Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  Passing through the metal detector, we would remove our shoes, belts, and any metal objects, and then proceed into the hallway beside the elevators to wait for the sheriff’s personnel who would bring us through the hallway and into the courtoom. We had to face the killer and his family every day in court. We had to walk through the same doors as they did, and down the same hallway. And of course we had to sit in the courtroom very close to where they sat.

  We all had security badges. They gave the killer and his family the same thing—the same badges, same parking spaces, same number of seats in the courtroom. Where does it say that the defendant in a murder case gets the same rights as the victim? I’m not sure about the answer to that question. And I’m sure there are good reasons to be fair. But I just had a strong feeling that if the defendant was black and the victim a white child, it might have gone a different way.

  The prosecutors rarely came to the small witness room that we’d been given for lunch and breaks and never asked us for input. They met with us prior to the trial, but the strategy was all theirs, for better or for worse.

  —

  Trial day number five would bring the testimony of an important observer to the actual event: witness number six, the 911 caller Jonathan Good. He worked in “finance,” he would tell the court, and was a resident at the Retreat at Twin Lakes on the night of Trayvon’s killing. He was one of the very few eyewitnesses who claimed to have actually seen the struggle between Trayvon and his killer, if for only a few seconds.

  He entered the courtroom, a young man in a white dress shirt and candy-striped necktie. He sat down, and under questions from de la Rionda he told his story. He said he was at home with his wife in the living room watching TV when he heard a “faint” noise coming from an area near the back of his house, followed a few minutes later by more noise.

  “The same noise,” Good said. “Just louder. It seemed like it was getting closer.”

  He stepped halfway out his sliding glass door, keeping one foot inside.

  “It looked like a tussle,” he said, and he thought it might be an attack involving a dog.

  “What’s going on?” he yelled into the darkness. “Stop it!”

  Then, he testified, he began to make out the shapes of two people on the ground, one on top of the other. He couldn’t see their faces, only the color of their clothing.

  “The color of clothing on top,” de la Rionda said. “What could you see?”

  “It was dark,” said Good, which would lead the jury to believe it was Trayvon, in his dark gray hoodie, on top.

  “How about the color of clothing on the bottom?”

  “I believe it was a light white or red,” he said, which was the color of the jacket the killer was wearing that night. Although he only saw “ten seconds max,” he also claimed the person on the bottom was lighter-skinned.

  He said that as the struggle moved “up to the concrete,” the person on top was “straddling” the other who was faceup below him. Good said it “looked like there were strikes being thrown, or punches being thrown,” but because of the lack of lighting he was unsure if what he saw were punches or the person on top holding the other down. What he was sure of was that he saw the arms of the person on top moving downward.

  If it was a fight, however, it must have been a short one. Rachel’s call with Tray got dropped at 7:15; the screams on the 911 call came a minute later.

  He heard someone yell “Help,” but couldn’t say “one hundred percent” whether it was the man on the top or the man on the bottom. He called 911. The prosecution played Good’s 911 call for the court. “Police, I just heard a shot right behind my house,” he said on the call. “They’re wrestling right in the back of my porch….The guy’s yelling help, and I’m not going outside…I’m pretty sure the guy’s dead out here. Holy shit!”

  Good had compared the “straddling” position of the person on top to a move made in mixed martial arts, saying, “It just looked like something I’d seen on TV before.”

  “Did you ever see the person on top pick up the person on bottom and slam them into the concrete?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Did you ever see the person on top slamming the person on bottom’s head on the concrete over and over and over?”

  “No,” he repeated.

  “Did you see at any time the person on top grab the person on the bottom’s head and actually slam it into the concrete?”

  “No,” he said again.

  Of course not, as this was a claim made by the killer, which we believed never happened.

  So much for the defense’s opening statement about the concrete being used as a “weapon,” I thought.

  —

  After showing exhibits of the crime scene, de la Rionda asked Good when he heard the gunshot in relation to making the 911 call. Good said that after stepping outside and hearing one or two cries for help, he returned inside to pick up his phone. As he was waiting for the dispatcher to pick up, he heard the gunshot.

  What de la Rionda said next after about forty minutes of questioning stunned us: “Thank you, I have no further questions at this time.” This was a witness saying that Trayvon was on top of his killer, attacking him, and the prosecution didn’t question how he could be so sure about the color of the people’s clothing on that dark and rainy night? I was beginning to feel like the prosecution was overconfident that the jury would connect the few clues they gave them, but I didn’t think they’d given them nearly enough to convict—they were making it harder to convict than it needed to be.

  That feeling deepened when O’Mara then began his cross-examination. Good admitted to O’Mara that he was reluctant to get involved in the case, and he had requested to remain anonymous. And he had remained anonymous to everyone except the police, prosecutors, and defense attorneys until now, with one exception: he had spoken to the media.

  “What you saw was the person on top in an MMA-style straddle position, correct?” O’Mara said.

  “Correct,” said Good.

  “That was further described, was it not, as being a ‘ground and pound?’ ”

  “Correct,” answered Good.

  “What is ‘ground and pound’ as you define it?”

  “The person on top being able to punch the person on bottom, but the person on bottom also has the chance to get out or punch the person on top. It’s back and forth,” said Good.

  Was this what he saw—or was he merely describing what “ground and pound” is?

  “The person who you now know to be Trayvon Martin was on top, correct?”

  “Correct,” said Good.

  “And he was the one who was raining blows down on the person on the bottom, George Zimmerman, right?” O’Mara continued.

  “That’s what it looked like,” Good said.

  “You couldn’t actually see fist hit face, right?”

  “No,” he replied, and a discussion of where he was and what he saw continued.

  “Do you think that it was the person on the bottom who was screaming for help?” O’Mara asked.

  “I mean, rationally thinking, I would think so,” Good said.

  Rationally thinking? Wouldn’t it be more rational to think the unarmed person on the wrong end of a gun would be the one screaming—regardless of who was on top and who was on the bottom?

  Bernie de la Rionda questioned him in redirect. Using a pair of water bottles to represent the two men, he demonstrated the body positions of the killer and Trayvon as Good described them. He asked Good to reiterate that he didn’t hear any sounds that would be made by punches or slaps, and Good admitted that he used the term “ground and pound” simply to give a better description of what he saw. But what he saw was only a downward movement of arms and he couldn’t say there were actual blows inflicted on the person on the ground. But de la Rionda stopped there, and never brought up the important point: if Trayvon was beating the shooter so badly, straddling him in a “ground and pound” position, with blows to the
head so fierce it would lead the bigger, older man to become disoriented and begin screaming for his life, how could he suddenly see Trayvon reaching for his gun and then be able to retrieve his gun and fire? And if the killer was on his back, as Good claimed, how could Trayvon even have seen the gun holstered behind him as he lay on the ground, let alone been able to reach for it?

  Things just didn’t add up. It could not have possibly happened the way the killer told the story.

  The prosecutors told us they were going to question Good about that, but the questions were never asked. De la Rionda returned to the prosecution table without attempting to address these issues. Not once did this line of questioning come into the trial. Why? Along with this, why didn’t they try to “humanize” Trayvon, as the attorney Lisa Bloom would write, to show him as we knew him? I didn’t understand what was going on.

  —

  After Good’s testimony, we left the courthouse and headed back to our hotel, where the television was filled with news and commentary about our case.

  “If he was raining blows, MMA-style, you think there would be some physical evidence of that on his fists,” Reverend Sharpton said on one of the never-ending news shows. “Second, it was testified that Zimmerman had MMA training. If Zimmerman had MMA training and there was an MMA attack going on, why didn’t he use his MMA training to defend himself?”

  It was a Friday night after a long day, and a long first week, in court. Every weekday night after a day in court, we would have dinner with our attorneys and family. And if it was a Friday, we would drive back to Miami.

  I spent a lot of time alone at the trial, which was something I was accustomed to doing. As a truck driver, I spend my days mostly alone, a one-man band, driving between restaurants and hotels, making deliveries. Sometimes my girlfriend, Brandy, would come up to support me during the trial. Usually, members of my family were there. But most evenings, I had nothing to occupy me but the case. I would find myself alone and praying.

  “Continue to show us favor, Lord,” I would pray. “Continue to cover us.”

  I prayed for Trayvon, for Sybrina, for Jahvaris, for myself. But I also prayed for justice. It was still early, but I already had the feeling it wasn’t going our way. It just seemed so bizarre. A phrase kept coming to me: My son had been intensely alive! My son had been a life force, a teenager who had hopes and dreams and so much love. But in death, he became a figure we could only see through the dark mirror of evidence and testimony, a cursed single night when our son and all that life inside him was reduced to a stranger, a black kid in a hoodie, a young man in the shadows. A suspect. The prosecution hadn’t yet personalized Trayvon for the jury and had allowed the defense to characterize him in a way that I didn’t recognize.

  If the defense was going to put Trayvon on trial, couldn’t the prosecution call Trayvon’s grandmothers, aunt, uncles, classmates? All I had heard about Trayvon in this trial was what the defense was saying about him. And if I was feeling that way, I’m sure the jury was, too. I knew these six women didn’t—and couldn’t—feel close to Trayvon. Not that the prosecution didn’t use nice adjectives when talking about him, but I didn’t think they were asking the right questions of the witnesses, or even calling the right kind of witnesses, the kind that would help build a fuller picture of him. So while the killer sat in the court, day after day, in his suit and tie and blank expression, the victim was absent, unaccounted for, and yet, somehow, put on trial.

  I would approach prosecutors de la Rionda and Guy about my concerns.

  “Where are the character witnesses for Trayvon?” I would ask.

  “Why would Trayvon approach a man he didn’t know?”

  All I would get from them was “We’ll see.” The prosecution seemed content with a passive approach. But I didn’t feel they were proving the truth beyond a reasonable doubt—that George Zimmerman killed my son—and I was worried we were losing the momentum we had built over all the time we’d spent on the road in our march to justice over the past year and four months.

  I still kept faith in the jury. I was comfortable with six women, but I was concerned that there were no people of color on the jury, except for one Hispanic woman, who would later tell author Lisa Bloom that the others trivialized and mocked her. They were technically sequestered at the Marriott in Lake Mary but they were seen in public, and there were even reports that they went bowling and on other excursions.

  But I continued to pray that even though none of them were black, they would have the compassion and insight to realize that race shouldn’t be a divisive issue in this case. We believed, now and then, that the death of a child is the same for white parents as it is for Latino parents as it is for Asian parents as it is for black parents, and that our case, as Sybrina had said, was not about black and white, but right and wrong. As long as the women on the jury could understand that, I believed we still had a chance. But I think our hopes might have been misplaced. Race was an issue, bubbling under the surface of everything.

  Another one of our best chances for justice appeared on Monday, July 1, when de la Rionda called Chris Serino, the lead detective in the shooting of my son, to the stand.

  The square-jawed detective wore a black suit, black tie, and dark, closely cut hair. Serino led the investigation for the Sanford Police Department from its first night to meeting with me on two mornings after the shooting, all the way up to consulting with Chief Bill Lee and even members of the state attorney’s office. A career police officer, Serino had nearly twenty years of experience in law enforcement, including time as a federal officer with the Department of Defense. I knew he would tell the truth and help our case—if he was asked the right questions.

  He shrugged his broad shoulders as he settled into his chair and introduced himself in the kind of gruff, gravelly voice you might expect from a career cop.

  He gave some details about the night of February 26, 2012. When he arrived at the Retreat at approximately eight P.M., Trayvon was dead on the ground and the killer had already been taken into custody by the police department. He said he tried to identify Trayvon through a fingerprint scan, but he wasn’t in the system. Around midnight, Serino headed back to the police station, where he met the killer for the first time. Another investigator, Officer Doris Singleton, had already interviewed him, but Serino decided to interview him again.

  De la Rionda played a portion of Serino’s interview tape for the court, leading up to the killer’s claim that Trayvon mounted him and began punching him in the face and the head. When Trayvon began pounding his head against the concrete, the killer said, he started yelling for help but Trayvon smothered his mouth and nose. The killer tried to slide out from underneath Trayvon, but realized his shirt had come up and felt Trayvon reaching toward his right side where his gun was holstered, it would turn out, behind his back, which “the prosecution had failed to raise this point at trial,” wrote the attorney and author Lisa Bloom in her book about the case.

  “You’re gonna die, motherfucker,” we could hear Zimmerman saying on the interview tape, quoting what he said Trayvon had told him.

  But the killer, in his version of the story, was quicker and grabbed the gun first.

  “What happened then?” Serino asked.

  “I shot him,” the killer said.

  Trayvon immediately sat up after the shot went through him. “You got me,” the killer said Trayvon told him before dying.

  He said “somehow I got out from under.” Trayvon as he died. He thought Trayvon was armed with something in his hands, so he spread my son’s arms apart and climbed on top of him until, Serino asked, the police “arrived and you surrendered?” to which the killer agreed.

  That was pretty much the extent of Serino’s first interview, and for the most part Serino took him at his word. They scheduled a time to meet the next day for a walk-through of the events at the Retreat, and Serino instructed the killer to go home and get some rest.

  Go home and get some rest.

  I�
��d heard this story a dozen times now, but it was always like a punch to my stomach.

  De la Rionda then played the video of the walk-through at the Retreat. By now Sybrina couldn’t bear to look at the video screen hanging on the courtroom’s far wall. They had shown Trayvon’s lifeless body too many times on it, and she couldn’t stand to see it again. She left the courtroom before the lights were dimmed and the video screen showed George Zimmerman on the day after the killing.

  In the video, he took Serino and two other investigators through his version of the events. He showed them where he was when he first saw Trayvon. He showed them where he parked and where my son died. He gave his version of what happened, saying that Trayvon confronted then attacked him.

  De la Rionda had one more video to show the jury, this one from a few days after the shooting. In this video, Serino interviewed the killer in an interrogation room at the Sanford police station. Officer Doris Singleton joined Serino, and the three of them sat around a table in a small room with a two-way mirror on one wall. The killer repeated his version of the events from that night, but this time Serino and Singleton had some tougher questions for him. They drilled him about why he didn’t identify himself as neighborhood watch as well as the details of their fatal encounter.

  “I can’t pinpoint where you were smothered, that’s the problem I’m having…” Serino said.

  “And when we’re listening to the screaming, doesn’t sound like there is a hesitation in the screaming,” said Officer Singleton. “It sounds like it’s continuous, and if someone’s being hurt [imitates scream being muffled] it’s gonna stop. But we don’t hear the, we won’t hear it stop.”

  Again, thoughts raged through my mind: Because his mouth was never covered up! And he wasn’t the one yelling.

  Sure enough, when Serino played the tape for the killer, he said, upon hearing the voice screaming for help, “That doesn’t even sound like me.”