MIRIAM:

  That’s right and when you finish cutting his ass send him to home to Auntie & Uncle house so we can get on him too. You know how we do it.8

  In reality, Trayvon hadn’t played football in years. His grades had tanked. His behavior had deteriorated. “He did hit some trouble in his teenage years. He skipped classes and got suspended a couple times,” Richardson acknowledged. According to Tracy Martin, “It was just regular teenage stuff,” but Sybrina regretted that her son had not passed the FCAT, Florida’s major standardized test, that is required for graduation. “Trayvon was going to set that right, they know it,” Richardson wrote. “One mistake doesn’t mark you for life.”9

  On March 26, the Monday after Obama’s Friday Rose Garden manifesto, the Herald dug a little deeper. It published a piece by Frances Robles whose very title, “Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of Trayvon Martin” should have caused the other media to put a brake on Martin’s canonization. The A and B student who majored in cheerfulness had apparently been suspended three times within a year and “had a spotty school record.”10

  The most troubling of those suspensions was handed down in October 2011, four months before Martin’s death. Yes, Robles reported, Martin was seen in an “unauthorized area,” but that wasn’t the half of it. A school police officer saw him in that area “hiding and being suspicious.” There he had written “‘WTF’—an acronym for ‘what the f**k’”—on a locker. The next day the officer rifled through Martin’s book bag, looking for the offending marker, and found something more interesting: twelve pieces of women’s jewelry, a watch, and a large flathead screwdriver that the officer described as a “burglary tool.” Martin reportedly told the officer that the jewelry wasn’t his but that “a friend gave it to [him].” School police seized the jewelry and stored it.11 All that came of this was a ten-day suspension for the graffiti. The stolen jewelry was stashed and the crime forgotten.

  Four months later, Robles reported, Martin was suspended again after being “caught with an empty plastic bag with traces of marijuana in it” and a marijuana pipe. It was his third suspension within a year. He had earlier been suspended for tardiness and truancy. True to form, attorney Crump assured the Herald that Martin’s school problems were “completely irrelevant to what happened Feb. 26.”12 This is the kind of thing an attorney says, but it is not the kind of thing a good reporter accepts uncritically. When Zimmerman first saw Martin, he told the dispatcher, “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.”13 Given Martin’s school record, Zimmerman could have been right on all counts.

  Even after the Herald introduced this evidence, the major media still did not want to register it as an accepted part of the established narrative. In an April 1 article, for instance, the New York Times admitted Martin’s three suspensions but claimed they were for “tardiness, for graffiti and, most recently, for having a baggie with a trace of marijuana in his back-pack.”14 The Times was in good company. Up to that point, in just about every article that mentioned Martin’s suspension, the reporter felt obliged to point out that Martin did not have a criminal record.

  Sanford Police Department investigator Chris Serino early on said, “[Martin] has no criminal record whatsoever,” calling him “a good kid. A mild-mannered kid.”15 The media almost universally sustained that tragically false narrative. Most took Team Trayvon’s word for Martin’s crime-free existence, but the Associated Press went the extra mile to prove it. On March 26, the AP reported that the State Department of Juvenile Justice had “confirmed that Martin does not have a juvenile offender record.”16 This information was said to have been obtained through a public records request, but juvenile records are confidential. As the Florida Bar has observed, however, the court uses a “good cause” standard to determine whether a given record should be released. In making this determination, “the court is to balance the privacy rights of those identified in the reports against the public interest.”17 Given the escalating political pressures, it is unlikely the court would have been as forthcoming if Martin did have a juvenile offender record.

  Martin avoided the criminal justice system for one unlikely reason. He had the seeming good fortune of pursuing his education in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth largest district in the country and one of the few with its own police department. The Miami-Dade Schools Police Department (M-DSPD) has more than 150 sworn personnel and, as the Martin case would reveal, problems unique to its peculiar mission. Through its diligent exploitation of the Freedom of Information Act, the Conservative Treehouse was uniquely able to discover why the M-DSPD allowed Martin to skate. The exposure of the department’s practices began inadvertently with the Miami Herald story on Martin’s multiple suspensions. The article prompted M-DSPD Chief Charles Hurley to launch a major Internal Affairs (IA) investigation into the possible leak of this information to the Herald.18

  As the investigation began, the officers realized immediately that they had a problem on their hands. “Oh, God, oh, my God, oh, God,” one major reportedly said when first looking at Martin’s data.19 He could see that Martin had been suspended twice already that school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested. In each case, however, the case file on Martin was fudged to make the crime less serious than it was.

  To their credit, the officers, when questioned, told the truth about Martin and about the policies that kept him out of the justice system. From their statements, made under oath, it appears that Hurley instructed his officers to divert offending juveniles away from the criminal justice system and back to their respective schools for discipline. He did this subtly. As one sergeant told IA, the arrest statistics coming out of Martin’s school had been very high, and the detectives were told that they “needed to cut back on any type of crime that was going on there.”20 This directive allegedly came from Hurley. At least a few officers confirmed that Hurley was particularly concerned with the arrest rates of black males in the Miami-Dade system. In a letter obtained by NBC 6 of South Florida, a senior detective wrote, “[Hurley] asked that I reduce the number of arrests I effect of all black juveniles. I told him regardless of the race of an individual; if probable cause existed for an arrest that individual would be arrested. He was not happy with my response to his request.”21

  “Chief Hurley, for the past year, has been telling his command staff to lower the arrest rates,” volunteered another high-ranking detective. When asked by IA whether the M-DSPD was avoiding making arrests, that detective replied, “What Chief Hurley said on the record is that he commends the officer for using his discretion. What Chief Hurley really meant is that he’s commended the officer for falsifying a police report.”22 The IA interrogators seemed stunned by what they were hearing. They asked one female supervisor incredulously if she were actually ordered to “falsify reports.” She answered, “Pretty much, yes.”23

  In a purely statistical sense, Hurley’s policies were working. On February 15, 2012, eleven days before Martin’s death, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools put out a press release boasting of a 60 percent decline in school-based arrests, the largest decline by far in the state. “While our work is not completed, we are making tremendous progress in moving toward a pure prevention model,” Hurley told the Tampa Bay Times, “with enforcement as a last resort and an emphasis on education.”24 In truth, however, the only “education” a diverted student like Martin was getting was to be sent home—or wherever—on an unmonitored suspension. As a result, his parents seemed genuinely oblivious of the kind of trouble he had been stumbling into. Nor was there any “prevention.” With their previous crimes winked at, students felt empowered to commit more.

  Martin’s getting caught with the women’s jewelry and a burglary tool should have been a wake-up call for everyone in his life. It was not. Given the directives from the top, the officer who apprehended Martin chose not to link him directly to the jewelry. He instead wrote a report about “found items” and traced those items to Martin only through the police report number. He did not do this of his own initiative. He had told a sergeant, as the sergeant later testified under oath, that the need to lower the crime stats “came up from his supervisor up the chain.” The sergeant also acknowledged that “campus police records are not considered an educational record.”25 They cannot simply be sealed. Still, there was no further investigation. As far as Tracy Martin knew, his son had wandered into an “unauthorized area” and been suspended for writing graffiti. No big deal. Boys will be boys.

  Within a year, Hurley was demoted and then forced out of the department. In his defense, school districts across the country had been feeling pressure to think twice before disciplining black students. In July 2012 the Obama administration formalized the pressure with an executive order warning school districts to avoid “methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” The White House headlined the press release announcing this dubious stroke of reverse racism, “President Obama Signs New Initiative to Improve Educational Outcomes for African Americans.”26 Jesse Jackson brought this nonsense home to Sanford during a large April 1 rally. He implied that Martin would not have been killed if he had not been suspended from school, suspensions being just another form of “profiling” given that black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. “We must stop suspending our children,” Jackson said, then told the crowd to repeat: “Invest in them. Educate them.”27 Days later, in Miami, Jackson would get more specific and more dishonest. “How did he leave Miami?” Jackson asked of Martin, “’cause he was suspended from school on some trivial notion that there was some marijuana dust in a bag.”28

  In a way, Jackson was right. Martin should not have been suspended. He should have been arrested on both occasions. Had he been, his parents and his teachers would have known how desperately far he had gone astray. Instead, Martin was “diverted” into nothing useful. Just days after his non-arrest, he was allowed to wander the Retreat at Twin Lakes high and alone, looking, in Zimmerman’s immortal words, “like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something.”29

  Knowing that an established paper could get responses that a blog could not, the Treehouse’s Sundance tried to interest Orlando Sentinel reporter Rene Stutzman in the stolen jewelry case. He had taken the story about as far as a blogger could. Through some clever investigating, he had identified a home burglary in the neighborhood of Martin’s high school on the same day that Martin had been busted for possessing stolen female jewelry. The latter jewelry was still in possession of the school police. He explained to the reporter that he needed to compare it to the jewelry stolen in the home burglary and needed the Sentinel’s help to do it.

  “You want us to publish your stuff, right?” asked Stutzman. Sundance tried again to explain. “No,” said Sundance. “I hold no proprietary ownership of the truth. I’ve just been digging holes trying to find it, and now, after months of digging, I have narrowed down the location to within inches.” Sundance just wanted her to look at the documents he had acquired and make up her own mind.

  At this point, Stutzman reverted to her institutional protection mode. “If [this information] pertains to Trayvon Martin’s criminal behavior, or evidence of burglary, we are not interested,” she told him. “Our editors and editorial board have decided that nothing about that has anything to do with the events in Sanford.”30 This is the same editorial board that green-lit the profoundly unsubstantiated and utterly irrelevant story that an eight-year-old George Zimmerman allegedly molested a six-year-old cousin. And the sad thing is that Sundance contacted Stutzman because he thought she was perhaps the most responsible reporter covering the case.

  By March 26, the same day as the Miami Herald article about Trayvon’s suspensions, the major media had to work overtime to preserve the BGI narrative of innocent black “child” murdered by racist armed vigilante. The blogs had gotten ahold of the story, and they dared to go where the paid press should have gone instantly, namely, into Martin’s social media accounts. On Sunday, March 25, the Treehouse linked to a piece by blogger Dan Linehan, provocatively titled “Was Trayvon Martin a Drug Dealer?”

  The Martin that the reader met on his twitpic account went by the name of “Slimm” and the unsavory handle “No_Limit_Nigga.” Unlike the fresh-faced, innocent boy readers saw all over the news, this older, unsmiling Martin sported several gold teeth and numerous tattoos. Linehan also highlighted references to Martin’s apparent drug use. After his death, several of his friends posted on Twitter pictures of rolled blunts (marijuana cigars) as a memorial to Martin. As shall be seen, Martin may have died in pursuit of one. From the postings on his Facebook account, it seems likely, too, that Martin not only consumed marijuana but also dealt it. On February 5, three weeks before his death, one friend told Martin, “We got business to talk.” When Martin responded, “NO PHON,” the exasperated friend posted back, “Damn were u at a nigga needa plant.”31

  Zimmerman attorney Mark O’Mara would later argue that the court had an interest in presenting Trayvon Martin as he appeared on the night of February 26, 2012, and that was not the “several-years-old photo of Trayvon Martin as a boy wearing a red shirt.” Said O’Mara hopefully, “If the memory of Trayvon Martin is going to be a catalyst for a conversation about race relations in America then we should have an honest conversation.”32

  Unfortunately, he would find no one to converse with.

  14

  PICKING THE WRONG FIGHT

  WHILE THE MEDIA were continuing to insist that Zimmerman had stalked Martin and that the cries for help from this “child” filled the night air, his friends had already come to another conclusion. Wrote Skee Dollah Nickus just two days after Martin’s death, “Ima miss you till I die dog I know you whooped his ass doe.”1 Skee Dollah may have presumed this outcome given Martin’s budding reputation for street fighting. As one of his cousins posted on Facebook, five days before his death, “Yu aint tell me you swung on a bus driver.”2 Blogger Dan Linehan wondered, as others have, whether this alleged attack may have contributed to Martin’s most recent suspension. Given the M-DSPD’s diversion policies, punishment, in fact, was more likely to come through the school than the courts. Only the major media had the resources to locate the bus driver and establish the truth of the story. They did not bother.

  On April 1, Linehan posted a piece titled, “Did Trayvon Martin Referee School Fights?” Two of the five videos Martin posted on his YouTube channel were of students street fighting at his high school. In one of the videos, Martin appears to be the referee. The cameraman on one video says, “Watch out, Trayvon, or I’ll slap you nigga.” The videos have since been removed from Martin’s video channel. Gracing that site was a photo of Martin saluting the camera with both middle fingers raised.3

  On Monday, March 26, the Daily Caller exposed the darker side of Martin’s life to a broader audience in a story with the un-sensational headline “The Daily Caller obtains Trayvon Martin’s tweets.” This Washington-based news and opinion website has a relatively high and respectable profile as a conservative/libertarian source. Its reporting on this controversial a subject would have been difficult for the major media to ignore, but ignore the media did the 152 pages of unedited tweets the Daily Caller culled from No_Limit_Nigga’s Twitter account. Although most are innocuous, too many read like the one that follows: “f*** a bitch, any bitch, who you want? Take yo pick, but you gone have to take yo time.” In their totality, they show Martin to be a vulgar, sexist, angry adolescent whose life was moving in no useful direction.4

  More disturbing still for the keepers of the Trayvon flame was an article that same Monday in the Trayvon-friendly Orlando Sentinel. The article’s lede was as straightforward as a hard right jab.

  With a single punch, Trayvon Martin decked the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who eventually shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old, then Trayvon climbed on top of George Zimmerman and slammed his head into the sidewalk several times, leaving him bloody and battered, authorities have revealed to the Orlando Sentinel. That is the account Zimmerman gave police, and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say.5

  On Thursday of that same week, March 29, the Daily Caller revealed a second Martin Twitter feed, this one under the cryptic handle T33ZY_Taught_M3. The accompanying photo showed a dead-eyed Martin staring into the camera with his middle finger extended. The photo was taken on June 17, 2010, when Martin was fifteen. His unease in the world would have been clear to anyone who chose to see. In the most provocative of the tweets, sent two months before he died, Martin urged an unknown friend, “Plzz shoot da #mf dat lied 2 u!” It is impossible to tell how literal he meant to be taken, but Martin’s other tweets showed little gift for irony.6

  That same week New York Times columnist Bob Mackey made a desperate attempt to shore up the Martin orthodoxy with an article titled “Bloggers Cherry-Pick from Social Media to Cast Trayvon Martin as a Menace.” Mackey argued that the Daily Caller and others had ignored those communications that showed Martin in a more nuanced light, like his allegedly “poignant” comment that “You never notice da bad until all da good gone away.” To give his argument teeth, however, Mackey first attempted to subvert the legitimacy of the social media posts that the Daily Caller and others had been running. He zeroed in on the photo of a menacing Martin making an obscene gesture at the camera. Mackey made the case that since Martin’s social media sites were “reported” to have been hacked by an anonymous white supremacist, it was “possible” that photo could have been created through digital manipulation and “might not be genuine.”7

  Mackey linked to the reporting source, a Gotham-centric blog called Gawker, whose slogan—“Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news”—neatly sums up the site’s mission. A month before Martin’s death, Gawker made a tactical change in editorial policy. Each day, a different staff writer was obliged to abandon his or her regular beat and post whatever item that writer felt would attract the largest audience, whether it be a “dancing cat” video or a Burger King bathroom fight. The editor described this strategy as “traffic-whoring.”8