Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the crosshairs of someone who crosses the line.”

  —

  At our March 9 press conference, Natalie Jackson said, “What’s so important about us finding out the criminal history of George Michael Zimmerman? It is important because it gives you the indication of, one, you have a person with a propensity toward violence. Or at least the appearance of a propensity toward violence.” She said that the police had investigated Trayvon within twenty-four hours of his being shot. But even though the Sanford police had sophisticated computers and databases “linked to the FBI record searches,” they didn’t seem to have investigated the man who killed our son. “In this case, one of two things happened,” she said. “Either an investigation of [the shooter] was never done, or, two, an investigation was done and there was a decision made to withhold this information from the family and the public. Now, why? That’s the question. That’s the big elephant in the room.”

  Crump once again showed the media the killer’s arrest record and said, “We just simply went to the Orange County clerk of court public records,” he said. He stated the killer’s name and birthday and said, “Charged with a third-degree felony in 2005. Resisting officer with violence. Charged with battery on a law enforcement officer. Third-degree felony….And, so the police had this! So they knew about his propensity of violence. But yet just chose to not even consider that when they lied to this family saying he was squeaky-clean.”

  Later, at a press conference, Sanford police chief Bill Lee responded. According to a local television news report, “Lee admitted on Monday that his investigators took Zimmerman’s word that he had a clean record and didn’t find out about the arrest until days after the shooting.” Lee had insisted that they were doing a thorough investigation, but we wondered why it had taken so long for them to mention this huge piece of information.

  Although the charges against the killer were eventually dropped, Crump told the media his propensity toward violence remained.

  “They should have arrested George Zimmerman,” he said.

  A reporter interrupted. “Miss Sybrina,” she said. “We haven’t heard much from you. This is your son. What is your reaction to the fact that your son is no longer here and was shot and killed by a man with at least a history of violence?”

  And with that, Sybrina Fulton, standing beside me in her dark business suit and purple blouse—always purple, for strength and positive energy—began to shake, began to cry, and, finally, for the first time in public in this case, began to speak.

  —

  When I pressed the police, begging to know why they hadn’t made an arrest, they claimed that the person they brought in that night was clean—“squeaky-clean,” as they had called him—and that he had taken criminal justice classes, which seemed to give him some kind of credibility.

  But the streets were offering different information. The news reports were multiplying—and intensifying. Reuters reported, “A rumor that superiors had quashed an investigator’s intent to charge Zimmerman had already made the rounds in the black community, said Velma Williams, the only black member of the five-person Sanford City Commission. ‘People were getting suspicious, saying we knew that was going to happen based on history,’ Williams said in an interview.”

  After our first press conference with Sybrina on March 9, Ms. Williams went to the police chief’s office with a community activist. “We said, ‘Look, chief. Last time I was here I told you a train was coming down the tracks and it was going 50 miles an hour,’ ” she told Reuters. “I said, ‘It’s going 150 miles an hour now. And it doesn’t have any brakes.’ ”

  It was a train, all right, a very fast train, gathering steam, and we were on the back of it, and we would soon be stoking the engine with our media appearances. One show after another. Until you could feel the momentum gathering beneath our feet as we moved forward with our attorneys, our media expert, and the growing number of people who came to our side in support—particularly when it came to the 911 tapes from the night Trayvon was shot.

  We knew there were 911 tapes. I had already heard parts of them at the police station the day after my son was shot. But rumors were now going around Sanford about the parts of the tapes that I hadn’t heard. Sanford is a small city and everyone knows one another. Some of the rumors traced back to people who supposedly worked at the 911 call center—or so the attorney Natalie Jackson and her mother, Ms. Oliver, had heard. There were also tapes of nonemergency calls that had been made that night, which included calls between the killer and the police, which some people in Sanford were now talking about. Those tapes apparently revealed that the neighborhood watch volunteer was told not to follow Trayvon and to wait for the police to arrive before doing anything—while the neighborhood watch captain told the police that he was following the suspect. He supposedly emphasized two facts: the suspect seemed suspicious and he looked like he was black.

  These rumors seemed to be turning the story of our son’s shooting from a mystery into a conspiracy. People were saying that the tapes might show that the killer racially profiled our son, that our son was followed and shot because he was black. This is what the attorney Natalie Jackson told Ben Crump and what Crump told me.

  Now more than ever we realized we needed to hear those 911 tapes in full, for ourselves. We had to take our fight for the tapes to the next level.

  We continued our strategy of using the media to bring as much light and heat to the case as we could. In and out of airplanes and cars. One television studio after another. The strategy was starting to pay off. As the news spread about Trayvon’s shooting, more people began to come to our aide. These were people we didn’t know, and some of whom we would never know. But they kept offering support.

  Among the first was a law student named Kevin Cunningham. He was a thirty-one-year-old redheaded Irish American studying law at historically black Howard University. “The only race I believe in is the human race,” Kevin Cunningham would say when people expressed surprise that a white man played such a key role in the case. He didn’t know Trayvon and he didn’t know us personally, but he had been drawn to the story through media accounts. Cunningham first heard about our case on a Howard University fraternity website that ran a short piece that began, “A young black kid with a bag of Skittles was gunned down by a neighborhood watch volunteer on a wet Central Florida night.” He read the piece and felt himself becoming increasingly outraged by the details. He left the Howard site and logged on to Change.org, a website where people can start petitions for whatever causes they choose.

  Cunningham started a Change.org petition: PROSECUTE THE KILLER OF 17-YEAR-OLD TRAYVON MARTIN.

  Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi

  Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee

  US Attorney General Eric Holder

  Florida’s 4th District State’s Attorney Angela Corey

  I’m writing you today to call for justice for Trayvon Martin and his family.

  Trayvon Martin was only 17 years old when he was gunned down by the Neighborhood Watch captain George Zimmerman. All Trayvon did was go to the store to get his brother some Skittles.

  According to police, George Zimmerman admitted to the shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin. Why has he not been charged and his case been handed over to prosecutors?

  Trayvon Martin was unarmed when he was shot by Zimmerman. All he had in his hands was some candy when he was followed and approached by Zimmerman—who ignored instructions from police not to confront the young man.

  Please uphold justice.

  Sincerely,

  It was a long shot that an online petition would actually move the case forward, but it sparked a huge buzz online, and the signatures started adding up. On the first day, a hundred people signed the petition, but the numbers kept climbing: two hundred, then three hundred, then a thousand, then two thousand and more. Some of t
he signatures were friends of Trayvon’s and others were friends of ours. But most, like Kevin Cunningham, didn’t know us, only knew the story. Within a few days, the number of people who had signed Kevin Cunningham’s petition demanding justice and an arrest had grown to ten thousand, and Change.org and Kevin Cunningham transferred the petition to my name and Sybrina’s so that we could take the lead on the campaign.

  Within two weeks, a thousand signatures would be added to the petition every few minutes, making it the most successful petition in Change.org history at that time. It would soon have two million signatures. It didn’t suddenly lead to an arrest, but it kept growing the sense of outrage over the lack of one. The train that Velma Williams had said was going 150 miles an hour was now speeding even faster.

  Anger was also building. Every day more and more. A rally in Sanford’s Fort Mellon Park was planned for March 22. People from Sanford and around the country were calling the mayor’s office, insisting on an immediate arrest. The NAACP was demanding that Sanford Police Department chief Bill Lee, who said that there was not sufficient probable cause to make an arrest, be immediately fired. And US representative Corrine Brown, an African American woman whose district included the city of Sanford, was telling the media, “We want him arrested as we speak now!”

  CHAPTER 7

  Sybrina

  March 9, 2012–March 16, 2012

  We left Miami for Sanford at around eight P.M., riding in a Toyota Camry belonging to my cousin Penny, whom I call “Sugg” because she’s so sweet. I sat in the backseat with my mother and my sister while Jahvaris sat in front, listening to music through his headphones.

  Along the way, my cellphone exploded: call after call—friends, family, and media.

  “We’re on our way,” I would tell the friends and family. “I’m okay. Just pray for us.”

  After driving four hours from Miami, we pulled up to our hotel in Lake Mary, a small Orlando suburb ten minutes from Sanford. The feelings I’d held off during the car trip returned now that we were so close to Sanford, and I was dropped again into a deep gloom. Tracy came to meet me in the lobby of the hotel. I was quiet; he was pushing me to join him in action, which meant taking our tragedy—and our grief—to the media.

  “C’mon, we gotta do this,” Tracy kept telling me.

  And I kept saying, “I’m going home. I can’t do this.”

  But I stayed, and soon we were a team for Trayvon. People thought we were still together as a couple because they never saw the disconnect that most divorced couples have. We were now drawn together in our love for our sons and our fight for justice for the one who had died. Just as we had always done, we had to put everything that separated us as a married couple aside, to do the best we could for our kids.

  There was one more thing I had to put aside: blame. I could have blamed Tracy for even taking him to Sanford, where he was shot and killed. I could have been angry at him for what happened, just as I was the time when Jahvaris came home with a broken toe after a few weeks with Tracy one summer. I yelled at Tracy then, “I can’t believe this! I send him off with you and now his toe is hanging off to the side!”

  But I knew how much he loved his sons, knew how he loves all children, how he acted around them, so I never felt that Tracy didn’t do his best—or that he didn’t care. I let thoughts of blame go.

  It was after midnight by the time we finished talking, and I went up to my room. I said my prayers—I plead the blood of Jesus to cover me and my family. The alarm rang just after dawn the next morning, and we were up and driving, following Tracy’s directions to the Retreat at Twin Lakes, to Brandy’s townhouse, to the place I’d imagined a thousand times in my mind since that first phone call from Tracy two weeks ago. Tracy and the attorneys Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson were waiting for us there.

  We turned a corner, and, for the first time, I could see the community where my son was killed. The Retreat was a nice, clean development, but beside the big black entrance gate I saw something that shook me: a memorial. I had to look twice to see that it was a memorial for my son. There were footballs, teddy bears, signs, cards, and letters with the name “Trayvon” on them. Everything in tribute to my angel. That memorial—that outpouring from strangers—touched me deeply in a way the place did not. The Retreat was the crime scene, but the memorial was a gift. Strangers telling us through these cards and small tokens of childhood that they knew that the body on the ground was a boy, a human, a life. And that his killing wouldn’t be forgotten.

  Soon, the memorial would be gone. The city of Sanford, or the people who ran the Retreat, didn’t want it at the gate as a reminder of what happened.

  Once we were inside the townhouse, I didn’t look outside—and I wasn’t about to go into that backyard to see where Trayvon was shot and killed. I was doing my best to keep my focus, and my composure.

  In the living room, I met Ben Crump and Natalie Jackson. Crump—which is what we called him from the day we met him—was compassionate, professional, and always dressed in a suit and tie. But I could tell he was country. Not country in a bad way. More like Southern-gentleman country. He and Natalie were down-to-earth people who made us feel comfortable, and I immediately had confidence in them. That night, and every day I saw him, he kept saying over and over again that we needed to do media, to get our message out.

  “Sybrina, this case is going to be swept under the rug,” he would say. “They’re not going to arrest George Zimmerman. People want to hear from the parents. People need to hear from you! About how you felt about him, the man who murdered your son, not being arrested. We have to get the story out. You have to tell the story of what happened to Trayvon.”

  —

  A thing that kept rising up in our tragedy was the issue of race. People were already comparing Trayvon’s death to Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old from Chicago visiting family in Money, Mississippi, where he was lynched on August 28, 1955, after being accused of flirting with a white woman. But at first I felt that our case had little to do with race, at least as far as whether people would find the story sympathetic or not. When I hear a child has drowned, I don’t care what race or nationality that kid was. I don’t say, “Oh! Was it a black kid?” It doesn’t matter. A child has lost a life. When I hear about the death of a child, I think about the parents, the family, the siblings, the friends who are grieving the loss. Who cares about race in the face of that kind of tragedy and injustice? But the more I found out about my son’s killer, the more I started to wonder: if it wasn’t race, what else could it be?

  Those thoughts were racing through my head the first time I went to the government offices in Sanford. Crump said he wanted us to go with him to file the paperwork demanding the release of the 911 tapes. So my sister, my mother, Jahvaris, and I piled into one car, with Tracy and the attorneys in another, a two-car caravan. We exited the Florida Turnpike and took a smaller road toward downtown, where we were greeted with a sign by the side of the road—“Welcome to Sanford”—whose bland cheerfulness chilled me.

  We drove into Sanford’s little downtown and went into the clerk’s office where Crump filed the papers demanding the release of the tapes. Tracy and I didn’t actually have to be there, but we wanted to be there to show our support. When we came outside the courthouse, the media was waiting for us. I was still raw, numb, and unsure of what to say. I was strong enough to get out of bed, get out of my house, get out of Miami, and travel to Sanford, but I still wasn’t strong enough to speak to the media, and the public, about what had happened to my son.

  But there I was, standing in front of the clerk of courts building on Friday, March 9, 2012, just twelve days after my son’s death. The media gathered around us in a semicircle. Blinding camera lights. Stares from a dozen strangers. Everyone waiting for us to speak.

  “My son left Sanford, Florida, in a body bag, while George Zimmerman went home to sleep in his own bed,” said Tracy.

  It was my turn to speak, but my voice was deep inside me, a
nd it was hard to get it out. I was visibly trembling, and when I finally spoke, my voice came out high-pitched and at times unclear. My mother, my sister, and Jahvaris stood behind me for support. But I was adrift. I was on the verge of tears and a breakdown right there in Sanford’s courthouse square.

  “Um…” I started. “It was very difficult and it is very difficult for me to deal with.”

  I gasped for breath, but few words followed.

  “I don’t understand why we haven’t gotten the answers from the police department,” I said. “I don’t understand, and I don’t understand why my baby…” At this point, I lost my train of thought. Then began again. “Why this guy was not arrested.” Now I was crying. “I don’t understand. As a mother, my heart is broken.”

  Sobbing now, big tears rolling down my face. Gasping for breath. Flailing.

  “My heart…hurts,” I said. “I don’t understand. He was just a kid. He was just a baby.”

  I shook my head back and forth, and Jahvaris leaned in and kissed the back of my shoulder for support.

  A reporter asked, “What’s the hardest part for you when you wake up every morning knowing your son is not around?”

  I wiped my eyes and tried to regain my composure. “Just having to deal with him not being with me,” I said. “Just having to deal with him not smiling. Just having to deal with him not trying to help me and take care of me. It’s just very…”

  I tried to wipe the tears away. A reporter interrupted. “Ma’am, knowing the circumstances of this, was the man who pulled the trigger a vigilante that night?”

  Tracy answered for me.

  “I honestly think he was,” Tracy said. “He approached him for no apparent reason. It was cold outside. My son had on a hoodie. Does that give you the right to approach an individual just because he has a hoodie on and it was raining?