Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “Did there come a time that you met with Tracy Martin and his girlfriend, Brandy Green, in your office?” O’Mara asked.

  “Yes, sir, there was,” Serino replied.

  O’Mara then asked detailed questions about our meeting, even down to how we were seated when Serino played us the 911 calls. When asked if I’d thought it was Trayvon screaming on the recordings, the detective testified that I’d looked away and said “No” under my breath.

  —

  On Wednesday, July 3, Trayvon’s hoodie made an appearance, in one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

  During the testimony of Amy Siewert, a crime laboratory analyst in the firearms division of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, prosecutor John Guy brought out the actual hoodie Trayvon was wearing the night he was killed. The article of clothing that I had seen him wear so many times was now mounted behind glass in a frame with the arms stretched out and the hood pulled up. The bullet hole was clearly visible over the heart, surrounded by dried blood.

  By this time, hoodies had become a symbol of our movement for justice. But now it was an exhibit in the trial, and the first time people in court—and watching on television—had seen the actual hoodie that Trayvon was wearing on the night of his death. Amy Siewert explained that she had examined the hoodie as part of the initial investigation and had also done “distance testing” to calculate the distance of the gun from Trayvon’s chest when the fatal shot was fired.

  Prosecutor Guy lifted the framed hoodie in front of the jury so that Siewert could better illustrate the steps she took in the investigation, and I could see the courtroom reflected in the glass. Everyone’s faces—black, white, young and old, my face and Sybrina’s face and our family members’ faces—all staring back from the reflection within the shape of the hoodie.

  It was a powerful moment. This hoodie that had first made the killer suspicious of Trayvon, the hoodie that had sparked the chase and the fatal gunshot, the hoodie that would later be transformed into a symbol of our struggle for justice, was now front and center in the courtroom, another visual representation of how powerful our movement for justice—not just for Trayvon but for all of the young men and women who would follow him in death from senseless violence—had become.

  We could all see ourselves in that hoodie, but what we saw was uncertain. Could the jury see the case from our eyes, from Trayvon’s eyes? Or did the jury see the case from the eyes of the killer and the defense?

  First Guy, and then O’Mara on redirect, questioned the witness about the hole in the hoodie in detail, complete with close-ups of the bloody hoodie and bloodier sweatshirt underneath with the bullet hole just beneath the Nike Swoosh. The witness talked about gunpowder, things called “sooting,” trigger pulls and gun rates, all of the complicated science of ballistics. My mind reeled with the science and statistics, and what did it all prove?

  “The clothing displayed residues and physical effects consistent with a contact shot,” she said.

  “Meaning the muzzle or the end of the barrel of the gun was up against the sweatshirt when it was fired?” Guy asked the witness.

  “Correct,” she said.

  All of which meant that my son was shot through the heart at point-blank range. That same day, the prosecution called Florida Department of Law Enforcement DNA analyst Anthony Gorgone. He testified that none of the killer’s DNA was found under Trayvon’s fingernails and none of Trayvon’s DNA was found on the killer’s gun—which we felt put to rest the notion that Trayvon grabbed the gun.

  July 4, 2013, fell on a Thursday, and the court recessed with the trial set to resume the next day, a Friday. We spent that Fourth of July in our hotel in Lake Mary, and we didn’t go anywhere to watch the fireworks. We couldn’t go out in public like that. Still, that Fourth of July was very significant for us. I was increasingly sure that the trial wasn’t going our way, that our side of the story wasn’t being fully told in court. But I also reflected on how far we’d come from those cold, lonely moments when I first found out about Trayvon’s death. The story didn’t die, because we had a free press and some reporters who were willing to fight with us in public forums, even when officials wouldn’t. Our pleas for justice went all the way to the White House, to the country’s democratically elected president, Barack Obama. And even if the prosecution of the case felt insufficient, we were having our day in court. We were ordinary people—the most ordinary, if that even makes sense. And on that Independence Day we felt blessed to be living in a country where voices like ours could be heard and justice could be given a chance to prevail.

  But I knew that our country’s history was more complicated than any Fourth of July story would tell. In fact, the America of 2013, an America that was tuning in every night to watch highlights from the trial and debates over the case, was very different in some ways from the one in which I write this book in 2016, when a tragic series of other young black men have died from senseless violence, many by police bullets, and where cities like Ferguson, Missouri, have gone up in flames. Our son wasn’t nearly the first young black person to be killed, but the larger movement around it marked the beginning of a new response to the violence.

  At that time, we saw Trayvon’s case as an isolated event, a senseless killing calling out for justice. That was before the wave of killings, before we met parents like Ron Davis, whose seventeen-year-old African American son Jordan Davis was shot dead by a forty-five-year-old white software developer who fired ten bullets at Davis and his friends in their SUV outside a Jacksonville convenience store, mainly because he felt they were playing their music too loud. It was before Ron Davis told us about what he called “the injustice of the justice system,” where white officials choose white jurors, where less than ten percent of judges are African Americans, where defendants or their supporters pay for the best possible defense attorneys, leaving victims’ families and prosecutors outmatched by defense attorneys using the soon-to-become-familiar strategy of blaming the victim for their own death. “He was no angel,” these defense attorneys would say over the dead bodies of young black men. It was perverse.

  “They don’t want you here,” Ron Davis would tell us of the court system.

  But that understanding would come later. There on that Fourth of July, we believed our case stood alone, and were hopeful that it would never happen to another parent’s child. We also felt grateful to even be heard in a court in Florida, and have a judge and jury consider our case. Even getting the case to trial was a major victory, and so we followed what Crump told us to do: handle ourselves with dignity and composure, and let the anger pass when we felt it, even though at times I felt like it would consume me.

  But on that July 4, 2013, we also felt gratitude, as Americans with a right to a fair trial, even if we had to fight through the gloom of our own grief and waken the nation’s conscience to achieve that right.

  When we returned to court after the holiday, the prosecution called Sybrina to the stand. Many would say that it was insensitive to force a grieving mother to testify, and later, in his closing arguments, de la Rionda would defend his decision to call Sybrina, saying, “Ms. Fulton—people asked why you even questioned her. How dare you question the mom of a passed-away seventeen-year-old?” he said.

  “Doctors cut people sometimes when they do their work,” he would continue. “That was something I had to present to you…about the way it happened and how it happened. And, you know, the impact and just how moms think about these things, both sides. Because I know that both moms believe with their heart, with their soul that that was their son’s cry for help. You have to. You want to, and it’s just the way you get through it.”

  She walked into the courtroom that day in a dark suit, her jacket worn over a beige blouse. She wore glasses and a pearl necklace with matching earrings. Her hair was up in her familiar bun. And while it had been many years since we had been husband and wife, we were forever in this fight together for the love of our kids. It was tough for me to wa
tch her endure the agony of the trial.

  The courtroom was small, and the man who killed my son sat at the defense table not far from the witness stand where Sybrina was now sitting. I could feel the tension in the room. I glanced over at the killer. Sybrina, staring back at him, was steady and strong. The woman who was once so filled with grief that she couldn’t get out of her bedroom had found the inner resolve to be a warrior when she needed to.

  She stated her name, and de la Rionda began his questioning.

  “Are you married, ma’am?” he asked.

  “I’m divorced,” Sybrina answered.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Can you tell us who they are and their names?”

  “My youngest son is Trayvon Benjamin Martin. He’s in heaven,” she said.

  I looked over at the jury. I couldn’t tell anything from their blank expressions.

  “And my oldest son is Jahvaris Lamar Fulton,” said Sybrina.

  After asking Sybrina to state the basic facts of her life, de la Rionda said, “Was Trayvon Martin right- or left-handed?”

  “Trayvon was right-handed,” she said.

  This was an important detail since the gun the killer claimed Trayvon was reaching for was holstered behind his right side, which would have required Trayvon to reach for it with his less dominant hand.

  “Prior to your son’s death, had you heard him crying or yelling?”

  She had, of course. But de la Rionda was getting ready to once again play the tape of the 911 call with Trayvon’s bloodcurdling screams for help and the fatal gunshot. Sybrina remained stoic as she heard the last of our son’s screams again. There was a brief silence in the courtroom after the tape, then de la Rionda asked his next question.

  “Ma’am,” he said, breaking the silence, “that screaming or yelling, do you recognize that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And who do you recognize that to be?”

  “Trayvon Benjamin Martin,” she said without hesitation.

  The prosecutor, without asking a single question about Trayvon’s background or character, had no further questions at that time.

  O’Mara stood up and attempted to apologize for our loss, but de la Rionda was quick with an objection, saying O’Mara’s conduct was improper since he was not asking a question. The judge sustained the objection, and O’Mara began his cross-examination.

  “Will you tell us the first time that you listened to that tape?” O’Mara asked. “Where were you?”

  “I was here in Sanford,” Sybrina said. “I believe it was in the mayor’s office.”

  “That was pursuant to a request made by your lawyers to have that tape released, correct?”

  It was.

  “I imagine that it was probably one of the worst things that you went through to listen to that tape, correct?” O’Mara asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And that if it was your son in fact screaming, as you’ve testified, that would suggest that it was Mr. Zimmerman’s fault that led to his death, correct?”

  She agreed.

  “And if it was not your son screaming,” O’Mara continued, “if it was in fact George Zimmerman, then you would have to accept the probability that it was Trayvon Martin who caused his own death, correct?”

  “I don’t understand your question,” Sybrina said, remaining composed.

  “If you were to listen to that tape and not hear your son’s voice, that would mean that it would have been George Zimmerman’s voice, correct?”

  “And not hear my son screaming? Is that what you’re asking?” Sybrina said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I heard my son screaming,” she said definitively.

  “I understand,” O’Mara said. “The alternative, the only alternative, would you agree, would be that if it was not your son screaming that it would be George Zimmerman, correct?”

  De la Rionda objected due to speculation, and Judge Nelson again sustained.

  “You certainly had to hope that was your son screaming even before you heard it, correct?” O’Mara said.

  “I didn’t hope for anything,” she said. “I just simply listened to the tape.”

  “And in your mind, as his mother, there is no doubt whatsoever that it was him screaming, correct?”

  “Absolutely…”

  He mentioned the other people who listened to the tape in the mayor’s office.

  “Every one of them then told you that they agreed with your opinion that it was Trayvon Martin’s voice, correct?”

  “They didn’t tell me anything.”

  O’Mara asked Sybrina if anyone had prepared Sybrina before the tape was played, telling her “that you would soon be listening to screams from the event that led to your son’s death.”

  No one had told her anything about the tape before she heard it, she said. Not the mayor. None of our attorneys or family members present, and how could they? They hadn’t heard the tape yet, either, and I had only heard portions of it.

  “The question is, whether or not anyone told you to prepare yourself for the event, for the trauma of having to listen to somebody scream moments before your son was shot?”

  The answer was still no.

  “You just needed to listen to it one time, correct?”

  “That’s it.”

  O’Mara said he was finished with questions, subject to recalling Sybrina as a witness if needed, and de la Rionda had a few questions on redirect.

  “You were asked by defense counsel about hope,” he said. “Were you still hoping that he would still be alive?”

  Of course she was.

  “I don’t know how else to ask this, but I’m going to ask it,” de la Rionda continued. “Did you enjoy listening to that recording?”

  “Absolutely not,” Sybrina said.

  De la Rionda was finished, but again O’Mara stood up from the defense table.

  “At the risk of another objection,” he said, “I don’t mean to put you through this any more than necessary, than we need to, but you certainly would hope that your son Trayvon Martin did nothing that could have led to his own death?”

  “What was your question again?” she asked.

  “You certainly hope, as a mom, you certainly hope that your son Trayvon Martin would not have done anything that would have led to his own death, correct?”

  “What I hope for,” she said, “is that this would have never happened and he would still be here. That’s my hope.”

  “And now dealing with the reality that he is no longer here, it is certainly your hope as a mom, hold out hope as long as you can, that Trayvon Martin was in no way responsible for his own death, correct?”

  “I don’t believe he was,” she said.

  O’Mara rested, returning to the defense table.

  Sybrina’s testimony was over in less than thirty minutes.

  The prosecution moved on, calling my son Jahvaris to the stand next, with John Guy leading the questioning.

  Jahvaris, then twenty-two, was both an honor student and an extremely respectable young man. He stood by us every inch of the way in taking his brother’s death to the nation, taking time off from his studies at Florida International University from the moment we found out that Trayvon had been killed. Jahvaris had never enjoyed being in the public eye. He had to first endure depositions and now testify at the trial of his brother’s killer—but he did it all without hesitation.

  We went out to dinner one night, Sybrina, Jahvaris, our attorneys, and me. We had tried to keep the gory details of his brother’s shooting away from Jahvaris. But on this night, we got into a conversation about where the bullet went through Trayvon’s body, and Jahvaris asked us to explain.

  “Trayvon was shot through the heart,” I said.

  I didn’t realize Jahvaris didn’t already know.

  Jahvaris’s body suddenly seemed to give out from under him. We had to pick him up and take him outside. Jahvaris
was clearly holding a lot of pain inside him, but rarely let it slip out.

  Jahvaris is a strong young man of impeccable values, intelligence, and courage, and from the moment he entered the courtroom, in his dark suit, white shirt, and red 5000 Role Models tie with a design of large black hands touching smaller black hands, I knew he would conduct himself as he always has: with intelligence, poise, and complete control.

  “That’s my brother,” he said early on in his testimony of Trayvon, adding, after a series of questions about their age difference and other things, “We were very close.”

  Under questioning by prosecutor Guy, Jahvaris said that even though he was four and a half years older than Trayvon, they still did all the things that brothers do together.

  “Since your brother’s death,” Guy said, “have you had an opportunity to hear a tape that contains screaming and a gunshot?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Anywhere between ten and fifteen times.”

  “And how have you heard it? Have you heard it on a computer, on TV, on the Internet, or what?”

  He had heard the tape first on a computer that day in the mayor’s office and later on television.

  “Do you recognize any voices on that tape?” Guy asked.

  “Yes,” Jahvaris said. “My brother.”

  “What parts do you recognize as your brother’s voice?”

  “The yelling and the screaming.”

  Jahvaris said he had heard Trayvon yell a number of times before, but never like that.

  Guy finished his questioning—again, quickly—and O’Mara began to cross-examine, again, in detail.

  O’Mara said that Jahvaris wasn’t as certain that the screams were Trayvon’s when he spoke to a reporter from CBS Miami about the tapes, and the defense attorney quoted what Jahvaris had said at the time: “You said, ‘Honestly,…really haven’t listened to it. I’ve heard it. I would think it was my brother, but I’m not completely positive,’ correct?” O’Mara asked.

  Jahvaris agreed, and confirmed O’Mara’s questions about listening to the tape with the family in the mayor’s office.