On March 16, under pressure from Team Trayvon, the Sanford Police Department released the 9-1-1 calls, as well as Zimmerman’s initial nonemergency call. Later that day, the SPD turned copies of the calls over to the media. Tracy Martin had listened to at least some of these calls two days after the shooting, including the call by Zimmerman. At the time, he made a mental note of the dispatcher’s request that Zimmerman not follow Martin. His lawyers seemed convinced that this request would help them make their case that Zimmerman was a rogue stalker. What they heard on March 16 was not nearly as convincing as they had hoped. No matter. They had their agenda set and the media in their corner.

  This was a critical moment in the life of the Trayvon phenomenon. Despite a national piece here and there and a surging social media ground-swell, no national celebrity had descended on Sanford as of mid-March. The Twitter hashtag #Trayvon had not trended. And the story had barely broken out of Florida. This all changed with the release of the 9-1-1 calls. If the content of these calls would eventually help Zimmerman, the reporting on them did quite the opposite.

  Enter ABC correspondent Matt Gutman stage left. Blogger Antoine Reid described Gutman’s TV appeal, at least to the low-information slice of the news audience. “Where the heck did ABC recruit this guy from?” gushed Reid. “It’s like Christmas when this guy comes on to report about something—he has that stereotypical immaculate dark news anchor hair, a nice build to him, wears the tightest shirts he can find. Wooh, heat wave!”9 Gutman grew up in the affluent New Jersey suburb of Westfield, graduated from Williams College in 2000, and had been rapidly climbing the ABC News ladder ever since. Based in Miami, he had the opportunity to own the Martin story and the ambition to do just that.

  A century ago, shortly after founding the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Walter Williams penned the timeless Journalist’s Creed. Successful journalism, Williams insisted, is “tolerant but never careless, self-controlled, patient, always respectful of its readers but always unafraid, is quickly indignant at injustice; is unswayed by the appeal of the privilege or the clamor of the mob; seeks to give every man a chance.”10 They apparently failed to teach Williams’s creed at Williams College or reinforce it at ABC. On March 13, Gutman violated just about every one of its cautions, tweeting that Zimmerman “shot 17yr old teen bc he was black, wore hoodie walking slowly.” From day one, he worked under the elitist assumption that the Sanford police were either corrupt, incompetent, or both, and discounted whatever information led them to refrain from arresting Zimmerman, “likely not 2 be arrested.”11

  Late on March 16 Gutman posted a piece on the ABC News website that helped set the tone of the coverage to come. He based its inflammatory headline, “Trayvon Martin Neighborhood Watch Shooting: 911 Tapes Send Mom Crying From Room,” fully on the word of PR maestro Ryan Julison and admitted as much. The article implied, although it did not say so specifically, that Sybrina Fulton left the room in tears because she heard her son scream for help on the 911 calls. Attorney Natalie Jackson was busy making this point. “You hear a shot, a clear shot, then you hear a 17-year-old boy begging for his life,” she was widely quoted as saying. “Then you hear a second shot.”12

  In the accompanying video piece for Good Morning America, Gutman reinforced this insinuation. In the process, he may have set a new national record for most mistakes of consequence in a two-minute news bite:13

  GUTMAN:

  It was February 25.

  TRUTH:

  It was February 26.

  GUTMAN:

  Trayvon was staying at his stepmother’s.

  TRUTH:

  Martin was staying with Brandy Green, a girlfriend of his father’s. His mother as well as his stepmother, Alicia Stanley, lived in greater Miami.

  GUTMAN:

  He left for the store at halftime of the NBA All-Star Game. TRUTH: He left hours earlier. He was dead before the game started.

  GUTMAN:

  The “gunshots” are triggering outrage.

  TRUTH:

  There was only one gunshot. The media coverage was triggering the outrage.

  GUTMAN:

  Trayvon was “100 pounds lighter.”

  TRUTH:

  He was less than fifty pounds lighter. The autopsy recorded Trayvon as weighing 158 pounds. Zimmerman weighed in at the police station at 207, fully clothed.

  GUTMAN:

  “You can hear him stalk Martin.”

  TRUTH:

  He did not stalk Martin. When the dispatcher realized

  Zimmerman was following Martin and said, “We don’t need you to do that,” Zimmerman said, “Okay” and stopped. Gutman edited out Zimmerman’s “Okay” and followed immediately with his own comment, “But then came the gunshots.”

  GUTMAN:

  Zimmerman had a record—“battery on a police officer and resisting arrest.”

  TRUTH:

  The charges had been dropped. Gutman did not mention that fact.

  GUTMAN:

  Police have been accused of “correcting one eyewitness, while ignoring another.”

  TRUTH:

  Yes, but the Sanford police did so for good reason. Several eyewitnesses had seen very little. Others had seen a lot. Witness 11 called 9-1-1, and one can hear desperate cries of “Help!” for roughly forty seconds until they promptly stop with a gunshot. The investigators knew it was Zimmerman who was crying out. An hour after the shooting, the best eyewitness, Witness 6, told the Sanford police that he saw a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy . . . or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help.” According to Witness 6, the black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.”14 Witness 13 waited until the fighting ended, went outside, and saw Zimmerman walking towards him. “Am I bleeding?” Zimmerman asked. Witness 13 answered yes. He also noticed “blood on the back of his head” and took a picture of it.15

  Gutman may not have heard the audio of these interviews, but Witness 6— “Jon,” as he identified himself on camera—had spoken on camera to a local TV station the day after the shooting. “The guy on bottom who I believe had a red sweater on was yelling to me, ‘Help, help,’” the witness said. “I told them to stop and I was calling 911.” As both Zimmerman and the witness confirmed, Zimmerman appealed directly to this man for help.16

  The one witness Gutman presented on camera was the one all the media wanted, Mary Cutcher, a thirty-one-year-old massage therapist. Cutcher appeared in Gutman’s piece at a Team Trayvon press conference, where she said confidently, “We know it’s not self-defense.” As Gutman suggested, Cutcher was one of the witnesses the Sanford police corrected or ignored, but he did not say why. In fact, on her 9-1-1 call Cutcher insisted that there was “a black guy standing up over [the shooting victim].”17 The SPD could not take this information seriously.

  In an interview with the Sanford police four days after the shooting, Cutcher claimed, “I didn’t pay much attention to [the altercation]. I didn’t hear any words. It sounded like someone was struggling or hurt or something.” She clarified that to say, “I heard nothing but a little kid scared to death or crying.”18 In her defense, it is understandable that Cutcher came to believe that Martin was the “little kid” she thought she heard. Team Trayvon had been feeding the media old images of Martin as a boy, and the media had been showing them uncritically. Gutman used a half dozen of them in his Good Morning America piece. When he talked about the struggle between Martin and Zimmerman, the viewer saw the photo of a thuggish, heavyset Zimmerman from 2005 countered by an Onion-worthy photo of an innocent young Martin actually hugging a baby. In fact, however, Martin was an all-but-full-grown young man with fully mature vocal cords. As one old girlfriend posted on a memorial site, “I loved his deep voice.”19 Cutcher did not hear a “little kid.”

  Over the next few days, Gutman’s reporting grew more reckless and inflammatory. The FBI was now investigating the case as a hate crime. Why? Zimmerman, in his call to the dispatcher, had used a “possible racist remark.”20 Gutman never specified what that remark was. According to Gutman, even more damning evidence had emerged that the police had inexplicably ignored, and, better still, Gutman was exclusively allowed to hear it. As he related, Team Trayvon had interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who had been on the phone with Martin in his last minutes and promised to blow the case wide open—but more on Dee Dee in the chapters to come.

  If a controversy erupts outside New York and the New York Times does not notice it, is it really a controversy? In the media world, the answer is no. And so it was that on March 16, 2012, Trayvon Martin’s death took on new life when the Times recognized it. In the initial article, Miami bureau chief Lizette Alvarez made a shocking number of errors for a story that was already three weeks old. The only error that the Times corrected—and not until three weeks later—was among the least consequential, namely, that Zimmerman’s forty-six calls to the Sanford Police Department came over a period of years, not months. The two shots and the hundred pound differential went uncorrected. Ignoring the stylebook, Alvarez did what many others in the media had begun to do: call Zimmerman by his last name and Martin by his first.

  Worse was that Alvarez reported as fact fictions about which even Gutman had only speculated. One was that “the dispatcher told [Zimmerman] to stay in his car,” but that he disregarded the order. In fact, the dispatcher, who was not a police officer, had no authority to tell Zimmerman to do or not do anything. His request not to follow Martin came after Zimmerman had already left his truck. In any case, Zimmerman honored the request, but Alvarez failed to report this. More damaging still, Alvarez elevated Mary Cutcher’s ramblings to the level of genuine evidence. “Mary Cutcher and her roommate said they heard Trayvon pleading,” Alvarez wrote. “Then they heard a gunshot. They rushed outside and saw Mr. Zimmerman standing over the teenager.” The fact that the Sanford police took only a “brief statement” from Cutcher and showed no interest in following up with her led Alvarez to imply that they were ignoring Cutcher to protect Zimmerman.

  Alvarez earned a minor place in journalism history when she labored to identify Zimmerman’s ethnicity. Until this point, given his name, it was widely reported that Zimmerman was white. In her March 16 article, Alvarez introduced the notion that Zimmerman was “white and Hispanic.”21 In a March 22 article, she famously refined that categorization to “white Hispanic,” an ethnic designation uniquely Zimmerman’s.22 As an exasperated Bob Zimmerman observed, “George MUST be kept white . . . . somehow.”23 Although no one at the Times would ever admit it, the “white” part of the designation served to prevent the shooting from igniting black-Hispanic tensions, especially in Florida, especially in an election year. If nothing else, Alvarez’s reporting helped undermine the self-serving notion of Hispanics as “La Raza,” or a race apart.

  8

  HOGGING THE STAGE

  AL SHARPTON JUMPED INTO THE MESS mouth first. He knew Benjamin Crump from previous escapades and had been in touch with Team Trayvon from the beginning. The release of the 9-1-1 calls revealed, he claimed on the March 19, 2012, episode of his MSNBC show Politics Nation, the “shocking heart-breaking picture of what happened that rainy night.”1 It also gave him the ammunition to fill the entire half hour of his show. That Sharpton has a show at all is testimony to the fact that politically cooperative black Democrats have more lives than the proverbial cat.

  Sharpton got his start as a teen when Jesse Jackson appointed him as youth director of his all-purpose nonprofit, Operation Breadbasket. By the time he was eighteen, the ambitious Sharpton had formed his own organization, the National Youth Movement, and was embarking on a “civil rights” career so thoroughly rococo it made Jackson’s seem a model of restraint and decorum.

  The case that first thrust Sharpton into the national spotlight mirrored the Martin case, at least in its media strategy. In November 1987, fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley stepped off the bus after a long day at school. She headed to her upstate New York home a mile down a country road and then disappeared into the night. She was found four days later, dazed, confused, and covered in feces. According to her attorneys, Brawley had been kidnapped, raped, sodomized. “KKK” and “nigger” were inscribed on her body.2 Brawley accused six white men, one of them a police officer, of attacking her. As with the Martin case, the Brawley story exploded in the media all but unfiltered by common sense.

  Sharpton assumed the role of Brawley’s publicist. When Tawana refused to cooperate with prosecutors, including New York State’s attorney general Robert Abrams, Sharpton contended that doing so would be like “asking someone who watched someone killed in the gas chamber to sit down with Mr. Hitler.”3 Along with Brawley’s lawyers, Sharpton asserted that a local prosecutor named Steven Pagones was among those who had kidnapped and raped Brawley. Pagones endured nearly the hell that George Zimmerman has had to experience. Incapable of being shamed, Sharpton shifted blame to a local police cult affiliated with the Irish Republican Army. The case collapsed, according to Slate, “when a security guard for Brawley’s lawyers testified that the lawyers and Sharpton knew Brawley was lying.” Pagones later sued Sharpton and was awarded a sixty-five-thousand-dollar judgment, eventually paid by Johnnie Cochran and other Sharpton benefactors.4

  Despite several other equally egregious adventures in race-baiting—the Crown Heights Riot and the Freddie’s Fashion Mart massacre come quickly to mind—Al Sharpton had sufficiently rehabilitated himself by 2004 to seek the Democratic nomination for president. The left-leaning Slate, by the way, revisited the Brawley story when evaluating his candidacy. By 2011, the still-unrepentant Sharpton had acquired respectability enough to get his own nightly show on MSNBC. It was from this pulpit that he began to proselytize about America’s racist legacy as manifested anew by the killing of Trayvon Martin.

  In a vacuum the March 19 episode of Sharpton’s Politics Nation seemed an exemplar of reckless race-baiting, but it was only marginally less responsible than what Matt Gutman had been serving up at ABC. The half-hour format allowed Sharpton to pound home the message that the case was “a national outrage to many of us.” The critical word of that phrase was not “outrage” but “us,” meaning, of course, black America. Nothing if not politically savvy, Sharpton made no reference at all to Zimmerman as being Hispanic. He was focusing black animus against a more traditional target, the presumably white police. “How can they not make an arrest in this case?” asked Sharpton. “What is going on there locally, and why does it seem like they’re allowing probable cause to be dismissed and they’re trying this in the secrecy of the police department?”5

  In the course of the March 19 show, Sharpton orchestrated a remote interview with Benjamin Crump and Tracy Martin. To this point, the senior Martin had been a model of decorum for someone whose son was killed under ambiguous circumstances. He had allied himself, however, with people more interested in a payday than in justice. “His father, his mother, his family have heard them,” Crump told Sharpton of the many cries for help on the 9-1-1 tapes, “and they all know that is Trayvon Martin.”6 Based on a Crump interview, the Huffington Post reported that Tracy Martin “broke down crying as he listened to the audio.” Said Martin allegedly, “My son was crying for help, and he still shot him.”7 In fact, Tracy Martin knew otherwise, and he said as much in the presence of several police officers during his first day at the station. That said, the momentum of the case no longer allowed, if it ever did, for minor concerns like the truth.

  Back in Sanford on March 19, Bob Zimmerman was pleading with the FDLE investigators that they discover the truth quickly and declare it publicly. “Everything I hear in the news is absolutely wrong,” he told them.8 For Zimmerman, the most significant untruth was the declaration by the Martin family and the media that the voice heard crying on the 9-1-1 tapes was Martin’s. He could understand the stress Martin’s mother was under. When he first heard her declaration, he assumed the quality of the tapes led to her confusion. But when he heard the tapes himself, all doubt vanished. The tapes were clear. There was no confusion. His voice quivering with emotion, Zimmerman swore under oath, “That is absolutely, positively George Zimmerman. Myself, my wife, family members, and friends know that is George Zimmerman. There is no doubt who is yelling for help.”9

  The senior Zimmerman had gotten out of the hospital just four days before the shooting. He had suffered a heart attack. Earlier in the month of February, his mother-in-law, Christina, who had lived with her daughter and Bob Zimmerman for thirty years, had to be hospitalized when her Alzheimer’s medicine caused debilitating side effects. Once the atmosphere turned ominous, the three had to change their phone number and seek refuge in a hotel. “All of us are getting death threats,” Bob Zimmerman told the investigators.10 George’s brother Robert traced the start of “the terror” to March 7, the day the “false narrative” took hold. “We would all essentially become homeless,” said Robert, “on the run in and out of hotels.”11 Before the month was through, comedienne manqué Roseanne Barr would tweet their home address to her 110,000 followers. “I thought it was good to let ppl know that no one can hide anymore,” said the ever-helpful Barr.

  That same week film director Spike Lee re-tweeted the supposed home address of George Zimmerman to his 250,000 followers. In his eagerness to make life even more hellish for the neighborhood watch coordinator, Lee sent out the address of the wrong George. The other George Zimmerman and his wife had to leave their home because of the harassment and hate mail. On that same day, improbably enough, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) demanded “the prompt arrest of George Zimmerman,” given his “callous disregard for Mr. Martin’s young life.” If that demand were not intrusive enough, the NBPA also insisted that police chief Bill Lee be canned for “dereliction of duty and racial bias.”12