” she replied.
Rachel was supposed to be the prosecution’s star witness. But the prosecutors had only questioned her briefly. Now being pressured by West’s cross-examination, she was on the defensive. Under intense questioning, Rachel began answering questions with a single “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.”
“When Mr. de la Rionda was asking questions about what happened and who said what,” West continued, “you were making it sound different than it actually was to keep from hurting Ms. Fulton’s feelings?”
“Yes, sir,” Rachel said, and West asked her if the only thing she said that wasn’t accurate was the language Trayvon used to describe his pursuer.
West asked her again about the interviews she did with Crump and the letter she gave me, and why she never mentioned that she heard Trayvon saying “Get off! Get off!” until she mentioned it in her deposition. She answered that no one else but prosecutor de la Rionda had asked her about it, and that she was anxious to get off the phone during the telephone interview with Crump. West kept pushing and she kept repeating herself.
“I was not being asked for that part,” she said.
“So you made the decision then not to tell Mr. Crump that you’d actually heard Trayvon Martin say ‘Get off! Get off!’ because you were in a hurry?”
Rachel had clearly had enough. “First of all,” she said, “Crump is not law enforcement. He’s not an officer. I knew that he was not an officer. So, like I told the mother from the beginning, if an officer wants to talk to me and know the exact story, everything about what happened that night, they will reach me at my number. You got it?”
It was good to see her get her spirit back—and it made us happy to see Rachel testing West. She was sassy, and giving him a taste of his own medicine, something we couldn’t do.
West began questioning Rachel about the moments before her phone call with Trayvon cut off: the bump on his phone and Trayvon breathing heavily from running away from the killer.
“When you talked to Mr. de la Rionda on April 2nd down at Sybrina Fulton’s home,” he said, “at one point in the interview he said to you, ‘So the last thing you heard was some kind of noise, like something hitting somebody?’ ”
“Trayvon got hit,” said Rachel. “Trayvon got hit.”
“You don’t know that, do you?” West said, his voice rising, verbally confrontational. (Rachel said, “No, sir.”) “You don’t know that Trayvon got hit. You don’t know that Trayvon didn’t at that moment take his fists and drive them into George Zimmerman’s face.”
“Please, lower your voice,” Judge Nelson said, interrupting.
“Do you?” West asked.
“No, sir,” said Rachel.
“That’s when the phone cut off?” (“Yes, sir,” she answered.) “That’s what you wrote in the letter?”
“Yes, sir.”
Rachel’s sassiness seemed to now be fading. She appeared sad, like the guilt she had carried the past year had found her again and was suddenly dragging her down.
Still, she was far from giving up.
At one point, West began questioning the truthfulness of what Trayvon was communicating to her about his actions and the actions of the killer, and Rachel kept answering questions with variations of “That’s what Trayvon told me, sir.”
“Of course you don’t know if he was telling you the truth or not,” West said, a smile flashing across his face.
“Why he need to lie about that, sir?” asked Rachel.
“Maybe if he decided to assault George Zimmerman he didn’t want you to know about it.”
“That’s real retarded, sir,” she said. “Trayvon did not know him.”
We knew what Rachel meant and that she was right. She was telling the truth about what she knew, even if it was slang that was sometimes hard to understand.
“At the point, though, that all of that happened, you are saying now that you knew something had taken place,” said West. “But the reason you didn’t do anything about it, telling anybody what you had heard, come forward to the police, is because in your mind it was just a fight, correct?” (“Yes, sir,” Rachel answered.) “And in fact it was just a fight Trayvon Martin started. That’s why you weren’t worried, that’s why you didn’t do anything. It was because Trayvon Martin started the fight and you knew that.”
I eagerly waited for Rachel to unleash some classic line. But before she could, Bernie de la Rionda immediately stood up from the prosecution table and objected. West was badgering the witness, he said. But he was overruled.
“No, sir!” said Rachel defiantly. “I had told you before I did not know this man was out of jail. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
West kept trying to make Trayvon the approacher and aggressor, but Rachel defiantly stuck to her story. At every question she said, “No, sir.” She would answer insisting that George Zimmerman, not Trayvon, was the aggressor.
At one point the attorney told her, “I thought, in fact, that you said that it could have been, for all you know, Trayvon Martin smashing George Zimmerman in the face is what you actually heard…”
“What?” she asked.
“Yes, just earlier today,” said West.
“By who?” she asked.
“By you,” she was told.
“You ain’t get that from me,” said Rachel.
West soon rested his cross-examination after two or more hours, and after a short redirect by de la Rionda, Rachel’s time on the witness stand was finally over. It had been an emotional roller coaster. I was intensely relieved that it was over. We returned to our hotel for the night.
—
That night, television news and the Internet erupted with comments about Rachel, including vicious insults about her appearance, intelligence, and speech. She had lost a friend. She stood up for him in court. And she paid a price for it, which she didn’t deserve.
I had been worried for Rachel, who I knew was a nice young lady and a loyal friend who had bonded with our son. She was a very important witness, the last person to speak to Trayvon. But I didn’t believe she was prepared enough for the witness stand.
As for the defense, they turned her testimony into what seemed like a referendum on Rachel, just as they had done with Trayvon, attempting to turn both of them into caricatures of what some people think about young black people.
Tracy told me later it felt like time-of-possession in a football game: the numbers told the story. The prosecution questioned Rachel for a little over thirty minutes, the defense for almost seven hours over two days. I felt she had done her best given the circumstances, but I worried the prosecution had done irreparable damage, not only to our star witness, but to our entire case.
CHAPTER 12
Tracy
June 28, 2013–July 10, 2013
I knew the justice system wasn’t color-blind. There’s one set of rules for us and a different set for other groups—different races, ethnicities, religions, ethnic groups. The rules for us—for African Americans—had been in place for a long time in this country. And the rules were not going to help us. So from the beginning, I was worried about the jurors that had been selected for the trial.
Could they see this tragedy through the eyes of black parents?
I got my answer when I heard a potential white woman juror say, “Trayvon wouldn’t have been suspended had his father been involved in his life.” She didn’t know me from a can of paint. But she assumed that I wasn’t involved in my child’s life. My heart sank a little when I heard that—we have a long way to go. Little did she know that I was always a part of my son’s life.
By June 28, 2013, the fifth day of the trial, most people in Sanford and the outlying areas knew who we were. We knew that some people in the Sanford area, and beyond, didn’t like us. But we didn’t care. We also met many people who s
upported us—from the desk clerks at our hotel in Lake Mary to the McDonald’s on the road to the courthouse where we would stop every morning for breakfast—people knew our names and why we were there.
“Good luck,” many of them would say.
Because most of them were people like us: hardworking, family-oriented, struggling to get through the day.
At the McDonald’s, we would pick up our breakfast from the drive-thru. Some days, we would have three cars or vans of lawyers and family going through.
“Six egg-and-cheese McMuffins,” we would say. “Coffee, orange juice, hash browns…”
“Good luck, Tracy,” the clerk would say while giving us our food. “Good luck, Sybrina.”
Then we would drive to the courthouse in Sanford. By the time the trial had gotten under way, we had become a little paranoid—and not only from threats on our lives and the lives of our families that we were routinely receiving online, by phone, and in the mail. We also thought we were possibly being followed. Bringing thousands of protesters into a town with a population of fifty thousand does change things. Our case created a mood that the local citizens weren’t used to, especially when national civil rights leaders began streaming into town. Again, I wouldn’t say that the overall community was against us. But we definitely were foreigners in a foreign place.
Our attorney Daryl Parks would drive us, taking a different route from the hotel to the courthouse every day. A sheriff’s department deputy would meet us in his squad car a mile from the courthouse. He was a nice guy, big and burly, and we would follow his car closely as he led us into town. Driving behind the deputy, snaking down side streets, evading the steadily growing mass of media, Parks would drop us off at the back entrance of the courthouse every morning before eight.
Once we were dropped off, our attorneys would park in our spaces in front of the courthouse. Then our attorneys would usually address the media, every representative and every network and news outlet trying somehow to get a new way to talk about the case they had covered so much already. Once the trial began, our attorneys had started doing interviews for us—we were getting too many requests to deal with. We were under such a constant media siege that we soon began staying inside the courthouse throughout the entire day.
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