Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  She said the police officer told her, “You have nothing to worry about.” Still concerned for her safety and the safety of her children, she called again later that day and was told again not to worry. “He’s harmless,” she said the officer told her. “He’s not going to hurt you.” She said she called back again. “I said, ‘I firmly believe this was not self-defense,’ and he finally says, ‘If you feel that strongly about it, I can give you the number of the lead detective.’ ”

  Finally, she was given the number of Detective Chris Serino and left messages. “I made multiple calls on Monday, left a message for Chris [Serino],” she said. An appointment was eventually made for nine P.M. that Thursday, March 1, but instead of going by her house in the evening, as they had planned, Serino called to take their statements by phone, and then suggested that Mary and her roommate come in to the station for a recorded statement, which they did on Friday, March 2.

  She told him how shaken up they were, noting that she lived at the end of the row of townhouses where Trayvon had fallen dead. “We only heard one gunshot….There was no physical fighting going on….I heard nothing but a little kid, scared to death and crying. I feel in my heart, and I wouldn’t say this if I honestly didn’t believe it….I honestly do believe that he intended for this kid to die.

  “Multiple people had my phone number, and not one person called me back,” Mary continued at the press conference. “My point was that I feel it was not self-defense, because I heard the crying and if it was Zimmerman that was crying, Zimmerman would have continued crying after the shot went off.”

  Selma Mora Lamilla added that she was in the kitchen making coffee when she heard the night explode with violence right outside her window on what would have normally been a quiet Sunday night. “I heard the whine of a kid,” she said. “I ran to my back porch and I look at this guy on top of the body, and I ask him, ‘What’s going on?’ ” she said, adding that the killer didn’t answer her until after the third time she asked and then only replied, flatly, “Just call the police.”

  “That’s exactly what we told the police five days after this happened,” said Selma Mora Lamilla, beginning to cry. “I’m just trying to help. This is not something that you see every single day. To me it has been so hard realizing that it was a body. I have never seen a [dead] body in my life.”

  I stood behind these two women, mothers who’d bravely joined our cause. I was moved by their courage, but every detail of the shooting, every mention of my son’s last cries, tore at me. I stood up but felt like collapsing.

  —

  That same day, three days before our demand for the release of the 911 tapes was supposed to be decided upon by a judge, the city manager, Norton Bonaparte, called Crump and told him that the city was going to release the tapes voluntarily. The mayor would later say he did it to keep the peace and avoid any violence that might come from protesters or others who were feeling anger around the city’s stonewalling—although violence had already been unleashed and blood spilled in his city. We were upset and angry. But the talk of violence seemed premature to me. We hadn’t heard any talk of violence at this point, and if we had, we certainly wouldn’t have encouraged it.

  Our press conference had just ended. I felt empty, drained, suddenly very tired. It was getting dark, and we were preparing to drive back to Miami. Then one of the attorneys’ cellphones rang. It was the city manager.

  “Come to the mayor’s office to listen to the tapes,” he said.

  We immediately drove over to Sanford’s City Hall, which houses the mayor’s and city manager’s offices. City Manager Norton Bonaparte met us at the back door and took us to the mayor’s office. We were told that Chief Lee wanted to say something to us. We said we would rather not speak to him, and we asked that the uniformed police that were in the building keep clear of the area where we would be listening to the tapes. We didn’t want to see them, either. These were the men who allowed the killer of our son to go home and sleep in his own bed while Trayvon left the crime scene in a body bag headed for the morgue.

  It was somewhere between six and seven P.M. when we walked into the mayor’s office: Tracy, Jahvaris, and I and other family members, our attorneys Crump and Jackson, and our media consultant, Ryan Julison. We met Mayor Jeff Triplett and City Manager Norton Bonaparte for the first time.

  “Hello, I’m Mayor Jeff Triplett,” he said, greeting us. He seemed sincere and aware of how difficult this was going to be for us. “Everybody come in and have a seat.”

  We filed into a row of chairs set up behind his desk, facing his desktop computer. The mayor expressed his condolences and told us that he was going to play the tapes for us and then allow us to rewind and listen to them for ourselves. “I will personally play the tapes through my computer for you and you can listen as many times as you want in my office and take as much time as you need,” he told us.

  “You know, I’m a father. I can’t imagine the pain and anguish of what you are getting ready to hear,” he said.

  The mayor hit PLAY and we began listening. My heart felt heavy, and I braced myself as if for a hurricane of pain. But I had to listen. The 911 recordings were on his computer, so we could easily play them as many times as we wanted. As soon as the first recording started, I thought even one time might be more than I could handle.

  “Sanford Police Department,” said the male dispatcher.

  “Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, it’s Retreat View Circle,” came the voice of the neighborhood watch volunteer. “The best address I can give you is one-eleven Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he is just walking around, looking about.”

  “Okay, and this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?” the dispatcher asked.

  “He looks black.”

  “Did you see what he was wearing?”

  “Yeah, a dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie, and either jeans or sweatpants, and white tennis shoes. He’s here now, he’s just staring.”

  “Okay, he is just walking around the area?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Looking at all the houses,” said the watchman. “Now he’s just staring at me.”

  “It’s one-one-one-one Retreat View or one-eleven?” asked the dispatcher.

  “That’s the clubhouse,” said the watchman.

  “He is near the clubhouse right now?”

  “Yeah. Now he’s coming towards me,” he said. “He’s got his hand in his waistband. And he’s a black male.”

  The dispatcher asked, “How old would you say he looks?”

  “Late teens….Something is wrong with him. Yup, he’s coming to check me out; he’s got something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is.”

  “Just let me know if he does anything, okay?” said the dispatcher.

  “How long until you get an officer over here?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got ’em on the way; just let me know if this guy does anything else.”

  “Okay,” said the watchman. “These assholes, they always get away.”

  I could feel the blood rising to my face and something roiling in the pit of my stomach. These assholes. The words stung. The watchman began giving directions to the dispatcher: “When you come to the clubhouse…you go in straight through the entrance and then you make a left…”

  After giving more directions, he suddenly said, “Shit, he’s running.”

  “He’s running?” asked the dispatcher. “Which way is he running?”

  “Down towards the, uhhh, other entrance of the neighborhood…,” said the watchman.

  We could hear the neighborhood watch captain breathing heavily on the tape and the wind whistling through his cellphone, and we could imagine Trayvon. Running. For his life.

  “Which entrance is that that he’s heading towards?”

  “The back entrance…Fucking punks,” he said under his breath.

  “Are you
following him?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Yeah,” said the neighborhood watchman.

  “Okay, we don’t need you to do that,” said the dispatcher.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “All right, sir, what is your name?” asked the dispatcher.

  “George…He ran.”

  “All right, George, what’s your last name?”

  “Zimmerman.”

  I’d heard his name before, of course, and I had seen his picture. But now, hearing his voice in those final moments of my son’s life, I could finally really see the man, and imagined him following Trayvon.

  “All right, George,” the dispatcher said, “we do have them on the way. Do you want to meet with the officer when they get out there?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, and more directions followed. The dispatcher asked the watchman if he lived in the area, and he said, “Yeah…”

  “What’s your apartment number?”

  “It’s a home. It’s 1950. Oh, crap. I don’t want to give it all out. I don’t know where this kid is.”

  Back and forth we went on the opening section of the recording—playing it again and again as if we might be able to rewind the tape all the way back to the beginning and, through some miracle, bring Trayvon back.

  It was agonizing, but I knew it was important. We were finally able to hear exactly what happened on that rainy night in Sanford. So we all leaned in close to the computer speaker: my family, our attorneys, Tracy, and I, all huddled around the mayor’s desk, bracing ourselves—and praying for God to give us the strength—to listen to Trayvon die.

  At the same time, I kept an eye on the mayor’s office door, knowing that if things got too intense, if hearing my son’s voice in the final seconds before the bullet ended everything became too much to bear, I could get out of that office, into the hallway, out of the building, out of Sanford if I had to.

  What came next were the 911 calls from the neighbors, the calls where we could hear in the background the truth and the terror of what happened that night.

  “911,” the female dispatcher said on the first tape. “Do you need police, fire, or medical?”

  A woman’s voice came on the line. “Um, maybe both,” she said. “I’m not sure. There’s just someone screaming outside.”

  “Okay, what’s the address that they’re near?” asked the dispatcher. But the address couldn’t be heard on the tape. “And is it a male or female?”

  “It sounds like a male,” said the neighbor.

  “And you don’t know why?” asked the dispatcher.

  “I don’t know why; I think they’re yelling ‘help,’ but I don’t know. Just send someone quick, please.”

  “Does he look hurt to you?” asked the dispatcher, and we could hear the screams in the background.

  “I can’t see him. I don’t want to go out there. I don’t know what’s going on, so…”

  “Tell them to come now!” a male voice said in the background.

  “They’re sending,” said the caller.The scream was louder now. A shriek.

  “So you think he’s yelling ‘help’?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All right, what is your—”

  I heard Trayvon’s last, long agonizing cries, loud and raspy, the voice of a teenage boy in despair. The voice of Trayvon. We knew without a doubt. It was Trayvon.

  Then we heard the gunshot. A single, loud, echoing pop from the neighborhood watch volunteer’s pistol that went through my baby’s hoodie, his chest, and his heart.

  “Just, there’s gunshots,” said the neighbor.

  Now Tracy had taken over the controls of the computer. He began playing the tape over and over again, the scream, again and again. Each time it became clearer. We could hear someone yelling, shrieking, howling, and calling out what sounded like a long, drawn-out cry: “Help!” I knew it was Trayvon. I was 100 percent sure that it was Trayvon. I don’t care who claimed it wasn’t, and lots of people would say it was the killer’s voice, and not my son’s voice on that tape. A mother knows her son’s voice; a mother knows her son’s screams; a mother listens to her baby’s voice every day of his life. A mother knows. And I knew: that was Trayvon, and I didn’t have to tell everybody who was in that room that it was Trayvon’s voice. They knew it was Trayvon’s voice, too. And I started crying, bawling, big tears rolling down my face in uncontrollable sobs. I eyed that door, that escape. But before I ran out, I looked around the room. And I could see that everybody else in the mayor’s office was crying, too. My sister, crying. My cousin, crying. Tracy, crying.

  Even the mayor of Sanford, Florida, was very emotional. He was really shaken, almost as shaken as we were. From his reaction, it seemed like he was just hearing the tapes for the very first time. I could tell that what he’d heard had not only touched him; it had shaken him. He knows something is wrong, that something is not right with this case, I thought.

  “Did you just say gunshots?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Just one…”

  The neighbor, also a mother, then apparently turned to her son, saying, “Get in here now,” and I felt my heart break again at the sound of a mother instinctively protecting her son. Because with that single, static-muffled, echoing pop, I knew that my own son was dead.

  “I don’t hear him yelling anymore; do you hear anything?” the dispatcher asked.

  And that was it for me. I screamed. I sobbed. I ran. Through the mayor’s door and into the hallway, as if I could run all the way back into that night at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, and tell my son to “get down,” save him from that pop, that bullet, that gun. Save him from the killer. But I couldn’t, of course. So instead I collapsed on a couch in Sanford’s City Hall.

  —

  Crump came out to console me. My sister came out to comfort me. Even the mayor came out to check on me. Jeff Triplett was working for the city. He had to stand with his team. But the kindness he showed us made a big difference at that time. He’d not only let us listen to the tapes, he’d gone one step further. He saw the human side of our loss. He saw our case through the eyes of a parent. Not as a white parent, or a black parent. Just a parent.

  “I’m so very sorry for your family,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your son.”

  Tracy came outside to check on me, too, but then he returned to the mayor’s office, where he, Jahvaris, and the others continued to listen to the tapes, which, they started to notice, seemed to have been altered in some way. Phone numbers and addresses were redacted. There were gaps. It was obvious that somebody had edited the tapes. We would never know for sure what was missing. But at that moment, it was our best and maybe only evidence of what happened to Trayvon that night. So the others kept listening, hanging on to every word. Play, rewind, and then play again, listening to our son die again and again, determined to find the truth.

  That night I couldn’t sleep, just like most nights. But this night, as I prayed before going to bed, as I always did, I asked: “How could an adult shoot and kill an unarmed teenager, claim self-defense, and go home and sleep in their own bed?” Who could be so heartless?

  CHAPTER 8

  Tracy

  March 16, 2012–March 21, 2012

  The mayor’s office turned quiet for a moment. Sybrina had run out of the room, crying, and her sister and Jahvaris had followed her. I was alone with the lawyers, the mayor, Sybrina’s brother, and those 911 tapes. I wanted to take my time and listen to them, really listen to them. At that point, I knew that Tray was gone. I wanted to know why. So I sat at the mayor’s computer, playing the tapes, back and forth, back and forth, listening to every word.

  I moved from one tape to another, each one more heartbreaking than the last.

  I was now listening to a woman, frantic, like the other neighbors, about the gunshots that had erupted right outside her back porch. “There’s someone screaming outside…,” she said. �
�Yes, I heard a gunshot. Hurry up. There’s someone screaming—I just heard gunshots….Hurry up, they’re right outside my house….”

  Another tape, another frantic caller: “I think someone’s been shot!”

  “Where at?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Oh, my God!” was all she said back.

  “Where?” asked the dispatcher. “Why do you think someone’s been shot?”

  “Because they’re out in the backyard and a gun just went off and they said, ‘Call 911.’ Now there’s people coming with flashlights.”

  I could hear her speaking to what were surely her children, trying to protect them from the violence taking place right outside their back door, telling them, “Get inside, get inside, get inside.”

  Another neighbor, another female, came on the tape. “I’m looking out my back of my townhome and someone’s screaming ‘help’ and, I don’t know, I heard, like, a bang,” she said. “I’m looking out my window, like my backyard, and someone is yelling and screaming ‘help,’ and I heard like a pop noise and they’re both still out there right now, and I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now, you’re not the only person that’s calling,” the dispatcher reassured the caller. “We already have one officer on the scene and another on the way…”

  “Oh, my God!” she continued. “I see the person right now. I see him like walking….I don’t know what he did to this person. I can’t see, there’s a man walking with a flashlight right now….I don’t know what’s happening. Someone’s on the ground.”

  “You see someone laying on the ground?”

  “I don’t know, someone’s been shot,” said the neighbor. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Calm down, stay on the line with me. Like I said, we have an officer on scene…”

  “Oh, my God, they better hurry up. I don’t know if someone’s dead on the ground or something….I see out my back window, and…a sidewalk and grass and stuff…There’s a man who’s out there with a flashlight with a man who’s been wrestling…People are coming. I can see another gentleman with a flashlight. I don’t know if they’re police or not. Oh, my God, he shot the person. He just said he shot the person.”