Trayvon Benjamin Martin was a 17-year-old African American teenager from Miami Gardens, Florida, who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012. An athletically inclined teen with an eye toward aviation, Trayvon was deeply interested in becoming a pilot. After national media focused on the tragedy, Zimmerman was eventually charged and tried in Martin’s death, but a six-member jury acquitted him of second-degree murder and manslaughter in July 2013.
Trayvon Martin was born in Miami, Florida, on February 5, 1995, the son of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin. At the time of the shooting, Fulton was a program coordinator for the Miami-Dade Housing Authority, and Tracy Martin was a truck driver; they lived near each other in Miami Gardens. After his divorce from Sybrina Fulton in 1999, Trayvon’s father married Alicia Stanley, who had two daughters from a previous marriage. Stanley met Trayvon when he was about three years old, and she and Martin’s father were together for about fourteen years.
When Trayvon was nine years old, he saved his father’s life by pulling him out of a fire in their apartment after his father had been immobilized by burns to the legs. Trayvon enjoyed sports video games and was determined to earn his own money; he washed cars, babysat, and cut grass. His former football coach said he had been one of the best players on their football team, the Wolverines, which he played for from age eight to thirteen. Trayvon’s coach described him as a shy youth who often walked with his hoodie up and his headphones on, listening to music.
Trayvon had wanted to fly or repair airplanes, and in the summer of 2009 he enrolled in “Experience Aviation,” a seven-week program in Opa-locka, Florida, which introduced him to aviation. At the time Trayvon was enrolled, the program was run by Barrington Irving, then the youngest person ever to fly solo around the world. Irving remembered Trayvon as a polite youth who enjoyed flying and also had a strong interest in football. After Trayvon graduated from the program, he spent the next summer as a volunteer, helping new students in the aviation program. According to his parents, Trayvon hoped to attend the University of Miami or Florida A&M University.
When Trayvon started high school, his early goal of playing professional football gave way to a more focused ambition to work with airplanes. He attended Carol City High School in Miami Gardens for his freshman year and most of his sophomore year before transferring to Dr. Michael M. Krop High School in north Miami-Dade in 2011. During his first year at Carol City, Trayvon attended classes in the morning at the high school and then went to George T. Baker Aviation School for the rest of his school day. His ninth-grade teacher, who taught him three Aerospace Technology classes at Baker Aviation, said that he was a normal, well-behaved student who passed all his classes. Another teacher at Carol City recalled that math was his favorite subject and that she never saw Trayvon show disrespect.
Trayvon’s mother transferred him to Dr. Michael M. Krop High School for his junior year. Fulton said that her son had average performance in school, and she moved him because she believed Krop was a better school and wanted a different environment for him.
Trayvon was visiting his father in Sanford, Florida, after receiving a ten-day suspension from Krop Senior High School. The suspension stemmed from the discovery of drug residue in Trayvon’s book bag. Tracy Martin said he took Trayvon to Sanford “to disconnect and get his priorities straight.” Trayvon had been to the Twin Lakes neighborhood several times before with his father and sometimes played football with the neighborhood children. On the night of the shooting, Martin was out to dinner with his fiancée, Brandy Green, while Trayvon and Green’s young son stayed at home watching TV and playing video games. Trayvon went out, walking to a local 7-Eleven, where he bought Skittles for Green’s son and an Arizona-brand watermelon-flavored fruit juice drink.
In response to a rash of robberies and burglaries, residents of the Retreat at Twin Lakes community had established a neighborhood watch in September 2011. George Zimmerman, one of the residents, was selected as the program coordinator. Zimmerman regularly patrolled the streets and was licensed to carry a firearm. From August 2011 to February 2012, he called police numerous times to report people he considered suspicious, all of whom were Black males.
After Trayvon began walking back from the store to the Twin Lakes neighborhood, Zimmerman spotted him. From his SUV, Zimmerman called the non-emergency police line at 7:11 p.m. to report a “suspicious guy,” describing Trayvon as walking between homes and then starting to run. The dispatcher advised Zimmerman not to get out of his car or follow the “suspicious guy.” Zimmerman, however, disregarded the dispatcher’s guidance and pursued the teen on foot. Moments later, an altercation occurred between the two.
Video footage of Trayvon at the 7-11, later released to the public, showed him calmly shopping for snacks, exhibiting no criminal or aggressive behavior. In later interviews, it emerged that Trayvon had been on the phone with his girlfriend when he was spotted by Zimmerman. She stated that Trayvon noticed he was being followed and began to run, and that the two soon lost contact when Trayvon’s earpiece disconnected. Trayvon and Zimmerman—who, it is believed, never identified himself as part of a community watch—encountered each other under circumstances that remain disputed and contested, with someone crying out for help multiple times in quick succession. The confrontation ended with Zimmerman shooting the unarmed teenager in the chest at close range. Trayvon died less than a hundred yards from the door of the townhouse where he was staying.
An officer arrived on the scene at 7:17 p.m. He found Trayvon dead and Zimmerman on the ground, bleeding from wounds to the head and face. The officer took Zimmerman into custody. Zimmerman claimed he had shot Trayvon in self-defense, and he was released later that night without charges. Trayvon’s father learned of his son’s death after filing a missing-person report with the Miami-Dade Police Department.
In the weeks following Trayvon’s death, rallies, marches, and protests were held across the United States. In March 2012, hundreds of students at his high school staged a walkout in his memory. An online petition calling for a full investigation and the prosecution of Zimmerman garnered approximately 2.2 million signatures. Media coverage of Trayvon’s killing, and the response to it, briefly eclipsed attention to the 2012 presidential race, which was underway at the time. A national debate about racial profiling and “stand your ground” laws ensued, and the governor of Florida appointed a task force to examine the state’s self-defense laws. Trayvon’s life was scrutinized by the media and bloggers, who combed through the digital footprint he had left behind. On social media, the name “Trayvon” was tweeted more than two million times in the thirty days following the shooting. More than 1,000 people attended the viewing of his remains the day before his funeral, which was held on March 3, 2012, in Miami, Florida, and he was buried at Dade-Memorial Park (North) in Miami.
Trayvon’s parents, outraged that no arrest had been made in their son’s death, sought legal representation. Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney from Tallahassee, Florida, took their case pro bono and brought in Natalie Jackson, an attorney familiar with Sanford and Seminole County who specialized in women’s and children’s cases, to assist. On March 5, Jackson enlisted publicist Ryan Julison to help bring national attention to the case. Over the next days and weeks, major national outlets including Reuters, CBS This Morning, ABC World News, and CNN began reporting on the shooting.
At a White House press conference in March 2012, President Barack Obama was asked about the shooting and responded: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”
In June 2012, Trayvon’s parents and members of the Second Chance on Shoot First campaign delivered a petition with 340,000 signatures to Florida’s Citizen Safety and Protection Task Force, calling for changes to the state’s stand-your-ground law. The task force ultimately recommended against repealing the statute, asserting that Florida residents had a right to defend themselves with deadly force, without a duty to retreat, if they felt threatened.
Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder on April 11, 2012, after prosecutors argued that he had profiled Trayvon and taken the law into his own hands. His trial began on June 24, 2013, before an all-female jury. On July 13, 2013, after more than sixteen hours of deliberation over two days, the six-member jury acquitted Zimmerman of both second-degree murder and manslaughter.
In the years after the trial, Zimmerman had additional encounters with the law. Later in 2013, he was charged with domestic aggravated assault, among other offenses, after allegedly choking and pointing a gun at his girlfriend; she later declined to pursue the charges. Zimmerman was arrested again in early 2015 on another aggravated assault charge.
The Trayvon Martin Foundation was established in 2012 by his parents to honor their son’s legacy and address the broader crisis of gun violence. The foundation provides emotional and financial support to families who have lost children to gun violence, offers community-based STEM programs for youth, and advocates for social justice, racial equality, and an end to racial and gender profiling.
Timeline:
February 26, 2012 – George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida, calls 911 to report “a suspicious person” in the neighborhood. He is instructed not to get out of his SUV or approach the person. Zimmerman disregards the instructions. Moments later, neighbors report hearing gunfire. Zimmerman acknowledges that he shot Martin, claiming it was in self-defense. In a police report, Officer Timothy Smith writes that Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose and back of the head.
February 27, 2012 – Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, files a missing persons report. Officers with the Sanford Police Department visit Tracy Martin. He is able to identify Trayvon Martin’s body using a photo.
March 8, 2102 – Investigators receive a fax from the Altamonte Family Practice containing the medical records identifying the injuries sustained by Zimmerman on the night of the shooting: Open wound of scalp, without mention of complication; nasal bones, closed fracture; assault by other specified means.
March 12, 2012 – Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee says that Zimmerman has not been charged because there are no grounds to disprove his story of the events.
March 13, 2012 – Sanford Police Department’s homicide detective Christopher Serino recommends Zimmerman be charged with manslaughter.
Zimmerman “failed to identify himself” as a concerned citizen or neighborhood watch member on two occasions that night. Serino reports that he thought Zimmerman’s head injuries were “marginally consistent with a life-threatening episode, as described by him, during which neither a deadly weapon nor deadly force were deployed by Trayvon Martin.”
March 14, 2012 – The case is turned over to the Florida State Attorney Norm Wolfinger.
March 15, 2012 – In a letter to the Orlando Sentinel, Robert Zimmerman, George Zimmerman’s father, writes that George has been unfairly portrayed as a racist, and that George is Hispanic and grew up in a multiracial family.
March 16, 2012 – Authorities release seven 911 calls from the night of the shooting. In one of the 911 recordings, Zimmerman, against the advice of the 911 dispatcher, follows Martin. In one of the recordings, a voice screams “Help, help!” in the background, followed by the sound of a gunshot.
March 19, 2012 – The Justice Department and the FBI announce that they have launched an investigation into Martin’s death.
March 20, 2012 – A lawyer for the Martin family, Benjamin Crump, holds a news conference, telling reporters that Trayvon was on the phone with his 16-year-old girlfriend at the time of the shooting. The girl, who wishes to remain anonymous, says she heard someone ask Martin what he was doing and heard Martin ask why the person was following him, according to Crump. The girl then got the impression that there was an altercation in which the earpiece fell out of Martin’s ear and the connection went dead.
March 21, 2012 – CNN analyzes one of the tapes of Zimmerman’s call to dispatch, in which he is purported to have used a racial slur against blacks. The results are inconclusive.
March 22, 2012 – A petition on Change.org calling for the arrest of Zimmerman, created by the parents of Trayvon Martin, surpasses 1.3 million people.
March 22, 2012 – Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee announces he is stepping down “temporarily” as head of the department, which has been criticized for its handling of the fatal shooting.
March 22, 2012 – Florida Gov. Rick Scott announces he is appointing Angela B. Corey of the 4th Judicial Circuit as state attorney in the investigation, replacing Norman Wolfinger, state attorney for Florida’s 18th District, which includes Sanford.
March 23, 2012 – President Barack Obama speaks out publicly for the first time on the growing controversy over the shooting of Trayvon Martin, saying that the incident requires national “soul-searching.”
March 24, 2012 – A handful of members from the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) offer a $10,000 reward for the “capture” of George Zimmerman.
March 26, 2012 – Exactly one month after Trayvon Martin’s death, rallies take place in cities across the country, including Sanford, where the City Commission holds a town hall meeting on the incident and its aftermath. Martin’s parents speak at the meeting.
March 28, 2012 – Zimmerman’s father, Robert, appears on television and says that Martin threatened to kill Zimmerman and then beat him so badly Zimmerman was forced to shoot.
March 29, 2012 – Zimmerman’s brother, Robert Zimmerman Jr., appears on CNN and says medical records will prove that his brother was attacked and his nose was broken by Trayvon Martin before he fatally shot the teen.
April 2, 2012 – FBI agents interview Martin’s girlfriend, the 16-year-old girl who, phone records show, was on the cell phone with him shortly before the fatal confrontation.
April 3, 2012 – Zimmerman’s legal adviser, Craig Sonner, says that criminal defense lawyer Hal Uhrig will represent Zimmerman and that Sonner will serve as co-counsel if the case proceeds.
April 7-8, 2012 – George Zimmerman launches a website warning supporters about groups falsely claiming to be raising funds for his defense. The site includes a link through which donations can be made to pay for Zimmerman’s lawyers and living expenses.
April 9, 2012 – Prosecutor Angela Corey announces that she will not present the case to a grand jury.
April 10, 2012 – Attorneys Hal Uhrig and Craig Sonner announce that they have lost contact with Zimmerman and no longer represent him.
April 11, 2012 – Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder. His new lawyer, Mark O’Mara, tells CNN that Zimmerman has turned himself in.
April 18, 2012 – Seminole Circuit Court Judge Jessica Recksiedler, who was assigned to Zimmerman’s case, approves a motion to disqualify herself from the criminal case because her husband works as a CNN legal analyst.
April 18, 2012 – It is announced that Seminole County Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. will take over George Zimmerman’s case.
April 20, 2012 – Zimmerman’s bond hearing is held. Judge Lester sets Zimmerman’s bond at $150,000. During the hearing, Zimmerman apologizes to the family of Trayvon Martin for the loss of their son.
April 23, 2012 – Zimmerman is released on bail at 12:05 AM. Later in the day, Zimmerman enters a written not guilty plea and waves his right to appear at his arraignment.
May 8, 2012 – Judge Kenneth Lester accepts Zimmerman’s written plea of not guilty.
May 15, 2012 – A medical report by George Zimmerman’s family doctor, taken a day after the February 26 shooting, shows Zimmerman was diagnosed with a fractured nose, two black eyes and two lacerations on the back of his head.
June 1, 2012 – Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. revokes Zimmerman’s bond and orders him to surrender within 48 hours after the prosecution argues that Zimmerman and his wife, Shellie, misrepresented their finances when Zimmerman’s bond was originally set in April.
June 3, 2012 – At 1:45 PM, Zimmerman surrenders to authorities and is taken into custody at the John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County.
June 12, 2012 – George Zimmerman’s wife Shellie is arrested and charged with perjury.
June 18, 2012 – Audio of six phone calls between Zimmerman and his wife Shellie are released, along with bank statements.
June 20, 2012 – Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee is officially fired.
June 25, 2012 – Zimmerman’s attorney files a motion requesting a “reasonable bond” be set for Zimmerman’s release from jail.
July 5, 2012 – The judge sets Zimmerman’s bond at $1 million.
July 6, 2012 – Zimmerman is released from jail after posting the required 10% of the $1 million bond ($100,000).
July 13, 2012 – Zimmerman’s legal team files a motion requesting Judge Lester step down from the case. The motion claims Zimmerman cannot get a fair trial because Lester used “gratuitous, disparaging” language in the previous week’s bail order.
July 18, 2012 – Zimmerman, appearing on Fox News “Hannity” show, does his first television interview since the shooting. He says he would not do anything differently.
August 9, 2012 – A photo of Trayvon Martin’s body and George Zimmerman’s school records are mistakenly released by prosecutors. Special Prosecutor Angela Corey’s office issues a statement asking reporters to “please disregard and do not use the information contained in the initial e-mail. It was inadvertently attached.”
August 13, 2012 – George Zimmerman appeals Judge Lester’s refusal to recuse himself with the Fifth District Court of Appeals.
August 29, 2012 – A Florida appeals court grants Zimmerman’s request for a new judge, saying Judge Kenneth Lester’s remarks in a bail order put Zimmerman in reasonable fear of a fair trial.
August 30, 2012 – Judge Debra Nelson is assigned to replace Judge Kenneth Lester in the case of George Zimmerman.
December 7, 2012 – Zimmerman sues NBC Universal for allegedly editing the 911 call he placed on the night of the tragic event. He states in the lawsuit that NBC unfairly made it appear that “Zimmerman was a racist, and that he was racially profiling Trayvon Martin”.
February 9, 2013 – The Justice for Trayvon Martin Foundation hosts a “Day of Remembrance Community Peace Walk and Forum” in Miami. It takes place four days after what would have been Martin’s 18th birthday.
March 5, 2013 – Lawyer Mark O’Mara decides against seeking a pretrial Stand your Ground immunity hearing for George Zimmerman citing lack of preparation time.
April 5, 2013 – Martin’s parents settle a wrongful-death claim against the homeowners association of the Florida subdivision where their son was killed.
April 30, 2013 – George Zimmerman waives his right to a “stand your ground” pretrial immunity hearing. Zimmerman’s attorneys decide they will instead try this as a self-defense case. If Zimmerman had had a pretrial immunity hearing, a judge would have ruled whether his actions were protected under the “stand your ground” law. If the judge had ruled in favor of Zimmerman, it would have meant that no criminal or civil trial could proceed.
May 28, 2013 – Judge Debra Nelson rules on several motions brought by the defense. Nelson rules that Trayvon Martin’s familiarity with guns, his marijuana use, and fights he may have been in cannot be brought up in Zimmerman’s trial. She also denies a request to take the jury to the crime scene. Nelson, however, rules that jurors will remain anonymous and will be referred to by numbers only.
June 20, 2013 – An all-female jury is selected.
June 24, 2013 – The trial begins with opening statements.
July 13, 2013 – The six woman jury finds George Zimmerman not guilty. They had three choices: to find Zimmerman guilty of second-degree murder; to find him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter; or to find him not guilty. The jurors deliberated for more than 16 hours total, including 13 on Saturday alone.
August 28, 2013 – Shellie Zimmerman, wife of George Zimmerman, pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge of perjury. Prosecutors said Shellie Zimmerman lied when she told a judge during an April 2012 bond hearing for her husband that the family was indigent.
February 24, 2015 – The U.S. Justice Department announces that no federal civil rights charges will be brought against George Zimmerman, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin in February 2012.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trayvon_Martin
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fast-facts/
http://www.biography.com/people/trayvon-martin-21283721#arrest-and-trial-of-george-zimmerman
