39

  SOURCING THE SCREAMS

  ON MARCH 16, 2012, Sanford city manager Norton Bonaparte Jr., a middle-aged mustachioed African-American, convened Trayvon Martin’s parents and their attorneys in the Sanford mayor’s office and played for them the 9-1-1 calls from the night Trayvon was shot. In reporting on what followed, ABC’s Matt Gutman posted a piece headlined “Trayvon Martin Neighborhood Watch Shooting: 9-1-1 Tapes Send Mom Crying from Room.”1 Gutman was not on the scene. He relied fully on the word of Team Trayvon as to what happened. “You hear a shot, a clear shot, then you hear a 17-year-old boy begging for his life,” said attorney Natalie Jackson. “Then you hear a second shot.” It quickly became an article of faith among Trayvon supporters, the media included, that the forty seconds of screams heard on the one 9-1-1 call were those of young Martin. His mother, Sybrina Fulton, emerged as the high priestess of this orthodoxy. In drawing up its affidavit of probable cause to charge George Zimmerman with the second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin, the State of Florida relied on her identification of “the voice crying for help” as her son’s.

  During the trial, the 9-1-1 call that captured the screams came to be called the “Lauer 9-1-1 call” after the witness who made the call, Jenna Lauer. On the Friday that the State wrapped up its case, prosecutors put Fulton on the stand to discuss that call.2 Although normally well turned out, Fulton looked positively matronly with her spectacles, her demure black dress, and her hair in a bun. As expected, and as highly anticipated by those wanting to see Zimmerman convicted, Fulton was not backing off her claims about the Lauer tape.

  “Ma’am, that scream or yell, do you recognize that?” asked de la Rionda. “Yes,” she said. When de la Rionda asked whose voice she thought it was, Fulton answered firmly and defiantly, “Trayvon Benjamin Martin.” In cross-examination, defense attorney Mark O’Mara asked Fulton two questions, the impact of which was understood only by those following the case closely: Did she anticipate what she was about to hear when she first heard the Lauer tape? And did she discuss the tape in advance with any member of the family? She denied doing either.

  Taking the stand Friday morning after Fulton was her son and Martin’s older half brother, Jahvaris Fulton. Jahvaris also claimed to recognize the voice on the Lauer tape as Trayvon Martin’s. O’Mara pointed out in cross-examination, however, that Jahvaris had told a reporter two weeks after listening to the tape in the Sanford mayor’s office that he could not be sure whose voice he heard. “I guess I didn’t want to believe that it was him; that’s why during that interview I said I wasn’t sure,” said Jahvaris. To anyone with an open mind, his recovered memory seemed all too predictable.

  The Fultons were the prosecution’s last two witnesses. Right after the close of the State’s case, O’Mara made a motion for a judgment of acquittal—a request to the judge to end the case from the bench. He argued eloquently that given the absence of any direct evidence of Zimmerman’s guilt, the case should not go to the jury. “The motion was well-reasoned, and strongly founded on Florida’s case law,” said Ralph Branca at LI. “It was also doomed to fail before a Judge who has consistently denied reasonable defense motions out of hand, while rubber-stamping motions by the State that [bore] not the slightest relevancy to the facts of this case.”3 And fail it did.

  Although it was late on a Friday afternoon, Judge Nelson ordered the defense to present its witnesses. This actually played well for the defense. On the same day that Sybrina Fulton testified, Zimmerman’s mother, Gladys, took the stand as an emotional counterbalance. Gladys was the first of eight witnesses to testify that it was Zimmerman’s voice calling for help on the Lauer 9-1-1 call. Jorgé Meza, Gladys’s brother, followed his sister. Both had dark complexions and spoke accented English. They were every bit as sympathetic as Martin’s parents and even more convincing in their testimony.

  Following the family members to the stand on Monday were four Zimmerman friends, all of whom said that the voice they heard on the Lauer tape was unquestionably Zimmerman’s. Perhaps more importantly, they provided quiet testament to Zimmerman’s character. Of the friends, the fourth was the most compelling. John Donnelly had been a medic in Vietnam. In his emotional testimony, he explained that when he heard a friend crying for help on the battlefield, he knew who it was without even seeing him. In a similar vein, Donnelly claimed that he had no trouble linking Zimmerman’s speaking voice to his screaming voice. Juror B37 found Donnelly to be the most credible of all the witnesses. “I thought he was awe inspiring, the experiences that he had had over in the war,” she said.4 When Donnelly finished, the court broke for lunch. Martin supporters in Twitterdom had no patience for the testimony of these good people and no sense of the irony of their own impatience:5

  Hearing them refer to this overfed, overzealous child-killer as “Georgie” is kind of making me nauseous

  George Zimmerman’s best friend & wife? We are supposed to believe them? TUH. How insulting.

  How utterly shameful that TM’s parents are forced to listen to him scream again and again to facilitate these defense liars

  It was after lunch that the hammer came down on the prosecution’s case. The man delivering the blow was Investigator Serino. Under O’Mara’s guidance, Serino told how he played the 9-1-1 tapes, including the Lauer tape, for Tracy Martin. He played them two days after the shooting and more than two weeks before Martin’s ex-wife would hear the Lauer tape. When Serino asked Martin if his son were the one heard screaming, Martin said no. Sanford police officer Doris Singleton testified next. She witnessed the exchange and confirmed what Serino had said. “He was telling Chris it was not his son’s voice,” said Singleton. The testimony of the two officers, both of whom were sympathetic to the Martin family, undercut Fulton’s testimony that she was unaware of the Lauer call until she heard it in her ex-husband’s presence.

  In a bold move, the defense called Tracy Martin to the stand after the two police officers. He had been listening with obvious discomfort to the Sanford police officers from his seat in the family row. As might be expected, he denied that he ever said that the voice was not Trayvon’s. As Martin recounted, when Serino asked him, “Do you recognize the voice,” he rolled away from the desk on his chair, shook his head, and said, “I can’t tell.” Martin also denied ever telling his ex-wife that he had heard the tape before their collective listening session. A week before that session, however, he and Fulton had filed a complaint demanding the tapes’ release.6 O’Mara did not challenge him on that complaint, but he did on why he changed his mind about the source of the screams. Martin claimed to have listened to the tape twenty times in the mayor’s office, finally recognizing, “It was Trayvon’s voice.” He was not at all convincing.

  “I think they said anything a mother and a father would say,” said Juror B37 of Martin’s parents. “Just like George Zimmerman’s mom and father.” She told Anderson Cooper that she and four of her fellow jurors believed Zimmerman was the one screaming. The sixth juror wasn’t sure. The source of that scream mattered hugely. “I think it was pretty important,” said B37. “Because it was a long cry and scream for help, that whoever was calling for help was in fear of their life.”7

  Any disinterested observer would have had to agree with LI’s Andrew Branca that the biggest news of the defense’s first day “was the utter implosion of the State’s ‘scream’ narrative into which they had invested the heart and soul of their theory of the case.”8 Irresponsible to the bitter end, the folks at ABC did not quite see it that way. Diane Sawyer led the network’s coverage of the story with the maudlin and deceptive opening, “Today a father did everything in his power to convince a jury that the cry for help on that audio tape was not Zimmerman. That was his son. Matt Gutman was there.” Of course Matt Gutman was there, apparently unrepentant about past malpractice. The footage used to support his reporting featured a mournful Martin “listening to his [son’s] life being taken.”9 That “listening” phrase was used in the headline of the accompanying online piece.

  “George Zimmerman’s fate could hinge on those screams,” said Gutman on air in Sanford, as though there remained any doubt as to their source. Sixteen months earlier, Benjamin Crump had ventured a theory as to why Martin might have been yelling for help. “You can conclude who is the person crying out for help presumably when they see a gun,” he said. Revelations about Martin’s character since then, particularly his fondness for guns, had rendered that theory absurd, but in the interim the mainstream media had not ventured any other explanation. Nor had the prosecution offered any during its two weeks of presenting evidence. Given so obvious an information gap, Zimmerman supporters in the blogosphere ventured to fill it in:10

  GZ punched himself in the nose, threw himself onto the sidewalk, slamming the back of his own head into the concrete, and finally pulled a terrified and screaming TM onto himself while simultaneously shooting him through the heart.

  Trayvon was the one screaming. When you are breaking someone’s nose and banging his head against the ground, it hurts your hands and your wrists.

  Powerful George “Hulk Hogan” Zimmerman had little Trayvon by his little wrists and was slamming the poor little guy’s fists into his nose. Obviously a clever move on Zimmerman’s part to set up his dastardly racist crime. Fortunately the Judge and DA were too smart to fall for it.

  Not content to elevate the Martin-as-screamer scenario, Gutman concluded his reporting as dishonestly as he had begun, with Zimmerman’s own comment on first hearing the Lauer tape, “That doesn’t even sound like me.” True to form, ABC’s producers did not include Serino’s clarification of that innocent remark. On the encouraging side, however, ABC’s legal analyst, Dan Abrams, publicly backed off his earlier comments. “Now that the prosecution’s case against Zimmerman is in,” said Abrams a day before Gutman’s report, “as a legal matter, I just don’t see how a jury convicts him of second degree murder or even manslaughter in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.”11 The media were catching on, but not enough of them, and not soon enough.

  At the end of the day on which Tracy Martin testified, former Sanford police chief Bill Lee took the stand. He told the jurors about the mechanics of how the Martin family and their attorneys got to hear the Lauer tape. As he explained, the group listened together in a room with no law enforcement present. This, Lee said, was a conspicuous violation of the best practices for identifying anything. He had recommended that the tape be played for each family member individually “so their identification would not be influenced by others.” For a variety of reasons, none of them good, that did not happen.

  After testifying, Lee did his first TV interview in more than a year, this time a fair-minded one with CNN’s George Howell. Lee spoke regretfully of the pressure that had been brought to bear upon him in March 2012. During the course of the interview, Howell alluded to “outside” pressures but did not identify them. A principal source of that pressure, city manager Norton Bonaparte, asked Lee “several times” during that period, “Can an arrest be made now?” Bonaparte was not the only one prodding him. “It was related to me that they just wanted an arrest,” said Lee. “They didn’t care if it was dismissed later.” Lee did not specify who the “they” was, but Crump and Parks had to be among them. Lee paid for his resistance. Bonaparte fired him before his first anniversary on the job. “I upheld my oath to abide by the laws of the state of Florida and the Constitution,” said Lee in retrospect, “and I’m happy that at the end of the day I can walk away with my integrity.”12

  The same day as the Howell interview, day twelve of the trial, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch released the results of its investigation into Justice Department activities in Florida in March and April 2012. For more than a year the Treehouse had been calling attention to the provocative role played by the stealthy and powerful Community Relations Service (CRS) within the Department of Justice. Judicial Watch was able to document at least some of its involvement. Although CRS is officially tasked with identifying and easing racial tensions, the information secured by Judicial Watch showed that the agency “actively worked to foment unrest.”13 Former CRS director Ondray Harris confirmed that its career employees were often guilty of “acting as advocates instead of mediators.”14

  In their own words, CRS employees traveled to Florida on the taxpayer dime to “work marches, demonstrations, and rallies, . . . provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31, . . . [and] provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.”15 Harris, himself an African-American, had particular problems with regional director Tommy Battles, who was coordinating the CRS Sanford efforts in 2012. He is “black, and very pro-black,” said Harris. “I felt such views compromised implementing the CRS mandate.”16 Obama and his Department of Justice apparently felt otherwise. They played favorites along racial lines in the Zimmerman case from day one, never ceased, and never apologized.

  Also leaning on Chief Lee, according to Judicial Watch, was a “collective of young people of color” known as the “Dream Defenders.”17 After marching from Daytona to Sanford before Zimmerman was arrested in April 2012, the group barricaded the entrance to the Sanford police station and demanded that Lee be fired for failing to file murder charges in the case. Backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the White House’s favorite union, the Dream Defenders purportedly “organize to end the criminalization of black and brown youth.” Apparently, Zimmerman was either not brown enough or young enough to secure their blessing.

  40

  RESCUING SCIENCE

  ON THE SECOND FULL DAY of the defense’s presentation, day eleven of the trial, Mark O’Mara called Dr. Vincent Di Maio to the stand. The defense’s goal was to align George Zimmerman’s account of the shooting with the medical evidence. In the process, Di Maio helped revive the reputation of the forensic pathology profession after the woeful performance of the two medical examiners who had testified earlier on behalf of the State: Dr. Varlerie Rao and Dr. Shiping Bao.1

  First up had been Dr. Valerie Rao. Educated in India, Rao had little to recommend herself other than the fact that she worked in the same judicial district as state attorney Angela Corey. In her eagerness to down-play the damage done to Zimmerman’s skull, Rao gave all the appearance of throwing the game for her hometown team. At one point, for instance, she interpreted a couple of obvious goose eggs as natural configurations of Zimmerman’s head. On another occasion, when asked by John Guy to assess Zimmerman’s injuries, she answered, “They were very insignificant.” In fact, she repeated the words “insignificant,” “minor,” and “only”—as in “only three impacts of his head on cement”—as if her side scored a point every time she did so.

  In cross-examination, O’Mara quickly established that Rao owed her position to Corey. He then clarified her prior working relationship with the prosecutors. More to the point, he got Rao to admit she really had no idea how many blows to the head Zimmerman sustained. Better still, her presence on the stand allowed O’Mara to trot out once again the many gruesome photos of Zimmerman’s bloodied skull.

  Dr. Shiping Bao, the pathologist who oversaw the autopsy of Trayvon Martin, set back the cause of the international pathologist even further. In heavily accented English, Bao waded erratically through his notes to establish little except that it took Martin from one to ten minutes to die. Freelancing emotionally, Bao attempted to describe the suffering that Martin would have endured before the defense successfully cut off his testimony with an objection. At the end, Bao left the jury more confused about the nature of Martin’s death than they were before he began. Again, though, the jurors saw many photos of Zimmerman’s badly bruised head.

  By contrast, Di Maio’s accent was pure New York. Accent can matter as much to a jury as it can to a frustrated cable customer asking why his HBO is cutting out. More than accent, though, Di Maio had credentials—nearly an hour’s worth—much of it dealing with gunshot wounds. His experience informed his presentation style, which was both colorful and concise. Di Maio clearly explained something neither Rao nor Bao could, specifically what comes out of a gun when it is fired and why it matters.

  Di Maio observed that the fatal shot left a two-inch-by-two-inch area of gunpowder “tattooing” around the wound on Martin’s chest. From this observation, he was able to determine that Zimmerman fired his Kel-Tech PF9 at a distance of two to four inches from Martin. Had Zimmerman pressed the gun’s muzzle against Martin’s chest, as the State insinuated, the unburnt gunpowder would have been found in the wound, not on the skin around it. This determination mattered for one particular reason. The two-to-four-inch gap between the shirt and the chest strongly suggested that Martin was leaning over Zimmerman when the shot was fired—just as Zimmerman claimed. If Martin were standing or sitting up, as the prosecution desperately tried to establish, the wet shirt would have clung to his body.

  Di Maio also addressed the issue of evidence collection and preservation. Being as charitable as he could, he pointed out that by storing the wet clothes in plastic bags, not paper bags, as best practices dictate, Bao’s office may have degraded any DNA found on the clothes. Equally problematic, according to Di Maio, was the Sanford PD’s failure to bag Martin’s hands. This oversight might have allowed the rain to wash Zimmerman’s DNA off Martin’s knuckles. Di Maio went on to explain that Bao failed to examine Martin’s fingers for internal bruising despite the obvious abrasions on them. In sum, whatever DNA points the State might have scored with Bao’s testimony, and they could not have been many, Di Maio wiped them from the scoreboard. Juror B37 confirmed as much.