Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  I looked over at the jury, expecting some reaction. There wasn’t much. Did this register with them? Didn’t they just hear the killer admit that he didn’t recognize his own voice calling for help?

  After a recess, then a few follow-up questions by de la Rionda, the prosecution rested. No more questions. Again, I couldn’t believe it. The defense would spend hours questioning witnesses, tearing down their stories, and here, with the lead investigator on the stand, the prosecution rested after less than two hours.

  The prosecutors never gave the detective the chance to paint a true picture. Never asked, “Detective, did you believe the killer’s story?”

  And I thought, Oh, no.

  At the very least I thought de la Rionda should have asked Serino about his recommendation on his report that Trayvon’s killer be arrested and charged with manslaughter. A career police officer thinking there is enough evidence to charge the killer with manslaughter is something I believe that the prosecution should have drilled into the minds of each juror: not only had the public demanded the arrest of the killer, but the person who best knew the facts within the Sanford Police Department—Chris Serino—had recommended charging him with manslaughter when he wrote his police report on the incident.

  I kept repeating in my mind: Ask him about his recommending the charge of manslaughter!

  But the question was never asked.

  Serino also wrote in his report that the killer “failed” to identify himself in any way to Trayvon and acted in ways “inconsistent with those of a person who has stated he was in fear of another subject,” and had missed chances to “defuse the circumstances surrounding their encounter.”

  It seemed to me from Serino’s expression that he was also surprised that his testimony for the prosecution was so brief. He clearly had more to say, but more wasn’t being asked of him. Of course, we knew that prosecutors don’t like to be combative with police officers. Technically, they’re on the same team, both paid by the city, county, or state, and Serino had met and been cooperative with prosecutors during the investigation, so surely neither wanted to be openly confrontational with the other. The fact remained that a lot was left on the table by the prosecution.

  But confrontation was at the core of the defense.

  —

  When O’Mara rose to begin his cross-examination, he listed Serino’s responsibilities as chief detective and then commented, it seemed, on the lack of questioning from the prosecution.

  “You haven’t testified to virtually any of that yet, though, have you?” he asked.

  “As to the methodology of the case?” Serino said. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Basically, the only thing you’ve testified so far is the statements from my client?”

  “Correct, yes.”

  O’Mara then had Serino walk the jury through the steps he took that night. He spoke with the killer a few minutes after midnight, nearly six hours after the shooting. By then he had also spoken with other witnesses, like John Good, and had reviewed all the information gathered up to that point, including an interview with the killer conducted by Officer Doris Singleton. Initially, working with “a lot of information,” compared to what was originally available, O’Mara suggested the killer’s version of events, told to both Singleton and Serino, appeared to line up.

  “Did you notice any significant differences that caused you concern based upon your years of experience as an investigator?” O’Mara asked.

  “Not immediately. No, sir,” Serino said.

  “Did he seem to be cagey in his answering to you?” O’Mara asked. “Did he seem to be sidestepping your [questions] in any form or way to get around answering your questions?”

  “No, sir,” Serino said. “He was being straightforward, in my opinion.”

  He agreed with O’Mara’s term that the killer did seem to have a “flat affect about everything that had happened to him that night,” which meant he was strangely calm. Serino would suggest to the killer that he get some kind of psychological “help” to deal with it.

  “Did it come across to you, though, that he was just uncaring…?” O’Mara asked. “Or was it truly your thought that he was reacting to the trauma?”

  “I didn’t know him prior to this…,” Serino said. “That was one of the concerns, that may have been that he was uncaring or other things were going on.”

  “Would you expect that there were going to be some differences [in his story]?” O’Mara asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because we’re not robots as people,” he said.

  “As a matter of fact, if someone were to come to you and have the exact same story down fact for fact, and word for word, sentence for sentence each time you talked to them, what would you think about that person’s honesty or veracity?” O’Mara asked.

  “Either they’re being completely honest, or completely false to the extreme,” Serino said.

  After some back-and-forth, the attorney asked, “Because at this point you had fairly specific evidence that Mr. Zimmerman was acting in self-defense that night, correct?”

  “I had information that would have supported that.”

  Wait! I thought. Why would he suggest on his report that Zimmerman be charged with manslaughter if he thought it was a case of self-defense? Again, things just didn’t add up.

  O’Mara moved on to the third interview Serino did with the killer. Serino talked about the other evidence he’d gotten and how he realized the only living person who knew how the incident began was the man on trial. Of course, there were the 911 calls and statements from John Good, but only the killer knew how the confrontation started.

  “I had nothing of substance to basically toss it in to confront him with as far as the interview went,” Serino said, “other than a suspicious lack of remembering the streets, how many streets he had in his neighborhood and other oddities.”

  “So then what you decided to take on,” O’Mara said, “is what’s called a ‘challenge interview,’ correct?”

  “At this point, I wasn’t ready for one, but yes.”

  “You were also under quite a deal of pressure to get this case moved forward, correct?” (Serino answered, “Yes.”) “And had to move even quicker than you would have otherwise have moved on this case because of some of the external pressures that we now know existed in this case?” asked O’Mara. (“Yes, sir.”) “And it was for that reason that you may have moved a little bit quicker than you otherwise would have liked to interview Mr. Zimmerman in this sort of aggressive context, correct?”

  Serino said yes. As a result, he had little to challenge Zimmerman with and described this third interview as “mild.” Serino also noted that this case was particularly difficult because it was possible, at least from a detective’s perspective, that “in this particular case, I mean he could have been considered a victim, also.”

  O’Mara then asked Serino about the defendant’s profiling of Trayvon and his reasons for questioning him about his intentions and thought process.

  “You sort of hit him with that pretty straight out of the box, right, hoping for maybe a response that would give you an insight as to whether or not he was profiling Trayvon because Trayvon was black?” O’Mara said. “So you asked him, ‘If he would have been white, would you have reacted the same way?’ ”

  Serino answered, “Yes, sir.”

  We all knew that if Trayvon would have been white, the killer probably wouldn’t have reacted in such a manner.

  Serino said it didn’t matter, and to him he seemed straightforward in his response. “There were external concerns about that…and I needed to get that clarified,” Serino said.

  “You also had a concern that you evidenced to him or challenged him on because you had an issue as to whether or not his rendition of getting hit dozens of times were supported by the forensic evidence, correct?”

  “In my view, yes, they were lacking.”

  The killer had t
old investigators he had been hit nearly thirty times, but Serino felt the injuries he sustained were not severe enough for that much pounding. The detective added that people often panic during an altercation and exaggerate the facts, so while this concerned him, he didn’t feel it indicated an outright lie.

  In my book, when you exaggerate the facts, that is a lie. There is no way Trayvon hit him thirty times.

  O’Mara asked Serino again about his bluff that Trayvon may have filmed the incident on his phone, to which the killer responded that he hoped someone had. Serino again said this meant to him that, “Either he was telling the truth or was a complete pathological liar.”

  He knew that Trayvon wasn’t filming anything, because he was trying to get away from his killer!

  “So if we were to take pathological liar off the table as a possibility, just for the purposes of this next question, you think he was telling the truth?” O’Mara asked.

  “Yes,” Serino replied.

  But he’d given me the impression that he hadn’t believed the killer’s story!

  With that, the court then recessed for the evening.

  O’Mara played Serino like a piano. And Serino, who had seemed so skeptical of the killer when we first talked, and who recommended in his report that the killer be charged, seemed to be walking all that back. Once again, we felt that law enforcement, whose testimony is almost always helpful to the prosecution, was working against us. Why? When we returned the next day, and before the jury entered, de la Rionda led off with an objection.

  He argued that the end of Serino’s testimony from the previous day should be stricken from the record because he was giving his opinion, which, coming from a police officer, might bias the jury.

  After briefly reading over some of the case law, Judge Nelson agreed that Serino’s opinions should be stricken. The jury was then brought in and given that instruction, as if that alone would cause them to forget everything flying in Serino’s testimony the day before.

  Why hadn’t the objection been made before Serino finished giving his testimony? Before the jury had a night to sleep on it?

  It wasn’t much of a victory for the prosecution.

  O’Mara trudged forward, playing a portion of the recording of Serino’s third interview with Zimmerman, in which he played for the defendant the 911 tapes and asked his client if he recognized the voice screaming for help.

  “In the transcript,” O’Mara said, “there was a suggestion yesterday that Mr. Zimmerman said, ‘It doesn’t even sound like me.’ Do you remember that?”

  Serino said yes.

  “Did that change the direction of your interrogation of him at all?”

  It didn’t, he said. When asked if the killer’s comment about the voice on the 911 tape—“It doesn’t even sound like me”—caused any concern, he said, “No, it did not.”

  On his redirect, de la Rionda, thankfully, had more questions for Serino.

  He replayed the killer’s words from the nonemergency-line call that became the first words of this trial, “These assholes, they always get away.”

  “Is that something you would use in reference to somebody you’re going to invite over for dinner?” de la Rionda asked. “Would you call them ‘these assholes’?”

  “No, sir, I would not,” he said.

  De la Rionda played more of the nonemergency call.

  “Is the word, pardon my language, ‘fucking punks’ something that you would refer to, something good about people when you would reference them?” he asked.

  “No, sir, it’s not,” Serino said.

  “Does that statement not indicate ill-will, hatred, and spite against somebody else, sir?…Calling somebody and referencing them as ‘fucking punks’?”

  “That is ill-will and spite, correct,” Serino said. De la Rionda was finally trying to link the killer’s words to the kind of mindset—“a deranged mind” was the legal definition—that could lead to a conviction.

  “Did the defendant ever indicate that he was happy that there were burglaries being committed at Twin Lakes?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “In fact, didn’t he actually say this?” And then de la Rionda played another portion of the killer’s interview with Officer Doris Singleton, in which the killer references his wife becoming scared after the burglaries that took place in the neighborhood and said that was the reason for starting the neighborhood watch program. In describing his role as the neighborhood watch coordinator, the killer said he often calls the nonemergency line when he sees something suspicious, but “these guys always get away.”

  “Didn’t he say that to the nonemergency operator also, but he used more colorful language, pardon my language, ‘These assholes always get away,’ correct?”

  The detective agreed that he had.

  “If somebody were to believe that another person is a criminal, could that be a form of profiling?” de la Rionda continued.

  “It could be construed as such,” Serino said, after O’Mara objected.

  “Was there any indication that Trayvon Benjamin Martin, the young man…just turned seventeen, was committing a crime that evening, sir?”

  Of course, he said, there wasn’t.

  De la Rionda’s pace was now quickening, and we were glad for that. He moved on to the killer’s claim that he left his truck and followed Trayvon down a path between the townhomes because he needed an address to give to the police and couldn’t remember the name of the street he was on.

  “Right there on that corner,” de la Rionda said, pausing the video walk-through on a frame with a townhome facing the spot where the killer said he parked, “lived Ms. Lauer.

  “I want to show you a photograph in front of Ms. Lauer’s residence,” he said. “Isn’t there a numerical address right there in front of her house?”

  There was, and de la Rionda zoomed in on the frame to show the numbers: 1211, which Serino confirmed as the correct address.

  “The defendant in that reenactment, when he’s pointing at all the back of all these houses where he’s claiming he doesn’t have an address,” de la Rionda said, his arms now outstretched in the air, “[but] there’s an address right there staring at him, isn’t that true, sir?”

  “Yes, there is,” Serino said.

  De la Rionda then showed an aerial photograph of Twin Lakes. He highlighted a portion of Zimmerman’s interview in which the killer stated he couldn’t remember the name of the street he was on when he left his truck. But in the photograph, de la Rionda pointed out that there are only three streets in the Retreat, and the street the killer was on, Twin Tree Lane, was the same street that led to the main entrance of the neighborhood. With only three streets in the complex, how could you not know what street you were on?

  Which meant the killer knew where he was, knew the terrain. It was clear that he exited his truck for one reason: to follow Trayvon and make sure he did not get away.

  Finally, de la Rionda pointed out one more major hole in the killer’s story.

  The killer had claimed that after he shot Trayvon he had spread his arms apart until the police arrived, in fear that Trayvon might have a weapon. But the first pictures taken at the scene by police officers showed Trayvon’s body lying facedown, not with his hands outstretched, but underneath his body.

  “Could someone say that that was inconsistent with the defendant’s statement that his hands were straight out, that he had put his hands out?” de la Rionda asked.

  “That positioning as seen there, yes it is,” Serino said.

  After de la Rionda rested his redirect, O’Mara began questioning Serino again, now more forcefully than ever.

  Regarding his client’s use of the term “assholes,” O’Mara suggested to Detective Serino that the killer could have been “generalizing,” and not explicitly meaning Trayvon. “Because you know from your investigation that he was a bit frustrated that his neighborhood was being assailed by burglars, right?”

  Serino said yes.

&n
bsp; O’Mara mentioned his client’s admission that he had been following Trayvon.

  But wait: during one of the killer’s renditions he said he was not following Trayvon, but was just walking in the same direction.

  “Anything wrong with following somebody like that?” he asked.

  An objection caused the question to be rephrased: “Do you think there was anything wrong with him following him to see where he was going?”

  “Legally speaking, no,” Serino said.

  But if you are in fear of your life, why would you get out of your vehicle to follow someone?

  “Another challenge that you made to Mr. Zimmerman concerned this question about the hands over the face,” O’Mara continued after a series of other questions. “And yet in the screaming on the 911 [recording] there wasn’t a great deal of muffling, would you agree?”

  “No, sir, there was not, yes,” Serino said.

  “May it also be that you perceive getting smothered even when somebody has a hand on your broken nose?” (“Possibly, yes,” said Serino.)

  Again, this was not consistent with the evidence. There was none of Zimmerman’s blood at all on Trayvon’s hands.

  “Would you agree that there may have been some screams muffled enough so they simply didn’t show up on the tape?”

  “There could have been, possibly.”

  After O’Mara returned to the defense table, de la Rionda cross-examined Serino briefly, before saying “No further questions,” and Judge Nelson excused Chris Serino from the witness stand.

  Watching the detective depart, I couldn’t help but feel as though I was watching our great hope go up in smoke. We had suffered yet another major defeat in the case. The detective had all of the right answers. But he was never asked the right questions.

  Six days later Serino was called back to testify again. O’Mara asked Serino about playing the 911 call for me for the first time. I had lost my son the day before, and, through a cloud of unfathomable grief and confusion, I said I wasn’t sure about whose voice was screaming for help on the tape. That would be misinterpreted by the police—and surely now by the defense—as meaning that I felt it wasn’t Trayvon, but his killer, yelling for help, which was one hundred percent false.