‹ ONE ›
A Death In Black and White
I don’t know what’s in a human heart.
I have seen more than my share of hearts, held them in my hands. Some were young and strong; some were worn-out, shabby, choked. Many had leaked away an entire life through neat little holes caused by bullets or knives. Some had been stopped by poison or fright. A few had exploded into a thousand tiny bits or were shredded in some grotesque trauma. All of them were dead.
But I never truly knew what was inside these hearts, and never will. By the time I see them, whatever dreams, hopes, fears, ghosts or gods, shame, regrets, anger, and love they might have contained are long gone. The life—the soul—has all seeped out.
What’s left is just evidence. That’s where I usually come in.
SANFORD, FLORIDA. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2012.
Tracy Martin dialed his teenage son’s cell number and it went straight to voice mail.
It was late, well past ten, on a dark, wet Sunday night. Tracy and his girlfriend Brandy Green had been out most of the weekend, leaving seventeen-year-old Trayvon and Brandy’s fourteen-year-old son Chad alone at her townhouse in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated neighborhood in the relatively sedate Orlando suburb of Sanford, Florida. Tracy and Brandy had been dating for two years, and it wasn’t unusual for Tracy and Trayvon to drive up from Miami, four hours each way, for an overnight or a weekend.
It wasn’t just the romance. Tracy desperately wanted Trayvon to wise up, to get away from thug life in Miami, and those long trips were his chance to talk some sense into the kid.
Trayvon didn’t seem to be listening. In some ways, he was a typical teenager, obsessed with girls, video games, sports, and the pounding of rap music in his earbuds. He loved Chuck E. Cheese and watching TV sitcoms. Someday, he thought he’d like to fly or fix airplanes. Family was important, too, even though some of their relatives were black sheep. He often hand-fed his quadriplegic uncle, baked cookies with his young cousins, and had begun wearing a button memorializing another cousin who’d died mysteriously after a drug arrest in 2008.
But Trayvon was no Boy Scout. At nearly six feet tall, he could be intimidating, and he knew it. He flirted with thug life, smoking pot and playing a badass on Facebook. In the past year, his Miami high school had suspended him three times, for tardiness, tagging, and having a bag of pot in his backpack. Tracy, a truck driver who’d been divorced from Trayvon’s mother since 1999, began to hector the boy about his friends, his behavior, and his grades.
He dialed Trayvon’s number again, and again it went straight to voice mail. Brandy’s son Chad told them Trayvon had left around six p.m. to walk to a convenience store less than a mile away. They thought they might catch the NBA All-Star game on TV at seven thirty. Before he left, he’d asked Chad if there was anything he wanted. “Skittles,” Chad said as he went back to his video games. Trayvon tugged on his hoodie and left. He never came back.
Maybe the kid had gone to the movies with a cousin nearby, the father thought, or maybe got sidetracked by a girl along the way. He did stuff like that.
Tracy called the cousin, but got no answer, so he shrugged it off and went to bed. Trayvon was still finding his way and got easily distracted. He was always testing his limits, and sometimes he went too far. He’d just turned seventeen, for god’s sake. He’d turn up.
The next morning, Tracy got up early and dialed Trayvon’s number again. The phone was still switched off, still dumping him directly into voice mail. He called the cousin over and over again until he finally answered—but he hadn’t seen Trayvon at all.
Tracy started to worry. Around eight thirty, he called the sheriff’s dispatcher to report his son missing. He described Trayvon: seventeen, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, light red tennis shoes, and probably slacks. He told her that he and Trayvon were from Miami but staying at his girlfriend’s house in Sanford. In a few minutes, another dispatcher called him back with more specific questions, and she told him that police officers were on the way to the townhouse. He felt some relief that he’d soon have some help finding Trayvon.
Three police cars pulled up outside. A somber detective introduced himself and asked Tracy for a recent picture of his son. Tracy flipped through the camera roll on his phone and found one.
The detective gritted his teeth. He told Tracy he had a photo to show him and he wanted to know if it was Trayvon. From a manila envelope, he pulled a full-color image of a young black man. He was dead.
It was Trayvon.
At that moment, Tracy’s boy was lying in a tray in the morgue, ashen and cold, shot once in the chest.
That instant blurred for Tracy Martin. And his sudden shock would soon evolve into a long, painful moment of profound anxiety across America.
* * *
The rain fell sullen and persistent as Trayvon left the townhouse. It was one of those ambivalent February nights in Florida, not quite cold and not quite warm, hovering in the mid-fifties. He pulled up his hood and walked through the Retreat, past the front gate, to the 7-Eleven convenience store on Rinehart Road, almost a mile away.
Inside the store, Martin grabbed a tall can of AriZona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail from the cooler and a small package of Skittles from some shelves near the cash register. He fumbled in the pockets of his tan slacks and put a couple of bucks and some coins on the counter to pay for the snacks, then left. A store surveillance camera watched him leave at 6:24 p.m.
On the way back to the townhouse, the rain picked up. Trayvon took shelter beneath an awning over the community mailboxes and called Chad at the townhouse to say he was on his way home. He also called his friend DeeDee, a girl he’d met back in Miami, and with whom he talked and texted endlessly. In fact, they’d already spent about six hours on the phone that day. This time they talked for about eighteen minutes, but he got serious toward the end of the call.
Some guy, “a creepy-ass cracka” in a funky silver truck, was watching him, Trayvon told DeeDee. He sounded scared. He thought about running out the back of the little mailbox area and losing the white guy in the maze of townhouses, but DeeDee told him to run back home as fast as he could.
No, he wouldn’t run, he said. The townhouse wasn’t far. He yanked up his hoodie and started walking right past the truck, glancing at the guy as he kept walking.
But while they continued to talk on the phone, Trayvon started to run. DeeDee could hear his heavy breathing and the wind rushing across the tiny microphone of his earbuds.
After less than a minute of running, he told DeeDee he’d lost the guy, and he slowed to a walk again. DeeDee thought she heard fear in his voice, and she was scared for him, too. She told him to keep running.
But the white guy appeared again, persistent. DeeDee begged Trayvon to run, but he was still breathing hard and couldn’t. After a few seconds, he told her the white guy was closer now.
Suddenly Trayvon wasn’t talking to DeeDee anymore. She heard his voice talking to somebody else nearby.
“Why you following me for?”
Another voice, not far. “What are you doing around here?”
“Trayvon! Trayvon!” DeeDee yelled into the phone.
She heard a thump and a rustling of grass. She heard somebody yell, “Get off! Get off!” She called out again and again to her boyfriend, but the phone went dead.
Frantic, she called Trayvon’s phone back, but nobody answered.
* * *
A little after seven p.m., George Zimmerman left his townhouse in the Retreat in his silver 2008 Honda Ridgeline pickup for his weekly grocery shopping at Target. Sunday nights weren’t usually crowded, and tonight the rain would keep even more shoppers away. Perfect.
Between some houses, though, he saw a teenager in a dark gray hoodie, just standing in the shadows out of the rain. He didn’t recognize the kid, who was just milling around. Zimmerman had an uncomfortable feeling about him. A month before, George had seen a kid at that same spot trying to break into a house, but he got away.
So his suspicion wasn’t without reason. The Retreat at Twin Lakes had been rattled when the housing bubble burst. Home values plummeted and underwater residents bailed. Investors snapped up a lot of foreclosed townhouses and started renting them out. The neighborhood changed. Strangers came and went. Low-end people from the wrong side of the gates drifted through. Gangsta boys in low-slung, baggy pants and cockeyed ball caps started hanging around. Then the burglaries and home invasions started. Overnight, those gates didn’t seem as secure.
After three break-ins in August 2011, Zimmerman proposed a neighborhood watch. The idea appealed to the anxious members of the homeowners association, so he invited a Sanford police official to explain how it’d work: Unarmed volunteers would keep an eye on the neighborhood and call the cops if they saw anything suspicious.
Vigilance without violence. Sounded easy enough. The board quickly appointed the pudgy, serious, twenty-eight-year-old George Zimmerman, who’d lived in the Retreat for three years, to coordinate the program.
This son of a former Virginia magistrate and his Peruvian wife was perfect for the job nobody else really wanted to do. A part-time college student who dreamed of being a judge someday, and a financial-fraud auditor at a private company in nearby Maitland, he took his unpaid job seriously. His own temper had flared in the past, getting the former altar boy in modest trouble, but his neighbors now knew him as a friendly, helpful, earnest guy.
He considered himself a kind of protector. Even before he became the watch “captain,” he’d helped capture a shoplifter who filched some electronics from a local supermarket, and now duly “deputized,” he was constantly calling the police dispatchers to report stray dogs, speeders, potholes, graffiti, family fights, and suspicious loiterers. He was even known to knock on doors to let residents know their garage doors were open. To some he was a godsend; to others, a badge-heavy doofus.
So on this gray, damp night, this unfamiliar black kid in a hoodie naturally caught his eye. Zimmerman parked his truck and called the cops on his cellphone.
“Sanford Police Department,” the dispatcher answered.
“Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood,” Zimmerman replied, “and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, [near] Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is 111 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’s just walking around, looking about.”
“Okay, and this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?”
“He looks black.”
“Did you see what he was wearing?”
“Yeah,” Zimmerman said. “A dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie, and either jeans or sweatpants and white tennis shoes … he was just staring…”
“Okay, he’s just walking around the area,” the dispatcher said. It wasn’t really question.
“Looking at all the houses,” Zimmerman seemed to finish her sentence. “Now he’s just staring at me.”
About then the teenager started walking toward Zimmerman’s truck, and Zimmerman kept up his play-by-play with the dispatcher.
“How old would you say he looks?” she asked.
Zimmerman squinted into the dim, drizzling darkness.
“He’s got a button on his shirt. Late teens.”
“Late teens, okay.”
Zimmerman was getting a little nervous. “Something’s 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?”
“How long until you get an officer over here?”
“Yeah, we’ve got someone on the way,” she reassured him. “Just let me know if this guy does anything else.”
Adrenaline was flowing in Zimmerman’s veins. “These assholes, they always get away,” he said.
He had started to give directions to his location when the kid broke into a run.
“Shit, he’s running,” the watchman said.
“Which way is he running?”
“Down toward the other entrance to the neighborhood … the back entrance.” Zimmerman cursed under his breath as he shoved his truck into gear and tried to pursue the kid.
“Are you following him?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, we don’t need you to do that.”
Zimmerman copied, but his chase was already over. The kid had vanished between two buildings. Zimmerman got out of his truck to look for a street sign so he could tell the dispatcher his location, and he scanned the shadows for the dark-clad figure. But the kid was gone.
Seven thirteen. The watchman’s call to police had lasted exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds.
In the next three minutes, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman would collide in a life-or-death struggle.
And one would die.
What happened next is murky. Accounts differ.
After he lost sight of the hooded teen, Zimmerman said he was walking back to his truck when the kid seemed to materialize out of the dank air. He was pissed, and angry words were spoken.
“Yo, you got a problem?” the hooded teen yelled.
“No, I don’t have a problem,” Zimmerman answered.
“You got a problem now,” the kid growled as he punched Zimmerman in the face, breaking his nose.
Stunned by the blow, Zimmerman stumbled and fell on his back. Trayvon leaped on top of him. Zimmerman couldn’t push him off, and soon the kid was repeatedly slamming Zimmerman’s head against the concrete sidewalk that ran between the rows of townhouses.
Zimmerman screamed long and loud for help.
Trayvon clamped one hand over Zimmerman’s nose and the other over his mouth, yelling at him to “shut the fuck up.” In the commotion, Zimmerman’s shirt and jacket were yanked up, revealing his Kel-Tec 9mm handgun, holstered on his right hip.
Trayvon saw it.
“You’re going to die tonight, motherfucker,” he said.
Zimmerman screamed again for help.
Nobody helped, but several startled witnesses called 911 to report the ruckus. In the background of their calls, dispatchers could hear desperate human howls.
“Does he look hurt to you?” the dispatcher asked one of the callers.
“I can’t see him,” the woman answered. “I don’t want to go out there. I don’t know what’s going on, so…”
“So you think he’s yelling ‘Help’?”
“Yes,” the frightened woman answered.
“All right,” the dispatcher said calmly. “What is your…”
A single shot rang out.
The screaming stopped at seven sixteen.
A minute later, the first cop rolled up on the scene.
A young black man lay facedown in the wet grass, his arms under him, his hood pulled back. No pulse.
A red-eyed Zimmerman stood nearby, bloodied but responsive. His jeans and jacket were wet and grass-stained in back. He admitted he’d shot the boy. He raised his hands and surrendered his handgun to the officer, who handcuffed him and seated him in a squad car.
Later, he told investigators that in the struggle, the teenager had reached for his exposed handgun, but Zimmerman had been faster. He grabbed his 9mm and pulled the trigger. The kid slumped into the grass, face forward, startled.
“You got me,” he said. His last words.
The stunned Zimmerman told police he’d quickly gotten up and moved the boy’s arms out to his side, to make sure he had no weapons. He couldn’t see any wounds, nor the boy’s face.
Other cops soon arrived, followed by paramedics, who all tried unsuccessfully to revive this nameless kid, although they had no idea at the time who he was. Still no heartbeat. They pronounced him dead at precisely seven thirty.
One officer lifted Trayvon’s hoodie and felt the heft of a large, cold can—the unopened AriZona watermelon juice drink—in its front pouch. He also found a package of Skittles, a lighter, a cellphone, forty bucks and some change, but no wallet or ID.
So the unidentified teen’s body was sealed in a blue body bag and given a number before it was carted off to the morgue. Sadly, he was just a hundred yards from his house.
The paramedics examined Zimmerman and noted abrasions to his forehead, some blood and tenderness at his nose, and two bloody gashes on the back of his head. His nose was swollen and red, probably broken.
Zimmerman’s wounds were cleaned up back at the station, he spoke freely in a voluntary interview, and later he walked detectives through his movements that night.
Days passed. The Sanford police followed up and were genuinely sad for the kid’s family because, despite his teenage missteps, he seemed to be generally pointed in the right direction, but they couldn’t prove Zimmerman committed any crime. In fact, all the evidence suggested his account was truthful.
The ordinary stuff in a dead kid’s pockets didn’t seem especially pertinent to their shooting investigation at the time, but the importance of any single thing is not always apparent at first glance.
The morning after the shooting, Volusia County’s associate medical examiner Dr. Shiping Bao unzipped the blue body bag on his table in the Daytona Beach morgue and began his autopsy of Trayvon Martin.
Bao, who was fifty years old, was born and raised in China, where he got his medical degree and a graduate degree in radiation medicine. He became a naturalized American and eventually did a four-year residency in pathology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. After three years at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office in Fort Worth, he came to Florida for more money. He’d been on the job less than seven months.
Before him now was the corpse of a handsome, well-developed black teenager, neither scrawny nor stocky. Apart from the bloodless bullet hole in his chest and the sooty ring of stippled skin around it, Trayvon Martin looked fit, trim, and healthy.
Ah, but that hole.
The single 9mm bullet that killed him entered his chest square-on, just to the left of his breastbone. It pierced his heart sac, punctured the lower right chamber of the heart, and passed through the lower lobe of his right lung, fragmenting into three pieces along the way. Around the hole itself was a halo of soot, a powder tattoo measuring two by two inches.
His wounded heart had continued to pump, and each contraction gushed blood into his chest cavity, filling it with 2.3 liters of blood—more than two quarts, or about one-third of a normal person’s total blood volume.
Bao didn’t write it down, but he said later that he believed Martin had remained conscious for as long as ten minutes after he was shot, and was likely in great pain.
One thing is almost certain: Conscious or not, Trayvon Martin probably lived very briefly after being shot.
Most gunshot wounds to the heart are not instantaneously fatal. In fact, no matter what you see on TV or in the movies, only gunshot wounds of the brain are likely to be instantaneously fatal … and even then, not always. Unconsciousness depends on three factors: the organ injured, the extent of the injury, and the psychology/physiology of the wounded person. Some people immediately lose consciousness from a minor wound; some are shot through the heart and keep going. One can stay conscious at least five to fifteen seconds from a heart shot.
But we know for sure that when paramedics arrived on the scene ten minutes later, he was dead.
Other than the fatal wound, Bao’s autopsy found only a small, fresh abrasion on Martin’s left ring finger below the knuckle. He didn’t cut into the knuckles of either hand to look for internal bruising around the knuckles that might have proven whether the boy had punched anyone. It might not have proven conclusively that he was the aggressor, but it might have proven he was in a fight.
Martin’s blood and urine also contained low levels of THC—the active ingredient in marijuana—but nobody knows exactly when he used the drugs or if he was high the night he was killed.
This struck Bao as a routine shooting case. He wrapped up his examination in ninety minutes.
“The wound,” Bao wrote in his final autopsy report, “is consistent with a wound of entrance of intermediate range.”
Those two words—intermediate range—quickly reverberated in the echo chamber of American media, which didn’t really know what they meant but seized on the phrase as somehow important. If the muzzle of George Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec wasn’t against Trayvon Martin’s chest when he fired, how far away was it? Was this “intermediate range” shot fired into the kid’s chest from an inch away? Five inches? Three feet? Different forensic experts (and a slew of inexpert commentators) couldn’t seem to agree on the precise meaning of the term.
Worse, the angry drumbeat against Zimmerman was becoming deafening, and this single phrase—intermediate range—only turned up the volume. One side saw “intermediate range” as proof of a summary execution; the other side saw it as a validation of self-defense.
They were both wrong.
When a gun’s trigger is pulled, the firing pin strikes the bullet’s primer, creating a tiny jet of flame that ignites the powder in a cartridge. That sudden ignition creates a burst of hot gas that propels the bullet down the barrel of the gun. It all bursts out—the bullet, hot gases, soot, vaporized metals of the primer, and unburned gunpowder—in a spectacular and deadly plume.
How far this cloud of superheated debris travels varies by gun, barrel length, and the type of gunpowder. Gunshot residue can be found on the clothing and the body of a human victim. It might leave a film of soot, or tattoo the skin around the wound with unburned or partly burned particles of gunpowder that puncture the top layer of the skin, or produce nothing at all. The pattern of this damage—or lack of it—can tell us how far away the gun’s muzzle was when it was fired.
That tattooing (sometimes also called stippling) is the hallmark of an intermediate range gunshot. Shots within a foot or less might leave soot residue. Without stippling, without soot, and without any other residue on the skin or clothing, a gunshot will be classified as distant. A contact wound, in which the muzzle is touching the skin when fired, leaves a completely different wound.
In Trayvon Martin’s case, this tattooing or stippling encircled his wound in a two-inch pattern. The examiner noted soot, too. The pattern suggested to me that the Kel-Tec’s muzzle had been two to four inches from the boy’s skin—intermediate range—when George Zimmerman pulled the trigger.
But while the media-sphere haggled over what the stippling proved, few people noticed a tiny fact in another report hidden deep inside the mountain of documents investigators and prosecutors had dumped on the public before trial.
On this obscure little detail, the whole case pivoted.
* * *
Amy Siewert was a firearm and gunshot expert in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s (FDLE) crime lab. With a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute, she’d worked in the FDLE’s forensic toxicology section before transferring to the firearms section, where she’d been an analyst for three years.
Her job was to examine George Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec 9mm handgun and the teenager’s light gray Nike sweatshirt and the dark gray hoodie he wore over it. Her main job was to connect all the dots that proved this was the gun that fired the bullet that penetrated the clothing and pierced the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy the world knew as Trayvon Martin. She’d also examine the garments microscopically and chemically for telltale gunshot residue that might suggest how the shooting happened.
The first thing Siewert noticed was an L-shaped hole in Martin’s hoodie, about two by one inches. It lined up perfectly with the boy’s wound. She noted soot around it, both inside and out. Frayed fibers around the hole were also burned. Chemically, she discovered vaporized lead. And a large, six-inch orange stain surrounded it all—Trayvon Martin’s blood.
Martin had worn a second sweatshirt underneath the hoodie. It, too, was sooty and singed from the muzzle blast. Its bloodstained two-inch bullet hole bore a star shape.
But what Siewert couldn’t find in two separate tests was a pattern of gunshot residue around and away from the holes.
The stellate hole, soot, vaporized lead, and no discernible pattern from the powder led Siewert to only one possible conclusion: The muzzle of George Zimmerman’s pistol was touching Trayvon Martin’s hoodie when he pulled the trigger. Not just close, but actually against the fabric.
But few people, much less the national media, realized the significance of Siewert’s brief report. Intermediate range fit the narrative so much better. If they noticed Siewert’s findings at all, they didn’t grasp the forensic distinction between contact and intermediate range, or ask the vital question: How could a gun’s muzzle be touching a sweatshirt but still be as much as four inches away from the skin of the person who wore it?
It was chalked up to a simple, minor contradiction. The media quickly moved on to the more emotional events swirling around Trayvon Martin’s death.
The question nobody was asking would provide the answer nobody was expecting.
* * *
That single shot in the night set a tragedy of mythic proportion in motion, quietly at first but slowly building toward a deafening din.
For more than a week, the shooting of Trayvon Martin wasn’t even much of a story. Local TV stations ran short items about it, the Orlando Sentinel published two news briefs, and the twice-a-week Sanford Herald ran just 213 words. But then on March 7, Reuters News Service circulated a 469-word wire story, based mainly on an interview with a lawyer for Trayvon’s family, that made it sound more like a white vigilante had purposely hunted down an unarmed, innocent black child and shot him in cold blood, a murder being covered up by local cops. The wires carried an old childhood photo of Trayvon, provided by his parents, leaving the impression that the victim had been a happy, harmless, baby-faced middle schooler.
It was the first blood in the water, and the national media smelled it.
Reporters swarmed to Sanford, both covering and cultivating the burgeoning conflict. When black leaders began to cry racism, the stakes grew instantly more intense; ratings and readership soared. Tapes of Zimmerman’s call to dispatchers were edited by one news network to make it appear he used a racial slur before the shooting; Martin’s parents endorsed a petition on Change.org calling for Zimmerman’s arrest and it got 1.3 million “signatures”; Reverend Al Sharpton and the rest of the racial-grievance industrial complex showed up to stir the pot; members of the New Black Panther Party offered a $10,000 reward for Zimmerman’s “capture”; and the newest parlor game became “Guess what slur George mumbled in his 911 tape” when no such slur was apparent.
A lot of bloggers and TV talking heads became armchair crime scene specialists, offering forensic theories that came more from Hollywood whimsy than medical school.
President Barack Obama elevated the case to a presidential issue when he said, “Trayvon Martin could’ve been me thirty-five years ago,” and “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” as he called for nationwide “soul-searching.” Instead of tamping down the rage, the president fueled it.
Angry rallies converted bags of Skittles into flags of protest. Hoodies and cans of tea became symbols of American racism.
“He may have been suspended from school at the time, and had traces of cannabis in his blood,” wrote London’s Guardian newspaper, “but when you look behind the appearance of a menacing black teenager, those Skittles say, you find the child inside.”
Celebrities, politicians, and throngs of ordinary people demanded justice for Trayvon, but the only suitable justice they would accept seemed to be the arrest, conviction, and swift execution of that vile racist George Zimmerman.
* * *
On April 11, 2012—more than six tense weeks after Trayvon Martin was shot dead and a local district attorney found no evidence to file criminal charges—a special prosecutor ordered the nearly broke George Zimmerman arrested and charged with second-degree murder. A new defense team volunteered: Mark O’Mara and Don West, both well-known legal veterans and both top-notch defenders. The old friends made a good team: O’Mara was a masterful litigator, dignified and unflappable; West was a fighter who didn’t apologize to anyone for feeling that the case against Zimmerman looked like mob justice.
And both had long experience in self-defense and Stand Your Ground cases. In fact, the deceptively affable Pennsylvanian West quit his job as a federal public defender in death-penalty cases to take Zimmerman’s case.
He wasn’t born yesterday. Regarded as one of the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers, he’d worked some tough cases with even tougher clients. He knew defendants sometimes lied. He knew the evidence wasn’t always perfect. He’d seen how the genuine facts in a shooting could be twisted beyond recognition by media.
But after spending time with Zimmerman, he barely recognized the public’s monstrous caricature of him.
And soon both O’Mara and West recognized that the fanatical public clamor and local politics threatened to capsize some serious legal questions.
Many court watchers expected Zimmerman to claim immunity under Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law, which said a victim under attack wasn’t required to retreat and could legally use lethal force in self-defense.
But for many Trayvon supporters recalling the image of that smiling child, the possibility that George Zimmerman had feared for his life seemed absurd. To them, Stand Your Ground was a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Outside of the courtroom, this case was more about race than self-defense, and blacks vocally decried a law they believed gave white people carte blanche to kill black folks. They demanded the immediate repeal of Stand Your Ground, and many politicians stood ready to accommodate.
Ironically, at the time of the Martin shooting, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law had benefited blacks disproportionately. Since poor blacks who live in high-crime neighborhoods were the most likely victims of crime, the law made it easier for them to protect themselves when the police couldn’t arrive fast enough. Blacks make up only about 16 percent of Florida’s population, but 31 percent of the defendants invoking Stand Your Ground were black, and they were acquitted significantly more often than whites who used the very same defense.
The tumult didn’t matter. O’Mara and West decided against a Stand Your Ground defense simply because they believed Zimmerman had a solid traditional self-defense case: He was on his back and couldn’t retreat from Trayvon Martin’s vicious pummeling. The law was irrelevant.
Even if Zimmerman had screwed up, they believed he had no evil intent. Would a killer call the police before he murdered someone?
And it was also possible that both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman feared for their lives, and that both chose to use force to defend themselves. If the jury believed that, under Florida law, Zimmerman was innocent.
But the prosecution had a different theory. Zimmerman had lied about everything except shooting Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had stalked the unarmed teenager and forced a violent confrontation. He shouldn’t have been armed at all. Zimmerman’s wounds were minor, and he had no reason to think he might die. The cries for help overheard on the 911 tapes came from Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman. The neighborhood watchman shot the kid in cold blood as he lay in the wet grass.
The scene was set for an epic courtroom battle.
As each week passed, the protests grew, and a horrible event was simplified for mass consumption: A good-natured black child had simply gone to the store for some candy and a drink, only to be bushwhacked by a racist white man.
Some were already calling Trayvon Martin a modern-day Emmett Till. Hundreds of death threats drove George Zimmerman into hiding, while reporters described him as a “white Hispanic,” seeming to accentuate the racist subtext in the tragedy. It didn’t take long for the real Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman to be lost in the Category 5 rhetorical storm that raged about race, guns, profiling, civil rights, and vigilantism.
O’Mara and West focused on the legal questions, but they weren’t cloistered from the commotion on the street. They knew their future jurors were listening.
Zimmerman’s defense team divvied up the daunting task brilliantly. Battling restive public opinion and prosecutorial sandbagging while trying to stay afloat, the smooth-talking O’Mara handled the intense media attention while West dived into the forensic issues.
Even if the media, the race-baiters, and the general public had already leapt to their own conclusions, justice moved more deliberately. Legal issues remained unsettled. The whole tragedy—the entire question of George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence—boiled down to a single legal question: Who was the aggressor at the moment the trigger was pulled?
* * *
This was a real case with real forensic issues, but for O’Mara and West, it was a nightmare. The case was complicated enough without a frustrating discovery process. Prosecutors were slow with or unresponsive to the defense’s requests for evidence. A simple color photo of George Zimmerman’s face after the crime took the prosecution months to deliver. Key exhibits like the complete Florida Department of Law Enforcement case file were withheld. The state claimed no evidence was recovered from Martin’s phone, but a whistleblower claimed otherwise.
With almost no money for the defense, West began the arduous process of finding legal experts who could interpret the evidence, looking for any clue that could help explain what happened. He needed experts on gunshots, forensic pathology, toxicology, voice analysis, and computer animation.
A toxicologist friend mentioned my name as the go-to guy on gunshot wounds. West already knew my name and reputation. He even had a copy of my book on gunshot wounds. So he eventually reached out to me in September 2012, ten months before Zimmerman’s trial was to start. They might not be able to pay me, he said, but it was an important case that raised important questions for America.
I had retired six years before as Chief Medical Examiner in Bexar County, Texas, where I had built one of the nation’s most respected forensic medical facilities. I had performed more than 9,000 autopsies, examined over 25,000 deaths, and continued to consult in unexplained or questionable death cases all over the world. Now George Zimmerman’s defense wanted me to connect the forensic dots in the last three minutes of Trayvon Martin’s life.
I knew the furor that had engulfed America. I knew that race politics had confused the issue. I knew there were facts that had been misunderstood or overlooked. But I also knew the truth about what happened was hidden somewhere within the evidence.
I agreed.
To simplify it, my job as a medical examiner is to determine how and why a person died. In legal terms, the cause and manner of death. The cause is the disease or injury that killed him—maybe a heart attack, a gunshot wound, AIDS, or a car crash. The manner is one of four general ways a human can die—natural causes, accident, suicide, or homicide—plus a vexing fifth: undetermined.
Our determinations impact the living more than the dead. The dead are past caring, but the living can go to jail. Lives can be saved from viruses and germs. Innocence can be determined. Questions can be answered, suspicions authenticated. So medical examiners bear a heavy burden to reach an unbiased, fact-based, scientific conclusion, no matter what a dead person’s family, friends, enemies, or neighbors wish it to be. Truth is always better than what we merely wish to be true.
Countless times I’ve delivered grim news to the relatives of suicides, and they’ve protested. Families often don’t want to believe that a loved one felt so unloved that he killed himself. They want it to be a gun-cleaning accident or a missed step on a high bridge. They want a medical examiner to declare it an accident so they can carry on, officially guilt-free.
I’ve even seen relatives breathe a sigh of relief when I tell them a son or daughter was murdered, as if suicide would have been a worse way to go. It’s not about the dead, but the living.
Sometimes what I told them they didn’t want to hear, and sometimes what I told them they wanted to hear. But it didn’t really matter either way, because I was telling them the truth.
I don’t take sides. What I know is vital; how I feel is irrelevant. The forensic pathologist’s mission is the truth. I’m supposed to be impartial and tell the truth. Facts have no moral quality, only what we project upon them.
Mysteries are, by definition, unanswered questions. If we could understand them, not only would they cease to be mysteries, but we’d probably consider them unworthy of being understood. Humans are funny that way.
This world itself isn’t reasonable. We yearn for clarity in all things but too often embrace the murky: conspiracy theories, supernatural explanations, and mythology, among them.
I’m not a deep thinker. I don’t seek profound meaning in the behavior of humans, or the stars, or the alchemy of little coincidences. We are occasionally astonished by these things simply because our world stubbornly refuses to reveal meanings, if they exist at all.
Forensic science is not magic or alchemy, even though complex technology and intricate research can take curdled blood, bullet fragments, bone shards, and flakes of skin and turn them into justice. I look for those tiny bits of truth that death leaves behind. Forensic science can see what ordinary humans often cannot, but science isn’t enough. We need credible, honorable people to explain it all. Good men and women must interpret science for true justice to happen.
How long can a man with an exploded heart speak (or hope, dream, or imagine)? Can we precisely determine the moment a human’s primitive instincts tell him he might die? Does every human interaction truly leave a trace?
I grew up with such questions floating in the air, and my career has been marinated in them, as this book will show. But the answers don’t always satisfy.
And when they don’t, my phone rings.
So it was with George Zimmerman.
Fact is, the community of medical examiners is very small—only about five hundred board-certified forensic pathologists live in the United States. Before West called, I already knew some details about the wound and that the bullet hole in the hoodie was a contact shot. I knew about the dueling conclusions of contact wound versus an intermediate range wound, but I knew why these observations were not incompatible. I shared my thoughts with West, who seemed surprised to hear them. He knew if I was right—and I was—that his whole factual case could pivot on it.
So my task was to document Martin’s injuries, trace the path of the bullet and its physical damage, and examine Zimmerman’s injuries to show whether they were all consistent with Zimmerman’s account of the struggle. I wasn’t hired to contrive an opinion to help the defense but to offer my expert opinion about whether any of it supported the shooter’s account. I wasn’t a hired gun coming to town to do the defense’s dirty work. I hate that medical examiners sometimes appear to say what they’ve been paid to say—and undoubtedly, some might—but I don’t work for the defense, the prosecution, the killer, the family of the victim, or the cops. I didn’t get this far by selling my opinion to the highest bidder.
But the rest of the world had already taken sides. Without the benefit of facts, a lot of people saw this tragedy through the prism of their own biases and reached unyielding conclusions. This wasn’t the first or the last time this had happened in my career, but it was among the most stark.
Don West sent me a thumb drive containing all the forensic material I’d need: Martin’s autopsy report, crime scene photos, a video reenactment of the shooting that Zimmerman did with detectives the next day, toxicology, gunshot tests and residue, witnesses’ 911 calls and statements, biological, trace, and DNA evidence, Zimmerman’s medical records and his cellphone data.
This was a complicated case only in cultural terms.
Forensically, it wasn’t complicated at all. It was tragically simple.
* * *
The second-degree murder trial of George Zimmerman began on Monday, June 24, 2013, almost sixteen months after the fatal shot was fired.
The prosecution’s opening remarks began with calculated shock.
“Good morning. ‘Fucking punks, these assholes all get away,’” state’s attorney John Guy blurted out to the six-woman jury. “These were the words in this grown man’s mouth as he followed this boy that he didn’t know. Those were his words, not mine.”
Over the next half hour, Guy repeated the profanities several times as he outlined the prosecution’s case against Zimmerman.
“We are confident that at the end of this trial you will know in your head, in your heart, in your stomach that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to,” Guy said. “He shot him for the worst of all reasons, because he wanted to.”
Don West opened for the defense with a lame knock-knock joke that fell flat, but he quickly got to the meat of the case.
“I think the evidence will show that this is a sad case, that there are no monsters,” West said. “George Zimmerman is not guilty of murder. He shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense after being viciously attacked.”
Zimmerman watched from the defense table and Trayvon Martin’s parents sat in the gallery as West suggested Martin’s deadly weapon was a concrete sidewalk, “no different than if he picked up a brick or smashed [Zimmerman’s] head against a wall.”
“Little did George Zimmerman know at the time in less than ten minutes from him first seeing Trayvon Martin that he would be sucker-punched in the face, have his head pounded on concrete, and wind up shooting and tragically killing Trayvon Martin,” West said.
The first shots fired, the trench warfare began.
Prosecutors played other 911 tapes where Zimmerman reported strange black men in the neighborhood … phone buddy DeeDee described her phone calls with Martin up to the point of the confrontation and denied the term “cracker” is racist … the lead detective said there were no major inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s various accounts of the shooting, although he’d probably not suffered the dozens of blows he’d told police at the scene … a medical examiner who reviewed the case said Zimmerman’s injuries “were not life-threatening” and “very insignificant,” not even bad enough to require stitches (and had no answer when asked by O’Mara if George Zimmerman’s very next injury might have killed him) … several eyewitnesses told conflicting stories about who was on top during the struggle … Martin’s parents both said the voice crying for help on the 911 tape was Trayvon’s … and five Zimmerman friends claimed the voice on the 911 tape was clearly George’s.
The central question—who was the aggressor when the shot was fired?—remained unanswered ten days into the trial.
I took the stand on the eleventh day, just a day before the defense expected to wrap up its case. It was perhaps a blessing that Trayvon Martin’s mother had left the courtroom because a victim’s mother should seldom be forced to hear what I must usually say in a trial.
My testimony was no surprise to the prosecutors. They knew in detail what I was going to say because they had deposed me just two or three weeks before. In fact, a few hours before I testified, the prosecutors again questioned me on what I was about to say. In light of this, I thought that they would bring in a rebuttal witness to disagree with my opinions. They didn’t.
I testified that George Zimmerman suffered multiple blunt-force injuries to his face and head: two swollen knots on his head, a couple of gashes and abrasions consistent with the head-banging assault he described, a likely broken nose that was pushed back into place, and bruises on his forehead where he was likely punched—all consistent with Zimmerman’s story. It was possible for Zimmerman to have severe head injuries, even life-threatening ones, without any visible external wounds, I said.
Questioning continued. Zimmerman had recalled Martin lying facedown with his arms splayed out after the fatal shot, but by the time cops and paramedics arrived, the teenager’s arms were beneath him. To prosecutors, this was evidence that Zimmerman was lying. West asked me if it was possible that the mortally wounded Martin had rolled over on his own.
“Even if I right now reached across, put my hand through your chest, grabbed your heart and ripped it out,” I told West, perhaps a little too colorfully, “you could stand there and talk to me for ten to fifteen seconds or walk over to me because the thing that’s controlling your movement and ability to speak is the brain, and that has a reserve oxygen supply of ten to fifteen seconds.
“In this case you have a through-and-through hole of the right ventricle, and then you have at least one hole if not two into the right lung,” I continued. “So you are losing blood, and every time the heart contracts, it pumps blood out the two holes in the ventricle and at least one hole in the lung. He is going to be dead between one and three minutes after being shot.”
West turned to Martin’s bullet wound. Was there anything in Trayvon Martin’s wounds that might tell us the positions of the two men when the fatal shot was fired? Could I tell who was on top and who was on his back?
I could.
“If you lean over somebody, you would notice that the clothing tends to fall away from the chest,” I said. “If instead you’re lying on your back and somebody shoots you, the clothing is going to be against your chest. So the fact that we know the clothing was two to four inches away is consistent with somebody leaning over the person doing the shooting and that the clothing is two to four inches away from the person [who is shot].”
There had been no contradiction between the medical examiner’s intermediate range wound and the gunshot expert’s contact shot. The Kel-Tec’s muzzle touched Trayvon Martin’s hoodie, which hung two to four inches away from his chest as he leaned over George Zimmerman. Gravity had pulled the can of fruit drink and the candy in the hoodie’s front pouch—weighing almost two pounds—down even farther.
The forensic evidence, I said, proved Martin had been leaning forward, not lying down, when he was shot. That was consistent with Zimmerman’s account that the boy was kneeling or standing over him, savagely beating him, when Zimmerman pulled the trigger.
If Martin had been on his back, his hoodie would have been against his skin, with no space between. If George Zimmerman had been tugging at his hoodie, the bullet holes wouldn’t have lined up so perfectly.
The courtroom was deathly quiet. The jury was riveted. The prosecution’s cross-examination tiptoed around my conclusion, which seemed to shut the door on their theory that Zimmerman, not Martin, had been on top in that fight.
I was excused from the stand, and Don West’s daughter took me directly to the airport to catch a plane home to San Antonio. On the long flight, I thought about the two lives that intersected on a dark, rainy February night. No matter who was on top, it was a tragedy. Lives were changed, and not just for the two combatants.
None of us was there. There are no pictures or videos of the fatal moment. We cannot know what truly happened, and we certainly cannot know what was in those two men’s hearts. But the scientific evidence told a story that many people didn’t want to hear and refuse to believe even now.
That’s how it is with truth. It isn’t always welcome.
A few days later, there was nothing more to say. The case went to the all-female jury. While they deliberated, dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse, hollering slogans, waving signs, and arguing with one another about the case. Two weeks of testimony hadn’t muted them at all.
After more than sixteen hours, the jury reached its verdict: George Zimmerman was not guilty of any crime in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
He walked away from the courthouse a free man, but likely to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
An acquittal isn’t always absolution.
* * *
Even now, it’s difficult for many people to hear this, but the question of Trayvon Martin’s death was not a miscarriage of justice, but rather a painfully perfect example of justice itself. Our system worked as it was intended. Questions were asked, scenarios explored, theories argued. It is simply the nature of any homicide—justifiable or not—that there will be winners and losers when the question must be settled.
Forensic evidence is the bedrock of justice. It doesn’t change its story or misremember what it saw. It doesn’t cower when a mob gathers on the courthouse steps. It doesn’t run away or go silent out of fear. It tells us honestly and candidly what we need to know, even when we want it to say something else. We must only have the wisdom to be able to see it and to interpret it honestly.
So it was with Trayvon Martin.
Like so many words that have been twisted beyond recognition by politicians, pundits, and other modern-day logrollers, “justice” does not equal satisfaction or punishment. It should be a fair investigation of the facts and a reasonable, impartial conclusion, but for some people it is revenge. Trayvon Martin got justice, but his loved ones will never be truly satisfied. So it is, too, with the loved ones of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore chanting, “No Justice, No Peace,” and promising to agitate until their killers are punished. What if vengeance isn’t warranted?
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, people leapt to their conclusions before the facts were known. They saw the entire unfolding tragedy through the defective prisms of their own biases and an increasingly dogmatic media.
We weren’t there. None of us saw a neighborhood-watch volunteer shoot an unarmed black teenager to death in the drizzling shadows of a Florida night in 2012. And despite the glare of media frenzy that followed, the facts grew murkier as a nation chose sides by what it imagined, not what it knew. We debated feverishly what nobody saw.
Every lynch mob begins with an assumption and a quick conclusion. We should certainly know by now, after so many crimes, that starting with an assumption and closing the case too quickly is deadly.
While many people made George Zimmerman’s case about black and white, it was anything but black and white.
The real problem wasn’t injustice, but an unfortunate series of ordinary human faults that led to a fatal overreaction by both men. Trayvon Martin didn’t need to die. A white guy misjudged the behavior of a black teenager, who misjudged the behavior of the white guy. They profiled each other. They saw each other as a threat. And both were wrong.
In the end, I can’t see into their hearts. This homicide question was settled, but the bigger questions about humanity are going to take a little longer.
Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Vincent Di Maio and Ron Franscell
