Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “No, I didn’t ask him specifically how his head was being impacted into the concrete,” he said. “I, again, generalize statements from Mr. Zimmerman himself….But his perception was that the downward blows, his head hitting the concrete, his head was being slammed into the concrete…”

  “I think you said you reviewed some medical records,” Guy said. “Did you review the medical record where the woman measured the longest laceration on the back of his head was two centimeters?”

  “They weren’t that large, if that’s what you’re asking?” Root said.

  Guy pointed out that two centimeters is less than an inch, and the other cut on the killer’s head was less than one centimeter, which a medical examiner from Jacksonville had previously testified was “insignificant” and “not life-threatening.”

  “You would agree with me, that of all the people you heard from, either talked to or had written statements or audio statements, the person with the best vantage point would have been the defendant, right?” Guy asked.

  “Of course,” Root said.

  “The defendant told you in his statement that Trayvon Martin was straddling him,” Guy said. “And you understood from the context of your conversation, that Trayvon Martin was over the defendant’s belly button, right?”

  “Over his waist area,” Root said.

  What Guy did next surprised us: he brought out a life-size foam dummy and laid it faceup on the floor in front of the witness stand. The lawyers at the defense table must have been surprised, too. They all stood with curious looks to try to get a better view.

  Where is he going with this? I thought.

  “So as the defendant described it to you,” Guy said as he got down on his knees with the dummy between his legs, his hips above the dummy’s abdomen, “is this the way he described it? In the area of his belly button?”

  “What’s really important right now, sir,” Root said, “number one, you’ve got your knees up pretty high on his waist. If you want to slide down just a little bit more.”

  Guy shuffled back and forth in order to move back in the direction of the dummy’s feet and began wrestling with the dummy.

  “There you go,” Root said, confirming that the prosecutor was now in the right position.

  “By the way,” Guy said, “did you have the defendant do this?”

  He had not.

  “If this person, this mannequin,” Guy continued, “were carrying a firearm on their waist, where would the gun be right now in relation to me?”

  “It would be at your left inner thigh,” Root said.

  Guy pointed to his thigh to illustrate to the jury the location Root was describing and added, “Underneath my leg, right?”

  Root agreed, on the condition that the defendant was right-handed.

  “Were you aware,” Guy continued, “that the defendant described to his best friend that when he slid down, the defendant slid down, that Trayvon Martin was up around his armpits?” And he moved his knees up directly underneath the dummy’s shoulders to illustrate his point.

  “No,” Root said, “I’ve not heard that.”

  “Where would the gun be now?”

  “Now the gun would be behind your left leg.”

  Root said that the killer was slipping down between Trayvon’s legs during the altercation, and that was what the killer claimed exposed the gun to Trayvon’s view. Guy asked if Root had asked the killer how he reached for the gun. He said he hadn’t. But what was more important than how he reached for his gun was the location on his hip where the gun was holstered.

  During the walk-through video, the killer indicated that the gun was in his waistband, behind him. So how could Trayvon see the gun if it was behind his back under his jacket, if Trayvon was on top of him?

  De la Rionda would eventually mention the location of the killer’s gun in passing during closing arguments—“It wasn’t right here in the front; it was toward the back, and it was hidden”—and John Guy would say in his closing arguments, “If Trayvon Martin had been mounted on the defendant as the defendant claims when [he] went to get his gun, he never could have got it. I don’t have to pull out the mannequin again and sit on it. You remember…if he was up on his waist, his waist is covered by Trayvon Martin’s legs. He couldn’t have got the gun….It’s a physical impossibility.” But I didn’t feel the jury realized the importance of this—which is that it would be almost literally impossible for Trayvon to have seen and reached for the gun. The killer’s story seemed to be a not-very-well-thought-out fantasy. And it was transparent. De la Rionda just had to hammer in on this simple fact for the jury. But he didn’t.

  O’Mara asked to borrow Guy’s “doll,” and laid the dummy on the floor in the same position Guy had placed it earlier. From a straddling position, he questioned Root about he killer’s injuries and if they could also be consistent with slamming the back and sides of his client’s head to the concrete while resisting an attack. Root said they could be.

  O’Mara then brought up the fact that the gun had been discharged against Trayvon’s hoodie, but with a distance from his chest, to which Root suggested that the only way that could have happened was if Trayvon was leaning over his killer, and that if he had been trying to get away, the weight from the can of iced tea would have caused Trayvon’s hoodie to fall against his own chest.

  O’Mara went through different positions above the dummy, sliding up and down its chest, at each position pointing to where he claimed his client’s gun was holstered and asking if the gun would have been “available.” Each time Root said it was.

  “How much thrashing or movement was happening in that dynamic event between these two men at that point?” O’Mara asked.

  “I would have to say a lot,” Root said. How could this be true? From the time Trayvon’s phone got disconnected until the time of his death was only a minute and a half. As O’Mara picked up the dummy and placed it back behind the prosecution table, and I wondered, Was the dummy a dumb thing to introduce, and had it just backfired on the prosecution?

  —

  The defense would call a total of eighteen witnesses, everyone from the killer’s trainer, who called him “physically soft,” to a neighbor at the Retreat, who testified about burglaries committed by young black men, and the prosecution would call thirty-eight witnesses. But what everyone remembered from those final days was Dennis Root and John Guy’s dummy. “Who was the winner in the use of a dummy to demonstrate the fights between Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin?” wrote Hal Boedeker in the Orlando Sentinel in a story titled “Mount-Your-Dummy Day.” “Not the state, most analysts said.”

  The trial was taking its toll on all of us: long hours, endless witnesses, and constant replaying of that terrifying tape and gruesome photographs of our son’s last hours on earth. We were all mentally and physically exhausted, as was the defense. “We’re not physically able to keep up this pace much longer,” Don West complained to Judge Nelson at the end of a thirteen-hour day of testimony, “We’ve had full days every day. Weekends. Depositions at night.”

  Judge Nelson didn’t show sympathy and instead demanded to know if the defendant planned to testify on his own behalf.

  “I object to the court inquiring of Mr. Zimmerman as to his decision about whether or not to testify,” said Don West.

  “Your objection is overruled,” said Judge Nelson.

  The killer would not testify, and why should he? His lawyers had done their work, challenging though it was, and as far as the state was concerned, the prosecutors and police, well, it was already clear that he was getting better treatment than my son.

  And with that, on July 10, the defense rested, after four days, half the time taken by the prosecution.

  But I couldn’t rest. Ever again. That night in the hotel room that had become my second home, I thought of the long and almost impossible road that had taken us to this point. We had come so far, from not knowing how our son had died to knowing almost everything; from being alone in our s
truggle to being supported by many parts of our nation and maybe even the world. Now the trial was coming to a close. Once it was over, would Trayvon rest in peace and be forgotten? Could something larger come out of this trial, this death, this loss—something bigger than a verdict against a single individual? Could change actually come, if we continued to honor our son, both in his life and in his death? If we continued saying his name, would his name continue to stand for something?

  Something deeper than his death. Something bigger than his unfinished life. Something that could last longer than this trial. Something that would turn his passing into power.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sybrina

  July 12, 2013

  I closed my eyes and prayed in the courtroom as closing arguments began on the morning of Thursday, July 11, 2013. It had been eighteen days since the trial began, and now it would come down to final arguments from both sides. The prosecution went first with Bernie de la Rionda delivering a two-hour presentation.

  “A teenager is dead,” de la Rionda said as he stepped up to the podium to face the jury that early afternoon. “He is dead through no fault of his own. He is dead because another man made assumptions….He is dead not just because the man made those assumptions, because he acted upon those assumptions, and unfortunately…because his assumptions were wrong Trayvon Benjamin Martin no longer walks on this Earth….

  “Unfortunately, this is one of the last photos that will ever be taken of Trayvon Martin,” he said, holding up the picture of Trayvon’s body lying dead in the grass at Twin Lakes. “That is true because of the actions of one individual, the man before you, the defendant….

  “A man who after shooting Trayvon Martin claims to not have realized he was dead,” he continued. “What did he do?…Did he render or attempt to render the same aid that the heroic officers from the Sanford Police Department did? Who didn’t wear the mask they normally would wear, but gave mouth-to-mouth, performed CPR, in an attempt to bring life back into that young boy?”

  He referred to the neighbor, Jonathan Manalo, one of the first to arrive at the scene, who testified that the defendant told him he had shot our son in self-defense. “Recall what he told Mr. Manalo: ‘Please call my wife,’ and then apparently Mr. Manalo was taking too long or something and he said ‘Just tell her I killed him.’ Just kind of matter-of-fact. Those acts, those actions, speak volumes of what occurred that evening, Sunday evening….

  “He profiled him as a criminal. He assumed certain things, that Trayvon Martin was up to no good. That is what led to his death. Trayvon Martin…He was there legally. He hadn’t broken in or sneaked in or trespassed.

  “He followed him, he tracked him. Because in his mind, in the defendant’s mind, this was a criminal, and he was tired of criminals committing crimes out there. Again, that’s not a bad thing. It’s good that citizens get involved. But he went over the line. He assumed things that weren’t true. And instead of waiting for the police, instead of waiting for the police to come and do their job, he did not. Because he, the defendant, wanted to make sure that Trayvon Martin didn’t get out of the neighborhood….That night, he decided he was going to be what he wanted to be: a police officer.”

  The prosecutor was building up to essentially this question: Who was more afraid in the moments before the confrontation, the seventeen-year-old minding his own business? Or the grown man with a loaded gun?

  Once again, he talked about the tape where the killer says to the dispatcher, “These assholes, they always get away,” saying that this indicated the hatred, ill-will, or spite needed to convict.

  “Hold the defendant responsible for his actions,” de la Rionda said. “Hold him accountable for what he did. Because if the defendant hadn’t assumed that—then Trayvon Martin would have watched the basketball game and George Zimmerman I’m assuming would have gone to Target or done whatever he does on Sunday evenings, and we wouldn’t be here.”

  De la Rionda asked jurors to think back to the defendant’s claim that he became afraid when he saw Trayvon circling his vehicle. Assuming that’s true, he said, “He says he’s [Trayvon] got something in his hands. Why does this defendant get out of the truck if he thinks that Trayvon Martin is a threat to him? Why? Why? Because he’s got a gun. He’s got the equalizer. He’s going to take care of it. He’s a wannabe cop. He’s gonna take care of it. He’s got a gun…and he’s not going to put up with it. And if the police are taking too long to respond…

  “His [Trayvon’s] body speaks to you, even in death ,” de la Rionda said at one point. “It proves to you that this defendant is lying about what happened.

  “See, because what’s important is the defendant, in an attempt to convince the police that he was really shooting this man, this boy, in self-defense, he had to exaggerate what happened,” he said. “That’s why he had to at some point say, ‘Oh, he was threatening me.’ It was almost like the levels of fear escalated.”

  He outlined the escalation that the killer claimed: from Trayvon hitting him and getting him on the ground to the struggle, in which “he got the upper hand” to Trayvon threatening to kill him and putting his hand over his mouth, suffocating him and pinching his nose. “And then he went for the gun…See how he’s exaggerating everything?”

  He was more than a wannabe cop, said de la Rionda; he was also a law student, who knew the “bullet points in terms of what’s required” for self-defense.

  He reviewed the testimony from Rachel Jeantel and her telephone call timeline, and the witnesses who made 911 calls. He showed the Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm gun to the jury, and asked, “Look at the gun, look at the size of this gun—how did the victim see that in the darkness?”

  He also reviewed the physical evidence, including Trayvon’s hands, which, in death, were underneath him, clenching his chest, which raised the question: why, as life was leaving him, would Trayvon somehow lift himself up and place his hands back under his chest?

  He played a video, in which the killer, when asked if Trayvon seemed afraid on the night of their encounter on a television interview with Sean Hannity, suggested that maybe Trayvon wasn’t actually running. “It was like skipping, going away quickly. But he wasn’t running out of fear,” he said. Which de la Rionda demonstrated as ludicrous by skipping in a carefree manner across the courtroom.

  It was ridiculous: How often have you seen a teenaged boy skip down the street?

  De la Rionda asked how the defendant could have managed to scream if he was indeed being choked and slammed and smothered by Trayvon.

  “How many arms did Trayvon Martin need for punching, moving to the sidewalk, grabbing the head, smothering the mouth and nose, grabbing for the gun all at the same time?” he asked.

  In his two-hour closing argument, de la Rionda noted the inconsistencies: the killer’s claim of being hit twenty-five times, which the physical evidence—the cuts on the back of his head and his supposedly broken nose—didn’t prove; the absence of Trayvon’s DNA or fingerprint evidence on the gun; the killer’s claim that he was scared of Trayvon while still getting out of his truck to follow him, all of which meant that his actions and the physical evidence didn’t meet his self-defense claim.

  He closed with this: “Some of the people you heard from were the parents of both the victim and the defendant. Unfortunately, the only photographs left of Trayvon Martin are those M.E. photographs….They can’t take any more photos and that’s true because of the actions of one person…the man before you…the man who is guilty of second-degree murder.”

  De la Rionda’s dramatic closing reviewed the evidence clearly, strongly, and presented the jury with all the right questions, but we returned to our hotel that night with more questions than answers. The next day the defense would present its closing arguments, led by Mark O’Mara.

  —

  O’Mara also mentioned the defendant’s desire to be a police officer, a “wannabe cop,” which, he said, contrary to the prosecution’s portrayal, was a good thing, a man wanting to hel
p his community, a place ravaged by crime and suspicion.

  He spoke for around three hours.

  He put on a pair of sunglasses, loosened his tie, and put on a pinkie ring, to warn the jurors against making rash judgments based on impressions. “You might have an impression of George Zimmerman,” he said, as the killer stood and walked to his side. “You may have an impression of him because he’s sitting at the defense table…because the state attorney’s office has decided to charge him he must have done something wrong.” But, he added, asking the jurors not to have first impressions would be “absurd.”

  He talked about the shooter’s injuries. “No injuries are necessary to respond with deadly force. Not a cut on a finger. The statute is clear—a reasonable fear of bodily harm….So the injuries, icing on the cake of self-defense.”

  He exhibited a “Self-Defense Burden of Proof” chart. “The state carries a burden, without question, of proving to you beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman did not properly act in self-defense…,” he said. “George Zimmerman is not guilty if you have just a reasonable doubt that he acted in self-defense.”

  He had also introduced life-size cutouts to show the jury the heights of Trayvon and the shooter. And he said of the prosecution, “They are supposed to use words like ‘certainty’ and ‘definite,’ and ‘without question,’ ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’…What aren’t good words of good prosecutors are ‘maybe,’ ‘what if,’ ‘I hope so,’ ‘you figure it out.’ ”

  Then, he walked to the far side of the courtroom and picked up a jagged chunk of concrete more than two feet long and four inches thick. I’ve never seen a piece of concrete that thick, and the attorney appeared to struggle under its weight as he carried the rock across the courtroom and prepared to lay it on the floor in front of the jury. “How many times was it said, that Trayvon Martin was unarmed?”

  The concrete chunk landed with a thud on the floor. O’Mara dramatically brushed his hands together and wiped them on his suit pants before he continued.