Jayne Surdyka, a fiftyish blonde, lived alone in a townhome just north of the east-west cut-through where it intersected the dog walk, the T. She told the court that she initially heard a confrontation between two males, one with a dominant, aggressive voice and the other with a softer, meeker tone. “It was someone being very aggressive and angry at someone,” she told the court. Although her view was obscured by the rain and the darkness, and she, too, just saw shadows, the sounds of violence sufficiently alarmed her to call 9-1-1. The State played all sixteen hysterical minutes of the call. Aggravating the hysteria was Surdyka’s profound sense of isolation. Even after the police arrived, the very patient male dispatcher proved unable to calm her. When he recommended she go stay with family or friends, Surdyka, a former schoolteacher, confessed to having neither.

  At the time of the shooting, Surdyka knew nothing about Martin or Zimmerman and had not talked to either one of them. From the imagery she gleaned in the media, she presumed that Zimmerman was the aggressor. “I truly believe the second yell for help was a yelp,” said Surdyka. “It was excruciating. I really felt it was a boy’s voice.” Before the trial, she had never seen a photo of a bloody Zimmerman, a testament in itself to the breadth of media bias and the myopia of even college-educated professionals. It was clear to anyone watching that Surdyka’s ignorance helped preserve her misperceptions.

  Defense attorney Don West led Surdyka to concede that seventeen-year-old boys often have deep and mature voices, a fact that should have been obvious to her as a teacher. Since the defense was not allowed to reference Martin’s social media pages, West was unable to enter into evidence the Martin memorial page on which a girlfriend had written that she loved “his deep voice.”2 Yet even if he had been able to, it would not likely have shaken Surdyka’s confidence in her initial observations. Indeed, despite all evidence to the contrary, she even continued to insist that she heard three shots.

  As was true with Bahadoor, Surdyka’s search for meaning—she occasionally and falsely listed herself as a “former Olympian”—led her to a new role as scorned eyewitness. Too rattled to even speak to the police on the night of the shooting, Surdyka was soon enough appearing on national television complaining about the lack of police follow-through. Near the end of West’s cross-examination, he asked her about appearing on TV, and Surdyka denied it. “Really?” asked West.

  SURDYKA:

  Well, just the one time on Anderson Cooper, but only on condition that I not be named or identified.

  WEST:

  Weren’t you also on television another time?

  SURDYKA:

  Well, yes, I was videotaped by another journalist.

  WEST:

  And that was played on TV several times?

  SURDYKA:

  I only saw it once.

  WEST:

  So you were taped, and you saw yourself on TV, that second time?

  SURDYKA:

  Yes.

  The State called still another female eyewitness to testify, a blonde Columbian named Selma Mora Lamilla. As Lamilla admitted through an interpreter, she and her roommate did not see anything until after the shot was fired. When she did look out, she saw Zimmerman on top of Martin. This revelation may have roused the ill-informed, but it only confirmed what Zimmerman said about the sequence of events. After the shot was fired, he told the Sanford police, “I slid out from underneath him and got on top of the suspect holding his hands away from his body.” He never claimed otherwise.

  Those paying close attention found it curious that the State called Lamilla to testify but not her outspoken, English-speaking roommate, Mary Cutcher. In the six-week-long hysteria between Martin’s shooting and Zimmerman’s arrest, Cutcher, a thirtyish blonde, was easily the most visible of the eyewitnesses. Her message was one that the media wanted to hear: the police were ignoring eyewitnesses whose testimony challenged Zimmerman’s innocence. At the height of the post-shooting furor, Cutcher told David Weigel of Slate that after giving her initial testimony, she called the Sanford police several times and did not hear back. When the police did respond to her calls they had little interest in what she had to say. “We were told, ‘you guys just need to calm down,’” Cutcher told Weigel. “They never followed up after that.”3

  To spread this message, Cutcher appeared on local TV, on CNN’s Anderson Cooper show, on Dateline NBC, at press conferences with Benjamin Crump, and at rallies with the Martin family. “I don’t know this family. I’m only trying to help,” Cutcher said at a March 2012 press conference. “I think that they [the Sanford police] are trying to cover up something that they made a mistake and, honestly, I feel like they’re taking the light off them and trying to discredit my statement.”4 The media then sought out more reticent witnesses like Surdyka, Lamilla, and Chahadoor to echo Cutcher’s theme.

  Although Cutcher admittedly did not see the struggle that led up to the shooting, she, like Surdyka, fully bought into the Trayvon-as-child narrative that the family’s advisers had crafted from day one. “It sounded young. It didn’t sound like a grown man, is my point,” Cutcher told NBC’s Lester Holt of the screaming she heard that night. “It sounded to me like someone was in distress and it wasn’t like a crying, sobbing boo-hoo; it was a definite whine.”5 The online version of that Dateline piece was headlined, “Witnesses describe Trayvon Martin’s final moments; Parents say ‘He was headed on the right path.’”6

  No, Trayvon was not on the right path, nor were the media. Ignored by the press in what Weigel described as Cutcher’s “media tour” were the words Cutcher told the 9-1-1 operator on the night in question, namely that there was “a black guy standing up over him [the shooting victim].”7 This call was available to the media as early as March 16, 2012. By not listening, they could take Cutcher seriously. The State could not afford to. With a sharp-edged question or two, the defense would have cut a swath through the fog of Cutcher’s memory that would have embarrassed the State even more than it did Cutcher.

  36

  PROFILING THE PROFILER

  DAY THREE SERVED UP THE MOST target-rich environment for crowdsourcing that the trial would present. Center stage that afternoon was the elusive Dee Dee, Witness 8, the real-life Rachel Jeantel, the plus-size, American born daughter of Haitian and Dominican parents. Nineteen at the time of the trial, Jeantel defied easy description. On her first afternoon on the stand, she was sassy, defiant, and often incomprehensible. On the second day, she was sluggish, depressive, and still very nearly incomprehensible. Before she was through, she would test the patience of the prosecution, the defense, the judge, the jury, and especially the court reporter.

  During her first afternoon of testimony, de la Rionda prodded Jeantel through the familiar story she had been coached imperfectly to tell: she was on the phone with Martin; a man in a truck was observing him; she encouraged Martin to run home; he tried to; the man followed him and kept getting closer. Finally, a breathless Martin turned to Zimmerman and said, “Why you following me for?” to which Zimmerman responded, “What are you doing around here?” He then bumped or pushed Martin. The fatal altercation began. Martin cried out, “Get off, get off.” The phone went dead.

  The un-coached highlight of the day, arguably of the trial, occurred when de la Rionda asked Jeantel how Martin first described Zimmerman. According to Jeantel, he sized Zimmerman up as “a creepy ass cracka,” a slur she liked enough to repeat. In so saying, she introduced a phrase into the American lexicon that may outlast the memory of Trayvon Martin. She also reversed the understanding of just who profiled whom. This was a point Don West did not hesitate to make in his cross-examination. In fact, he repeated the “creepy ass cracka” line at least twice as often as Jeantel did. As he stressed to Jeantel and jurors, “[the incident] was racial because Trayvon Martin put race in this.”1

  In fact, however, West may have misunderstood the meaning of the phrase. The Urban Dictionary defines an “ass cracker” as “one who engages in anal sex.” In other words, Martin may have thought Zimmerman a homosexual, even a “rapist” according to Jeantel. This was a point that Jeantel repeated in posttrial interviews; so, curiously, would de la Rionda. Given the unintelligibility of Jeantel’s speech, West seemed to have missed it.

  In his cross-examination, West established for the jury the many lies that Jeantel and her handlers had been telling, some from her first introduction to the larger world in March 2012. The media already knew about them. The jury did not. No, Jeantel was not sixteen and a minor as Crump first insisted. She was eighteen at the time of the shooting. And no, she had not been hospitalized on hearing of Martin’s death. That was pure fabrication. The prosecution had trouble as well with the age of its first witness, Brandy Green’s son, Chad Joseph. During his opening statement, John Guy insisted Chad was twelve at the time of the shooting. In the media accounts at the time, he was alternately said to be thirteen or fourteen. Sixteen months later, at the trial, Chad identified himself as a fifteen-year-old.

  West touched on many of the inconsistencies in Jeantel’s storytelling over time: the unaccounted-for twenty-five minutes between Martin’s leaving the 7-Eleven and arriving at the Retreat at Twin Lakes; the unaccounted-for four minutes between the time Martin ran for Green’s town house and the time Zimmerman allegedly confronted him; her conveniently recovered memory of Martin yelling, “Get off, get off” after his phone was knocked free. But West scored major points on one seeming discrepancy: the change in Zimmerman’s response to Martin’s first question.

  Following West’s circuitous interrogation was not easy, but here is how LI’s Andrew Branca interpreted what West had elicited from Jeantel. In her phone interview with Crump, Jeantel recounted that when Martin asked Zimmerman, “Why are you following me?” Zimmerman responded nonthreateningly, “What are you talking about?” In her interview with de la Rionda two weeks later, she claimed that Zimmerman answered Martin with the confrontational response, “What are you doin’ around here?” This shift mattered. Jeantel’s revised statement, argued Branca, “was much more in line with what the State need[ed] to support the arrest and prosecution of Zimmerman. Indeed, Jeantel’s newly revealed testimony formed the very backbone of the State’s affidavit of probable cause.”2 Although an astute observer, Branca was reporting close to real time. What he understood West to be saying was likely what the jury did, but in fact it was West who introduced the phrase “What are you talking about?”—not Jeantel. It was he who implanted the idea in the observer’s mind that Jeantel had changed her testimony, but she had not.

  Given the pressures of daily reporting, Branca misremembered what Jeantel had said previously. In fact, in the letter Jeantel gave to Sybrina Fulton, she made no claim as to what Zimmerman said, and in her March 2012 interview with Crump, she claimed to hear Zimmerman say, “What you doin’ around here?”3 She repeated this same phrase with de la Rionda in April 2012 and under direct examination at the trial. On this one critical point she remained consistent, and yet West managed to make her appear just the opposite.

  As with Bahadoor, de la Rionda did not straighten out the record when he had the chance. He did not refute West forcefully. He did not insist that, on this point at least, Jeantel never changed her story. Like West, de la Rionda had to suspect that much of Jeantel’s testimony had been fabricated with Crump’s help, including her alleged overhearing of Martin’s final exchange with Zimmerman. One wonders whether he had gotten lost trying to follow Jeantel’s mumbled responses or whether he had grown queasy about his own role in her fabrications. Once again, though, the skeptics in his own camp had to question whether he was actually playing to win.

  Had Jeantel been sharper, West might have enjoyed picking her testimony apart, but she was so sadly slow that at one point she had to confess her inability to read back a letter that she herself had dictated. When this American-born high school senior told the court, “I don’t read cursive,” she made more than a few people question the public education enterprise, particularly in Miami-Dade. She also turned herself from an object of scorn to one of pity. West had to tread carefully.

  That he did, shifting the blame for the prevarications from Jeantel to the people who had put her in that awkward position. With great patience, West reconstructed her reluctant interview with de la Rionda in April 2012. As Jeantel told the story, a two-car caravan drove to the house where she was staying and escorted her back to Sybrina Fulton’s living room. In the cars were Crump, Fulton, and de la Rionda, among others. During her sworn interview with de la Rionda, Jeantel sat next to Fulton on the couch while Fulton’s attorneys hovered nearby. As Branca saw it, “A more coercive environment for the taking of a witness’s statement is hard to imagine.”4 West offered Jeantel the excuse that she’d altered her testimony lest it upset Fulton, who was sitting next to her, weeping. Jeantel took the bait. She made it as clear as she could in her butchered English that she had changed some details to spare Fulton any further pain. It was hard to tell whether Jeantel meant what she said, but for the prosecution, there was no taking that admission back.

  Jeantel dismayed more than a few commentators who had been expecting a genuine star witness, but not the painfully predictable Sunny Hostin, CNN’s “legal analyst.” Her summary of Jeantel’s testimony to Anderson Cooper showed just how single-minded at least some major players in the media remained:

  I thought that she was a credible witness. I thought it was raw, I thought it was un-coached. I thought that she spoke like a teenager, and what I thought was very important is everything she says, Anderson, is corroborated. She says she was on the phone. Well, there are phone records. She said the amount of the time that she was on the phone with Trayvon Martin. Well, there are records of that. She is at least the third or fourth witness that contradicts directly what George Zimmerman told police, his version of events. And so I think when you look at it in context, it’s very, very helpful to the prosecution.5

  This was madness. Beyond the mere fact of the phone call, nothing was corroborated. Jeantel’s testimony was much more helpful to the defense than the prosecution. Martin’s humblest fans in the blogosphere saw Jeantel’s testimony more clearly than Hostin did. For some, that day marked a turning point—the first time they sensed that Zimmerman just might be acquitted. Rather than digging up facts as the Treepers did, they took to Twitter to express their outrage. What follows were some of the more printable threats:6 If they don’t kill Zimmerman Ima kill me a cracka.

  I’ll kill him. George Zimmerman goin walk.

  I swear ill kill Zimmerman my damn self

  Bruh ill kill George Zimmerman ass

  Watching the Zimmerman trial. If he don’t get life ill kill him myself.

  Ima kill a white person in self defense if Zimmerman go free lol on everything.

  If George Zimmerman win I’m gonna kill a fat white boy dat look lik George Zimmerman I swear lol

  If Zimmerman get off ima kill him myself since no one wanna take care of his Mexican burrito eatin ass.

  As for the Treepers, Jeantel surprised them only in her oddball extravagance. They had been anticipating this train wreck since Benjamin Crump tied the sixteen-year-old “Dee Dee” to the tracks some fifteen months earlier. “Remove your snark hats, remove your emotional dropped jaw, and focus, focus, focus on what she said today,” posted Sundance that first afternoon. He asked his fellow Treepers to compare what she said on the stand with her original interview with Ben Crump and ABC, her first written statement, and her first interview with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “After you have provided the context for the falsehood identified,” wrote Sundance, “then outline the possible line of inquiry that West/O’Mara might take to expose the lie in court. Again, be intellectual in analysis—not emotional. Provide the substance and [h] ow the question would be appropriately framed.”7

  One point that West did not raise, but that Sundance did, was how de la Rionda could have interrogated a girl he thought to be a minor without the permission of a parent. As Jeantel made clear, the caravan picked her up at a friend’s house. According to Jeantel’s testimony, her mother was in Haiti at the time of Fulton’s first approach and may have been two weeks later when this interview took place. More than one Treeper noticed something that the defense overlooked or chose not to pursue—Jeantel’s off-handed observation that she and Martin feared that Zimmerman might be gay. Said Treeper “Fred12” in response, “So Trayvon was a homophobe?”8

  The Treepers also noticed Jeantel’s casual admission that not all of the texts sent from her phone were sent by her. If not she, they wondered, then who? Others were curious about Jeantel’s odd description of where she and Martin rediscovered each other. “He came around my area,” said Jeantel cryptically. She tracked the renewal of this relationship—they had not really seen each other in six years—to February 1, 2012, three weeks before Martin left for Sanford. They had only seen each other a few times, and although unattractive and admittedly not his girlfriend, she quickly developed a bond with Martin around their shared interests. For Martin, as Sundance noted, those interests included “Dope, Weed, Guns, and “gangsta-isms.”9

  Unpaid and underappreciated, Sundance was doing the best reporting in America on the case. At the time of Jeantel’s appearance, he was in the Miami area, digging into Martin’s background, especially his relationship with the Miami-Dade School Police Department. One thing he could be sure of, however, was that certain people did not welcome the work he was doing. The school police, for instance, were “slow-walking” his FOIA requests through the system, but that was the least of his concerns. During the second day of Jeantel’s testimony, Sundance called a contact in the media. He gave that person his full name, his address, and his social security number, “just in case something happens to me.” He had reason to worry. That morning someone had surgically removed the valve stems from two of his tires, leaving them terminally flat. That same person had also taken a Miami-Dade Police business card, sliced off the name on the bottom, and written one word on the back—STOP!!10