The funeral director who embalmed Trayvon Martin’s body saw no bruising or cuts on his hands or any other evidence that he’d been in some kind of altercation. He saw a bullet wound in his upper chest. That’s it. This fits with the video evidence from George Zimmerman’s arrival at the police station a mere thirty-four minutes after the police arrived at the scene. Zimmerman also showed no signs of having been in any kind of altercation.
Of course we know from the testimony of several witnesses that an altercation took place. It just doesn’t seem like it lasted very long or that either of them was able to do much damage to the other.
What’s become even more clear is that the story being told from the Zimmerman camp, and even to a certain degree the police department, doesn’t look plausible because it doesn’t match up with any of the disinterested evidence in the case.
Let’s just take a look at the testimony of three separate neighbors, one of which watched the fatal moment, and the other two who heard it and then saw the immediate aftermath.
The witness recounted seeing two men on the grass, one on top of the other. “And at that point, not looking out the window, I heard the yell for help, one yell for help, and then I heard another … excruciating type of yell. It didn’t almost sound like ‘help.’ It just sounded so painful. But I wasn’t watching out the window during that. And then the next time I looked out the window, there’s the same thing: two men on the grass, one on top of each other. I couldn’t see a lot of movement. It was very dark, but I felt like they were scuffling. And then I heard the gunshots, which, to me, were more like pops than they were like a bang.”
The witness recalled hearing more than one shot. “It definitely was more than one pop noise, so I don’t know if it was an echo or anything else. But it definitely made more than one pop.”
Also:
The witness says: “As I said it was dark, but after the shot … one man got up … it was only in a couple seconds or so that he was walking towards where I was watching. And I could see him a little bit clearer, and see that he was a Hispanic man and he was, you know, he didn’t appear hurt or anything else, he just kind of seemed very, worried or whatever, walked on the sidewalk at that point, with his hand up to his forehead and then another man came out with a flashlight.”
And:
Mary Cutcher was in her kitchen making coffee that night with her roommate, Selma Mora Lamilla. The window was open, she said.
“We heard a whining. Not like a crying, boohoo, but like a whining, someone in distress, and then the gunshot,” she said.
They looked out the window but saw nothing. It was dark.
They ran out the sliding glass door, and within seconds, they saw Zimmerman.“Zimmerman was standing over the body with — basically straddling the body with his hands on Trayvon’s back,” Cutcher said. “And it didn’t seem to me that he was trying to help him in any way. I didn’t hear any struggle prior to the gunshot.
“And I feel like it was Trayvon Martin that was crying out, because the minute that the gunshot went off, the whining stopped.”
The two women said they could not see whether Zimmerman was bruised or hurt. It was too dark.“Selma asked him three times, ‘what’s going on over there?’ ” Cutcher said. “He looks back and doesn’t say anything. She asks him again, ‘everything OK? What’s going on?’ Same thing: looked at us, looked back. Finally, the third time, he said, ‘just call the police.’
Also:
Lamilla said that Zimmerman appeared to be pacing after the shooting: “He started walking back and forth like three times with his hand on the head and kind of, he was walking like kind of confused.”
Cutcher said of Martin’s last moments: “It sounded young. It didn’t sound like a grown man is my point. It sounded to me like someone was in distress and it wasn’t like a crying, sobbing boo-hoo, it was a definite whine.”
There are some very minor disparities between these two accounts, but together they paint a consistent picture. There was some yelling. Then there was a very heartbreaking kind of pleading sound. Then a gun shot. There weren’t any sounds indicating a fight. One witness described more of a scuffle with one man on top of the other. None of the witnesses thought that Zimmerman appeared to be injured, but they all agreed that he appeared to be worried, holding a hand to his head in kind of a “what just happened?” fashion.
To go with this, we also have Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend’s account. She was on the phone up until about a minute before the police arrived on the scene, and she felt like she heard a pushing match that caused Trayvon’s earpiece to fall out and the call to cut off. Independent records confirm the timing of the call. The last spoken words she heard were Trayvon asking Zimmerman why he was following him and Zimmerman replying by asking Trayvon what he was doing in the neighborhood.
Considering how tight the timeline is here, it appears that this is what happened. Trayvon interrupted his conversation with his girlfriend to confront Zimmerman. Zimmerman was verbally aggressive in return. They approached each other and started pushing. Loud words were exchanged. The fight went to the ground. Zimmerman wound up on top. Martin cried out for help. Then Zimmerman pulled his gun on him, causing Martin to make a frightened desperate plea. And then he was executed.
Then Zimmerman got up and started pacing around in a worried fashion. Within moments the first police officer arrived. At some point, it was decided to concoct a cover story, which involved Officer Timothy Smith fabricating evidence about Zimmerman bleeding from the nose and head and having grass all over his back. Most likely, he never received any medical attention from the fire department at all.
Within 34 minutes, Zimmerman was at the police station looking to be completely uninjured and with no signs of grass or wetness on his jacket.
From there, we can conjecture about a lot more, including the role of the prosecutor in the case who overruled the lead investigator and decided not to press charges.
But the evidence does not support the story that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman, punched him in the face, broke his nose, or slammed his head into the walkway repeatedly. About the only thing left to argue is that Trayvon went for his gun.
But that doesn’t explain an apparently fabricated story that was filed by an officer at the scene.
But that doesn’t explain an apparently fabricated story that was filed by an officer at the scene.
No, but it fits with what Sanford is all about. They still think it is the 1840’s down there.
Are you familiar with Sanford specifically? I’d never heard of it before this.
I don’t know that town at all, but I have my own opinions about the police in Florida in general.
I had never heard of this town. I have no real opinion about it. I’ve read that they’ve had a few prior problems, but nothing that appears to fall into Bull Connor territory.
Then you need to read this:
http://bit.ly/GTq9IG
by Dave Zirin .. that he published on The Nation‘s website last week.
But remember in the video at the station, one of the officers touches Z’s back and then looks at his hand and wipes it off on his pants.
Also I think it’s important to remember that it was raining that night, so he would have been wet from that but also there could have been a roll over tustle so he could very well have been in/on the grass at some point or other.
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I’m erasing your comment with his dad’s address and phone number. It’s easy to obtain, but I don’t want to make it any easier.
.
Point I wanted to make his parents live in near vicinity of Sanford (10 miles). I wouldn’t be surprised Robert Zimmerman intervened that very night and participated in cover-up. “Punch in nose, wet back with grass and banging head on pavement” to make self-defense argument possible. Just listen to his interview.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I agree that there enough unanswered questions to warrant an investigation of the investigation. But to publicly accuse a police officer of criminal behavior based on an extended chain of theorizing is getting into tin foil hat territory.
Based on the video, I believe he filed a false police report. Based on the witness testimony, I believe he filed a false police report. Based on the other officer’s report, I believe he filed a false police report.
I do not believe that George Zimmerman needed or received any first aid. I do not believe he was bleeding from either his nose or the back of his head, and I have reason to doubt that his back was wet and covered with grass.
Watch the cover-up:
This Wolfinger guy intervened and then had to recuse himself because of undisclosed conflict of interest? Follow this guys movements and actions on the night of the incident and you may find the secret to this case. How did he intervene and who did he talk to in the wee hours of that night? That’s where I’d put my resources.
He recused himself due to an unexplained conflict? Protestors spent days saying that the prosecutor was in the tank for the Sanford PD, they had no confidence, and they wanted him out and the case given to the Feds.
He then steps aside and now it is All Very Suspicious. Geez.
I come from a law enforcement family – when my father died, at age 79, he was still consulting for the Memphis PD, helping them try to win a “reverse discrimination” lawsuit – so I know something about how Southern PD’s work. And to conclude that the police manufactured evidence in a racially charged case, when, as Booman has laid out quite well, none of the independently available evidence supports the PD’s version of what happened, and quite a bit contradicts it, and there’s a long, long history in the South (and elsewhere) of this sort of thing happening, is most definitely not “tin foil hat territory.”
It is, in fact, nearly impossible to come to any other conclusion unless you start with the ideologically-driven assumption that cops never lie or play CYA games. And I can tell you definitively and from personal experience that that is simply not true.
I wish it were true, and when shit like that happens it makes every cop’s job exponentially harder, including all the ones who try their best to do it right. I wish it were so, but it’s not. So far I have seen nothing, from either independent sources or the folks defending the Sanford PD’s handling of this, that can explain the inconsistencies in the PD’s accounts, or the anonymous and irrelevant sliming of Trayvon Martin’s character based on a history that sounds like a pretty normal middle-class teenager.
Even if Florida law precluded investigating Zimmerman – and I’m no legal expert, so I’m willing to concede it’s possible, though it seems bizarre – that still doesn’t explain the contradictions and malicious leaks of the local cops. Only one thing does, and that involves criminal behavior, including obstruction of justice, on the part of at least some of the authorities.
Zimmertman identifies himself as a Neighborhood Watch member but his actions fly in the face of the whole framework of NW and I haven’t read anywhere that he identified himself to Trayvon as a NW member so to Trayvon he was a big man with a gun and an attitude stalking him.
Zimmerman endangered the whole neighborhood with the way he brandished that loaded gun.
This Country is really amped up about this story. It’s not gonna end well.
Here’s a short history lesson on north central Florida:
.
In this case, his father covered his ass and very likely not for the first time. This event reminds me of similar father-son relationships which ultimately ended in a violent death of innocent victims:
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The lack of movement could represent a temporary stalemate or exhaustion if the two men wrestling were roughly equal in strength. But my guess is that the larger man completely dominated the smaller one, pinning him down. I don’t see a 140lb man faring very well against somebody 200lb+. That’s an insurmontable difference in mass when it comes to grappling. Trayvon’s height while much ballyhooed on the white supremacist websites would actually be a disadvantage in a grappling contest. Zimmerman had superior mass and superior leverage, a double whammy.
My armchair martial arts and grappling enthusiast take on this is that the heavier man was the one that forced the confrontation to the ground and pinned the smaller man. From that point on the smaller man was at his mercy.
The witness accounts suggest to me that Zimmerman was getting off on dominating Trayvon, something about the dynamic made him snap, because it really makes no sense for him to shoot someone helpless, and frankly it strikes me as some other kind of sick dynamic that kicked in not racism per se. The police coverup is another matter.
You can hear the last 45 seconds of the confrontation on this 911 call.
It must have lasted a little longer, since the caller had to become alarmed and dial 911, which probably would take at least 15-30 seconds.
You can hear what sounds like a boy squealing in terror.
It basically matches up with the other three witness accounts.
I am also starting to believe that the witness “John” is a fake. John is the one who the Orlando Sentinel reported the next day, who said that Trayvon was on top of Z, beating him. He says he heard Z crying for help, and said he was going to call 911. Yet there’s no 911 call from John. So he called the newspaper but not 911?
Meanwhile, other witnesses, such as Mary Cutcher and Selma Lamilla, as well as the mother of the 13 yo boy who was out walking his dog, have come forward with their full names in public, AND stating that the police tried to get them to change their stories. The two women claimed that Trayvon was the one crying and Z was on top; the police kept saying it was the other way around. The 13 yo said it was too dark for him to see anything clearly, but again, the police told him he was mistaken and actually DID see Z on the ground. In addition, there are recordings of Cutcher’s 911 call and the call from the 13 yo’s older sister, but none from “John” that I know of (does anyone else?). And John, the only witness who supports Z’s story, remains anonymous.
very interesting
I can’t imagine how I would prove it but IMHO John is the “Holy Shit, the guy’s dead out here… Oh, my God” 911 caller; Adam Wainwright of Mother Jones has all the tapes.
As to why he desires anonymity, seriously? Maybe he doesn’t want to meet Spike Lee or any of the many, many Martin supporters at his doorstep. He is the most important witness supporting Zimmerman (and for all anyone knows, he feels awful about being in that role) and he might not want the hassle of being outed.
BTW, the new CNN witness (who basically saw/heard nothing of value) wanted name and gender anonymity. One senses rising tension.
Large potential problem regarding the witnesses: it was dark. If an actual criminal charge is ever brought against Zimmerman, any decent lawyer representing him will likely shred eyewitness accounts of what transpired– even more so regarding neighbors who heard what happened, but admit they saw nothing.