Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “That’s cement. That is a sidewalk,” he said. “And that is not an unarmed teenager with nothing but Skittles trying to get home. That was somebody who used the availability of dangerous items, from his fist to the concrete, to cause great bodily injury….And the suggestion by the state that that’s not a weapon, that that can’t hurt somebody, that that can’t cause great bodily injury…is disgusting.”

  My mother wrote out the words, “This is so phony!” on her notepad and passed it to me.

  I agreed with my mom. He presented this horrible hunk of concrete as if Trayvon were walking around with it in his hands, threatening people. It was the sidewalk! Between the concrete and the cutouts and the rest, it was almost too much to believe and, we felt, wasn’t based on the facts.

  In closing, he said, “The state never, ever loses their responsibility to take away reasonable doubt from you. Don’t let them do it with innuendo…sympathy…yelling….Don’t let them do it with screeching. Because none of that matters. Because we have a definition of reasonable doubt, and now you do. You look at that definition. You go back to that room and say, ‘Let’s talk first about self-defense. If I think George may have acted in self-defense, we are done.’ ”

  I looked over at the jury: the six women were expressionless, but I could sense that the closing remarks had affected them. O’Mara thanked the jury for their time and attention. Before he rested the defense’s case he had one more request of the jury. “I want you to really, really, look at those instructions, apply them, and just say he acted in self-defense, find him not guilty. Let him go back and get back to his life,” he said.

  —

  “The human heart, it has a great many functions,” began John Guy after a short recess in an emotional one-hour rebuttal. “It moves us, it motivates us, it inspires us, it leads us, and it guides us. Our hearts. In big things, like what we choose to do for a living, and in little things, like what we do every day at any moment in the day. So if we really want to know what happened out there behind those homes on that dark rainy night, should we not look into the heart of the grown man and the heart of that child?”

  Guy put up a slide of the words the shooter used to describe Trayvon, and asked if the words “fucking punk” were casual references to a perfect stranger, or did they reveal what was in the shooter’s heart moments before he pursued and then killed Trayvon?

  “What was in Trayvon Martin’s heart?” Guy asked the jury. “Was it not fear that Ms. Jeantel told you about? The witness who didn’t want to be here, the witness who didn’t want to be involved. But the witness, the human being, that was on the phone with the real victim in this case, Trayvon Martin, right up until the time of his death.” Guy asked, “isn’t that every child’s worst nightmare, to be followed on the way home in the dark by a stranger? Isn’t that every child’s worst fear? That was Trayvon Martin’s last emotion.

  “As a man speaks, so is he,” he said in a reference to a Bible verse, which he called “an old saying but a good one.”

  He showed a slide with the last words Rachel heard Trayvon say: “What are you following me for?”

  “If ever there was a window into a man’s soul,” Guy said, “it was the words from that defendant’s mouth on that phone call. And if ever there was a question about who initiated the contact between that grown man and that child, it was again those defendant’s words when he told Sean Noffke [the 911 operator], ‘Just have the officer call me on my cellphone and I’ll tell him where I am.’ George Zimmerman was not going back to the car…or the mailboxes. And if there was ever any doubt about what happened, really happened, was it not completely removed by what the defendant said afterward, all of the lies he told. All of them. What does that tell you?

  “There’s only two people on this earth who know what really happened,” Guy said. “And one of them can’t testify, and the other one lied…about the things that really, truly matter, and not one lie, over and over and over again….Why did he have to lie if he had done nothing wrong?…If that defendant had done only what he was supposed to do—see and call—none of us would be here.

  “The defendant didn’t shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to,” Guy said. “He shot him because he wanted to. That’s the bottom line.”

  He showed slides:

  “HE LIED,” read one. “About Trayvon Martin covering his nose and mouth…About his head being slammed over and over.”

  “HE CHANGED,” read another. “About what Trayvon Martin said to him…About whether Trayvon Martin touched his gun.”

  He said at various times in his closing:

  “The common sense that tells you if Trayvon Martin was the one on the hunt, would he still have been on his cellphone?” he asked. “Would the earbuds still have been in his ears if he was getting ready to attack somebody? Really?”

  Guy challenged the notion proposed by the defense that there was no evidence the shooter followed Trayvon after the nonemergency-line dispatcher asked him not to and he responded with “Okay.”

  “Yet, he told the police—not just the police, his best friend. Remember his best friend in the world? That Trayvon Martin was squeezing his nose,” Guy said. “Do you really think if that were true there wouldn’t be George Zimmerman’s blood on these sticks that they pried under his [Trayvon’s] fingernails?…

  “Let me suggest to you, in the end this case is not about standing your ground,” he said at one point. “It’s about staying in your car, like he was taught to do, like he was supposed to do.”

  The prosecutor reminded the jury of the requirements for the justifiable use of deadly force: “A person is justified in using deadly force if he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself.” He showed photographs of the shooter’s head with a few minor scrapes and a swollen nose.

  “Ask yourself, ‘Who lost the fight?’ ” he said to the jury, repeating that twice. “Who lost the fight? Who lost the fight?

  “Let me just address one more thing with you before I close….It was brought up by the defense in their summation this morning and it was brought up by the defense in the trial…RACE,” he said. “This case is not about race, it’s about right and wrong. It’s that simple. And let me suggest to you how you know that for sure: Ask yourselves, all things being equal, if the roles were reversed and it was twenty-eight-year-old George Zimmerman walking home in the rain with a hoodie on to protect himself from the rain, walking through that neighborhood and a seventeen-year-old driving around in a car who called the police, who had hate in their heart, hate in their mouth, hate in their actions. And if it was Trayvon Martin who had shot and killed George Zimmerman, what would your verdict be? That’s how you know it’s not about race.

  “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe the truth,” he said, showing the jury the photograph of our son. “What do we owe Trayvon Martin? [Seventeen] years and twenty-one days, forever. He was a son. He was a brother. He was a friend. And the last thing he did on this earth was try to get home.

  “This is the dead,” he said.

  “The self-serving statements, the lies, from his own mouth,” he added, pointing to the defendant. “And the hate in his heart, words that they can’t now take back. The physical evidence, which refutes his lies, and the law that her honor is about to read to you, the law that applies [to] all of us…This is the truth. Thank you for your time.”

  After more than two weeks, the trial for the murder of our son was finally over. The case was now held in the hands of the jury, while I felt there were still so many unanswered questions.

  How could the trial end and Trayvon’s side of the story never be told?

  —

  Following closing arguments, Judge Debra Nelson read the jury their instructions and the law that applied to the case. By now, she had granted the prosecution’s request to allow the jury to consider the charge of manslaughter, as well as second-degree murder. We all stood, and I watched the jur
ors—all female, five white, one Hispanic—exit. And an undeniable and very definite feeling overcame me, something so strong I couldn’t deny it.

  Leave.

  I just didn’t want to be there. Somehow, I knew: this isn’t going to turn out well. Whether the verdict was guilty or not guilty, I just did not want to be there. It was just a feeling that I got, a voice screaming inside me: I have to leave this place, this area, these surroundings. I needed to go home.

  Our attorneys were suggesting and recommending that we stay just in case the jury had any additional questions. But what questions could they have that we would need to answer? Any questions would have been directed to the state or the attorneys.

  So why did I need to stay? So the media could see my reaction once the verdict was read? I didn’t want to put myself, or my family, friends, and supporters, through that publicly, and I thought it would be a grave injustice to my fallen son.

  I wasn’t going to give the killer the satisfaction of watching me cry if things went his way. So I was very aggressive with my decision to leave.

  “I’m leaving,” I told Tracy and my family in the conference room at the courthouse.

  “What?” said Tracy. “We have to stay for the verdict.”

  Tracy was still holding out faith in the jury. They were, after all, a group of mothers, and he hoped they would see Trayvon as their son as much as ours. But the cultures were too different. I had a sinking feeling that they wouldn’t see things like that. After sitting through the trial, I just didn’t believe they would come back with a guilty verdict. Because I honestly didn’t think the state had proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “No, no, no, you’ve got to stay, you’ve got to stay here, they may have questions,” the attorneys told me.

  “I’m just not getting a good feeling, and I want to go home,” I told them, ready to leave and get back to the safe haven of home.

  “We have to stay here for the verdict,” Tracy repeated.

  “Parks and Crump said you guys need to stay here,” echoed my mom.

  The lawyers told me I needed to stay to address the media once a decision had been made. They sounded hopeful. They had based their careers on a belief that our justice system worked, that the bad guys with the guns pay for their crimes, sooner or later—in civil court, on appeal, but eventually they would be held accountable.

  But I had already made up my mind; I had seen the system fall short on its promise of justice for black Americans too many times. I had done my best to remain strong throughout the trial, the endless replaying of the 911 tapes and the gory photographs of my son’s corpse sprawled on the ground. I wasn’t going to allow the cameras, the press, and the public to see me break down now.

  “I’m just uncomfortable,” I said. “I’m starting to get sick.”

  Which was true. My stomach hurt and I had a headache and a terrible feeling. I turned to my family members in the room.

  “I cannot stay here,” I said. “If you want to stay, fine. I’ll go get on a plane, I’ll go rent a car, I’ll walk home if I have to. But I’m going home.”

  Finally, Tracy said, “Well, if you leave, I’m leaving, too.”

  “We’re all leaving,” said my family.

  So we did.

  I called Daryl Parks and just said, “We’re leaving.”

  But we couldn’t just walk out of the courthouse.

  The sheriff’s department had to escort us out, and that wasn’t easy, with the world’s media and a growing crowd outside awaiting the verdict, and awaiting our reactions to the verdict. That morning, we had driven our own cars to a place a safe distance away from the courthouse, from which point Daryl Parks had driven us to the courthouse as he always did. Now that we were leaving, the sheriff’s department came up with a plan for our exit: they drove a camper van up to the loading dock at the back of the courthouse, and we all climbed in and drove away. They dropped us off at our cars, and several sheriff’s department squad cards escorted us to the Florida Turnpike, where we were safe to drive, anonymously, back home.

  I rode with Tracy in his truck, down the same roads, highways, and turnpike that we had taken so often since Trayvon’s death a year and a half before. It was a familiar ride, but on this day it was different.

  It was about to be over.

  On the drive home, we talked about the trial and all that we had been through. We talked about how, only about seventeen months before, our lives were shattered by this tragedy. Trayvon was preparing to finish high school; Jahvaris was heading off to college. We talked about the media’s constant presence in our lives.

  We talked about how nobody who hasn’t been through it knows how it feels to have lost a child. Even the jury. We didn’t believe they understood why Trayvon was wearing a hoodie: that it was a fashion statement worn by all races and nationalities, and not a sign of criminality. And we didn’t think they understood that our peaceful protests were not—as one of the jurors stated—“riots.”

  We didn’t understand why the judge had ruled against the use of the phrase “racial profiling.”

  It was a Friday evening when we turned into my driveway. I told Tracy good night and went inside, showered, and went straight to bed, praying before I turned the lights out, praying our thanks, praying for Trayvon, praying for justice.

  —

  Almost everyone else—the media, the attorneys, the protesters—stayed in Sanford.

  Back home in Miami, I didn’t watch television. I had barely watched it during the trial, and I wasn’t going to begin now. But people told me what was happening, about the endless legal analysis and commentators speculating on the case and what the jury might think or do, and the action on the streets of Sanford.

  Outside the courthouse during the jury deliberations, crowds still gathered. Sanford had split into two factions, just as the country had. Trayvon supporters made up the majority, we believed, but there was a small, loud, aggressive group supporting the killer.

  Many of Trayvon’s supporters simply wanted their voices to be heard, frustrated by what they saw as an ongoing legacy of injustice. It was reported that one young woman lay in the grass outside the courthouse, a hoodie pulled over her head, with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea lying next to her. Like Trayvon, her arms were spread wide and her legs were crossed, headphones still in her ears. “Let’s Not Lose Any More Children to Gun Violence. Justice for Trayvon,” read a sign beside her.

  There were shouting matches between our supporters and those of the killer. Protesters gathered near the Goldsboro Welcome Center and outside the courthouse. People carried signs with Trayvon’s image calling for justice and chanted, “We want guilty! We want guilty!” Others wore black T-shirts with President Obama’s words: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

  —

  The next morning, Saturday, July 13, I went over to my sister’s house, where family and friends gathered to wait. We weren’t expecting the verdict that day. We just wanted to be together, for support, as we waited for the decision, which we thought might take several days.

  We were all sitting around chatting about TV shows and things. Day turned to night, and eventually everyone was getting ready to go home. It was after nine P.M. when our attorneys got the call: after a little more than sixteen hours of deliberation, the jury had reached a verdict. Our attorneys Crump, Parks, Rand, and Jackson entered the courtroom to listen, at last, to the jury’s decision.

  This time I did watch. I huddled around the television with everyone else in my sister’s family room, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. All of us held our breath.

  The ever-present courtroom cameras brought us the event live. We could see everyone in the courtroom stand as the jury entered. The six women looked exhausted and grim, their faces seemed upset, even though they had deliberated for such a short time.

  “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?” Judge Nelson asked.

  The jury foreperson handed the ve
rdict form over to the deputy, who delivered it to Judge Nelson. The judge read the verdict silently, without expression, before handing it over to the clerk, who read the verdict aloud.

  “In the circuit court of the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit and for Seminole County, Florida, The State of Florida versus George Zimmerman,” she said. “Verdict: we the jury find George Zimmerman not guilty, so say we all.”

  And just like that, it was over.

  —

  After a year and a half of searching for answers and demanding justice in the killing of our son, the man who admitted to shooting Trayvon was found not guilty of second-degree murder. Not guilty of manslaughter. Not guilty of anything. Those two words felt burned into my brain—Not Guilty—and forever pierced my heart.

  Judge Nelson released Zimmerman’s bond and informed him that his GPS tracking device would be removed.

  And he was free to go.

  “You have no further business with the court,” said the judge.

  The killer only blinked. Then, as the news sunk in, he flashed a big grin. Hugs and handshakes from his defense team encircled him.

  While our side said nothing.

  The television station cut to a scene in front of the courthouse.

  “No! No!” screamed the protesters as news of the verdict circulated. Many hung their heads and cried.

  I don’t remember anyone saying anything in my sister’s family room that evening. I don’t even remember us talking about it. I know I didn’t say anything. I was just numb. The verdict didn’t make me happy or sad. It just confirmed the fact that I felt that the justice system was not equal and the justice system does not work for African Americans. It also sent a message that you can shoot and kill someone that is unarmed and just trying to get home. And you can get away with it.

  Tracy and I tweeted messages to our supporters.

  “Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you,” I wrote. “You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!”