CHAPTER 5
Sybrina
February 27, 2012–March 8, 2012
Losing my child ripped my heart in half; it is indescribable pain.
I could not get out of my bedroom.
My bedroom had always been my haven, filled with my favorite things, all in my favorite color: purple. Purple is my birthstone, the purple of amethyst, the ancient stone that, it’s written, Moses said was filled with the spirit of God, bestowing power and strength. Almost everything in my room was purple: walls, carpets, sheets, pillows, flowers, accents, decorations, and more. After Trayvon’s death, even the purple seemed dead, and the brightest color, the color that had always comforted me, lost its radiance. Everything was gray.
My mind spun around and around on this one thought: every child needs their mother, and when my son needed me most I was not there for him. I could not get this thought out of my mind. It took the life out of me and put me in a strange paralysis. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything but lie in bed and cry. Within a few days I’d developed a new routine to cut off my exposure to the world: brush teeth, shower, change clothes, and fall back into bed, where I’d lie for hours and, then, days. People would come to visit, but I wouldn’t come out of my room. I didn’t want to see anybody, speak to anybody, or hear another word about the events that left my son dead.
One day, while I was in the shower, just letting the water run over me, lost in my grief, a song suddenly came to me.
My world was upside down, but the song, from some faraway corner of my memory, was like a life raft, something that I could grab on to in my endless gulf of grief. I couldn’t sing the song, couldn’t even speak it. Who could sing at a time like this? But the lyrics were stuck in my head, repeating themselves:
I’m living this moment because of You
I want to thank You and praise You, too
I knew the song from church. It was the gospel standard “Your Grace and Mercy” by the Mississippi Mass Choir from Jackson, Mississippi. It was a song about salvation, about overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, about somehow continuing to live in the shadow of death and the depths of despair. The song gave me strength, or at least enough to get through the next minute, the next hour, and, soon, the next day. I would sing to my boys all the time and would ask them if I sounded like what they heard on the radio. They always said yes.
Still, I didn’t want to see anyone or hear any news about the events in Sanford, Florida. Most of all, I never wanted to go to Sanford, and my feelings about the town were so strong that I made a vow, a promise to myself: I’m never going to Sanford, I told myself over and over again. Never, never, never going to Sanford.
Alone at home I prayed and cried, prayed and cried. I just wanted Trayvon’s body to be returned home so we could give him a proper homegoing service and burial.
Tracy would call to update me on the latest problems and roadblocks. He couldn’t identify the body, couldn’t visit the body, couldn’t get the body released in order to bring the body home. And, of course, there had been no arrest of the man who had killed our son, the neighborhood watch captain whose identity, at that point, I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
“They’re not giving me any information,” Tracy kept telling me, except that the police had told him they were probably never going to arrest this neighborhood watch captain, even though he’d admitted shooting Trayvon and they had the gun he’d used to shoot him.
I would listen to what Tracy had to tell me. But he seemed worlds away.
“Anyway, I’m never going to Sanford,” I would reply. “You need to straighten everything out, and find out what happened. Because I’m never going there, never going to Sanford.”
I managed to pull myself out of bed and out of my room for my son’s funeral.
The sun was shining, but it was a dark day. For me, the darkest. The day was just a blur. I don’t remember most of it, except for one image, which kept returning to me again and again over the days that followed: my son lying dead in his casket, in his white suit with his light blue tie, almost with a smirk on his face, as if to tell me, “I’m gone from Earth, Mom, but I’m okay.” As if he were trying to comfort me like he always did. As if he were saying, “I’ve got it, Cupcake.”
After the funeral, I managed to get out of the house to visit my pastor, Arthur Jackson III at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. Pastor Jackson knew Trayvon. Trayvon was a member of the church and the youth ministry, and he was learning to run the video cameras that record the Sunday services that we would attend. Trayvon got involved and started attending more because of the youth minister, Reverend Dwayne Fudge, Sr. So now I found myself going there for strength and comfort. My faith and trust in God were unbreakable. They were the only things unbroken in me. But I believed I was in a spiritual crisis.
I was ushered into his office, and he immediately hugged me in greeting. I’m sure I looked like a nervous wreck. Later, Pastor Jackson would tell me that he’d been expecting someone weeping out of control, mad, shouting profanity or expletives, but I wasn’t there to blame God—I never blame God—I was just desperately seeking help, somehow to make sense of this.
For some reason, I had started visualizing my own mind like a puzzle that had been put together and once formed a clear picture, not perfect, but one that made sense. Now that puzzle was broken and in disarray, and I could not find a way to put the pieces together.
“I know the pieces are there, but I can’t see the image,” I told Pastor Jackson as I sat across from him at his desk. Now I started crying and trembling, and my hands were shaking and my voice cracking, and I could barely speak.
“I have one son about to graduate from college,” I said, referring to Jahvaris. “And another son who was about to graduate from high school,” I said, referring to Trayvon.
I was having trouble keeping the thread. “I just feel like I’m just not myself, like I’m not me,” I continued. “It just doesn’t feel like this should be happening…” I tried to say more but kept having to stop when I would break down crying. “I don’t want to lose my mind.
“I keep thinking about my oldest son, Jahvaris,” I told my pastor. “I don’t want him to someday say, ‘I lost my brother to gun violence and then my mother lost her mind.’ ”
He put his hand on my forearm.
“These trials and tribulations that you’re going through won’t make you who you are; it will reveal who you are,” he told me. “It’s not going to make you strong; it’s going to reveal the strength you have. It’s not going to make your character; it’s going to reveal it. The strength you have is already inside of you, and this tragic event is going to reveal it.”
He came around from behind his desk and sat beside me, and we talked some more. I found myself feeling calm, even feeling some flicker of strength returning to me, just from the conversation. I come from a long line of strong women, I remembered, and I knew I was strong, had been strong all of my life. Even when I didn’t feel strong, I told myself, I am strong. And so I became strong. But you never know how strong you are until you are tested. And now I faced the ultimate test for any mother.
When I was done he prayed for me. Then we embraced each other and I just cried on his shoulder.
I walked out feeling better, still broken, but better, still far from whole, but stronger. I left knowing that I was going to someday get up out of my purple bedroom. Just not yet. I still didn’t know how to get back to the person that I was. I knew that my life would forever change because of what happened to Trayvon. I just didn’t know how to get back into life and find whatever my new “normal” life might be. I felt I would never know anything even close to happiness again.
Finally my sister, my cousin, and one of my nephews got me out of the house with a trick: they told me they just wanted to take me for a drive. So I pulled myself together, came out of my room, and climbed into my sister’s Camry, expecting a quick loop through the streets around our house and
then back to bed. Before I knew it, we passed one of my favorite restaurants: Red Lobster.
“I’m hungry; let’s stop here,” my sister said.
Before I could object, we were pulling into the parking lot and, soon, sitting at a table. Just when the waitress brought the menus, my cellphone rang.
It was Tracy and the attorney Benjamin Crump.
“You need to come to Sanford,” Tracy began.
“Never, never, never,” I replied, just as I’d already told him a million times: I am never going to Sanford, Florida, where my son was shot and killed.
“If we’re going to get the nation to listen to us, if we’re going to try to open people’s eyes to Trayvon’s death, then both of us have to do it,” said Tracy. “Both of us have to speak to the media. Both of us have to do television and newspaper interviews together.”
“I’m never going to Sanford!” I repeated.
He passed the phone to Crump, and he started saying something about the 911 tapes from the night Trayvon was killed. Tracy heard the tapes, Crump said, and they had “evidence unlocking what happened that night in Sanford,” a blow-by-blow of the shooting. However, the police wouldn’t release the tapes, even though Crump and his associates had filed official papers demanding the 911 tapes be released.
I got up from the table with my cellphone and went outside into the Red Lobster parking lot.
Tracy got back on the phone, repeating that it was important that I come to Sanford, to speak to the media with him, to demand the release of the 911 tapes and shine a light on what happened to our son. I didn’t understand why he needed me to speak to the media. That was not me. It was my sister, not me, who sang in the church choir; my sister who’d come up to testify before the congregation. Not me. Not Sybrina. Sybrina was a mother and not someone who had anything to say into a microphone. And, anyway, I had been pretty clear, I’m never going to Sanford.
“You handle it,” I said.
Then he said something that immediately lifted me out of Stage 1 of the grieving process—Denial and Isolation—and immediately propelled me into Stage 2:
Anger.
“They’re not going to arrest him,” Tracy said, meaning the police weren’t going to arrest the man who shot our son. “And we have to get the word out to the media about that—”
I cut him off. “What do you mean they’re not going to arrest him?!” I asked. “They have the person who killed Trayvon. They have the weapon. Why aren’t they going to arrest him?”
“They have this Stand Your Ground law,” Tracy said, explaining the law. I didn’t understand it then, but surely do now. How could that law apply to this case? I thought. With a seventeen-year-old armed with only a bag of candy and a can of iced tea?
I felt my strength returning, felt the old Sybrina rising up within me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m coming.”
I hung up the phone and marched back into the restaurant and told everyone what happened. And we left. Immediately. Drove home. Packed some clothes. And just like that we were all on the road—my sister, my cousin, my mother, and me—within a couple of hours after the call.
I was leaving Denial and Isolation behind. I was going to stand up for my son. I was going to fight to get answers as to why he was killed. I was going to do whatever was necessary to make sure that his death would not be in vain.
I was angry.
And I was going to Sanford.
CHAPTER 6
Tracy
February 29, 2012–March 9, 2012
“You ever hear of Murphy’s Law?” Sanford Police Department detective Chris Serino asked the killer during a police interview on Wednesday, February 29, 2012.
I didn’t hear it till much later, but when I did, it gave me chills. Not because the killer was monstrous and violent, but because he was so composed, casual. So sure of his own victimhood, so indifferent to the life he’d taken.
“You ever hear of Murphy’s Law?”
“Yes sir,” the killer replied.
“Okay, that’s what happened. This person was not doing anything bad….You know the name of the person that night?”
“Tayvon.”
“Trayvon,” Detective Serino corrected him.
“Trayvon? Martin?” the killer asked.
“Trayvon Benjamin Martin. He was born in 1995, February the fifth. He was seventeen years old. An athlete probably. Somebody who was going to be in aeronautics. A kid with a future. A kid with folks that care. In his possession we found a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. And [twenty-two] dollars in cash. Not the goon.”
“Goons” were what they called the gang members based in and around Sanford and Orlando, Florida. The detective continued his questioning.
“Um, you have any prior training in law enforcement at all?”
“Just the law books,” he said.
“Constitution law,” said Serino. “Okay, but as far as identifying people and stuff like that, as far as what to look for…”
The killer told him that there had been a PowerPoint presentation at a neighborhood watch event.
“Okay, I wasn’t privy to that,” said Serino. “But if you guys continue neighborhood watch, typically speaking at nighttime the [criminal] garb is black on black with a black hoodie. Now, this guy had a dark gray hoodie. It was dark but his pants were beige. Not quite your, you know, prime suspect type.” After a discussion of previous burglary in the community, and what the shooter said Trayvon was doing on the night he was killed, Serino said, “You know you are going to come under a lot of scrutiny over this, correct? Okay, the profiling aspect of the whole thing. Had this person been white, would you have felt the same way?”
“Yes,” he said.
I was waiting for Sybrina in Sanford, Florida, but it wasn’t the Sanford I knew before Trayvon’s death, the Sanford of weekend visits with my girlfriend, Brandy, and her young son, Chad. That Sanford was gone for me, forever. Now Sanford was a battleground.
We never wanted Trayvon’s death to become a racial issue. Soon, people of all different races would come to support us. And people of all races would be against us. That’s just the nature of life. Not everybody’s going to agree with you, and not everybody’s going to disagree with you. Benjamin Crump did his job in making the case in the media that there might be racism behind the shooting and the lack of an arrest. But for us, from day one we wanted our message to be: It’s not about race. It’s about the senseless killing of an unarmed kid and the injustice of the Sanford Police Department, as I would later say in a hearing, which we felt was trying to sweep it under the rug.
I knew, as Crump himself said, race was the elephant in the room: a white man—or at least a white-identified man—killed a black kid. So it wasn’t surprising to me that so much of the coverage approached it from that angle. It worried me, though. Because we knew that once it became a racial issue, once it was more than the plain and simple act of a kid walking home shot dead—people were going to be divided. Once you throw race into the equation, mothers in the white community that could identify with Sybrina’s pain of losing a child are left to choose: am I loyal to my motherhood or am I loyal to my race? They would likely never put it in those terms themselves, but I’d lived through enough events where at some point people stop caring about the truth or the complications; all they care about is whether you’re on team Black or team White.
That’s why we didn’t want Trayvon’s death to have racial implications. We were after justice and wanted to build a groundswell of support, not have Trayvon’s death become another point of division. Aside from losing racist supporters, who we probably wouldn’t get or want anyway, we were worried about people of goodwill getting turned off because they were tired of the endless battles around race, just at the moment when we wanted them to get engaged. But we may have been naïve to think that it was ever under our control.
And personally, I knew racism was part of the story from the day I heard what happened to my son and how la
x the police and prosecutors were about the killing. We would soon discover that the killer had called the police forty-six times since 2004.
The truth is, we were battling a system that allowed young African American boys to be killed without any consequences. So race would become an issue. Another reason race became an issue was because of where the shooting happened: Sanford, Florida.
Natalie Jackson, the Orlando-based attorney, was a gift. She not only knew Sanford; she was born and raised there and had all of the local knowledge of the town. What Natalie Jackson didn’t know about Sanford, her mother did, because she is the town’s unofficial historian, especially when it comes to its African American history.
Her name is Francis Oliver. Now seventy-three, Ms. Oliver is a longtime Sanford resident, teacher, activist, and historian who has lived in the city since she was four. One night, I joined our team of attorneys at Ms. Oliver’s house for the first of many dinners. She lived in a beautiful, large family home in the Goldsboro community of Sanford, and that night Ms. Oliver, in her long, white dreadlocks and the Christmas apron she wears year-round, cooked us all some soul food: fried chicken, collard greens, and homemade pound cake for dessert. When we sat down, she told me, as she would later tell Sybrina, all about Sanford and its history.
I already knew about Jackie Robinson, the black baseball great who was refused a hotel room in Sanford in 1946, and escorted out of the dugout before his game started after he came to the city for spring training.
“A whole lot of stuff had happened before that,” said Ms. Oliver, before launching into the story of Sanford. Originally Sanford was divided into three towns, Sanford, Sanford Heights, and an all-black township called Goldsboro, which in 1891 became the second incorporated African American town in the state of Florida. “Goldsboro had its own identity,” said Ms. Oliver. “Its own post office, its own jail, and its own city council. But the city of Sanford, which was mostly white, felt like it was boxed in. It couldn’t grow north because of Lake Monroe, and it couldn’t grow south because of another town called Sanford Heights, and it couldn’t go east because east was nothing but marshland. And it couldn’t go west because that’s where Goldsboro was, sitting high and dry.”
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