Tag: Trayvon Martin

Florida jury finds George Zimmerman not guilty

George Zimmerman
George Zimmerman

A Florida jury on Saturday found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, in a case that sparked a national debate on race and guns.

The panel of six women, which was sequestered, deliberated more than 16 hours over two days until nearly 10 p.m. on Saturday (0200 GMT Sunday).

Zimmerman appeared stoned-faced as the verdict was announced, but then showed a slight smile of relief. His parents embraced each other and his wife was tearful.

Zimmerman, 29, said Martin, 17, attacked him on the night of February 26, 2012, in the central Florida town of Sanford. Prosecutors contend the neighborhood watch coordinator in his gated community was a “wannabe cop” who tracked down the teenager and shot him without justification.

The jury could have convicted him of second-degree murder or manslaughter.

What happened in Sanford that February night may never have gone beyond the back pages of a local newspaper if police had immediately arrested Zimmerman.

But he walked free for more than six weeks after the shooting, because police believed his claim of self-defense, triggering protests and cries of injustice across America.

It also drew comment from President Barack Obama, forced the resignation of Sanford’s police chief, and brought U.S. Justice Department scrutiny to this town of 54,000 residents not far from Disney World in Orlando. – Reuters

Zimmerman acquitted of all charges in Trayvon Martin murder case

George Zimmerman
George Zimmerman

George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges on Saturday for the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in this central Florida town in February of last year.

If he had been convicted, the 29-year-old former neighborhood watch volunteer, who claimed he acted in self-defense, could have been sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder or up to 30 years for manslaughter.

A panel of six women jurors rendered its verdict in the case, which sparked a national debate on issues including race and profiling, after a trial that began in Seminole County court on June 10. Reuters

Law enforcement prepares for riots on Zimmerman verdict

riotszimmermanOn Monday, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office released a video calling on the public not to riot in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, expected this week or next in Florida. The Sheriff’s Office released a statement explaining that it was “working closely with the Sanford Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies” to coordinate “a response plan in anticipation of the verdict.”

The video, titled “Raise Your Voice, Not Your Hands,” focuses on attempting to channel reaction into non-violent response. It depicts two youngsters, one black teenage boy, one Hispanic teenage girl. “Raise your voice!” says the girl. “And not your hands!” says the boy. “We need to stand together as one, no cuffs, no guns,” says the girl. “Let’s give violence a rest, because we can easily end up arrested,” says the boy. “I know your patience will be tested,” says the girl, and then both conclude, “but law enforcement has your back!”

“Let’s back up and choose not to act up, and deputies are with us, so no need to act up,” says the boy. “Let it roll off your shoulders,” says the girl, “it’s water off your back, don’t lack composure, because in one instant it could be over.” Both conclude: “So let’s make the choice to raise your voice and not your hands.” Sheriff Scott Israel says, “I’m Sheriff Scott Israel, and law enforcement does have your back.”

“Freedom of expression is a constitutional right,” the Sheriff’s Department states. “While raising your voice is encouraged, using your hands is not. BSO has created a public service announcement with the help of kids from the Jason Taylor Foundation, H.A.N.D.Y. (Helping Abused, Neglected, Disadvantaged Youth) and basketball star James Jones of the championship Miami Heat team urging young people not to let their emotions get the best of them.”

Sheriff Scott Israel said, “We don’t have information about a specific event that might take place at the conclusion of the trial, but we encourage everyone to keep any protests peaceful.”

The Department says that it is keeping its channels of communication open with “community leaders, civic activists, members of the clergy, as well as local, state and federal agencies.” – Breitbart

 

 

 

 

 

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Racial violence feared in Zimmerman verdict

obamahoodieSanford Police Chief Cecil Smith and other city officials are worried that the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial could spark “violence” and have crafted a “secret law enforcement” plan to deal with potential social disorder.

Zimmerman is accused of killing a black teenager, Trayvon Martin. President Obama has already sided with the Martins in saying that “if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon”.

A CNN report shows Sanford police going door to door in an attempt to calm residents about possible racial unrest in response to the Zimmerman verdict.

“Our worst fear is that we will have people from outside of the community coming in and stirring up….violence in the community,” Smith told CNN’s David Mattingly.

Sanford Mayor Jeff Triplett echoes Smith’s concerns, warning that just one person intent on violence could spark wider disorder and “a provocation of violence”.

City Manager Norton Bonaparte is similarly on edge, fearing a Rodney King-style riot if Zimmerman is found not guilty.

“I’m saying that’s a scenario that’s certainly a possibility,” said Bonaparte, adding that plans had been made through law enforcement but that he would not go into detail on the nature of what they were.

Police Chief Cecil Smith was similarly evasive when asked if SWAT teams or “special personnel” were on standby to respond to disorder.

“As far as the particulars of the plans, we’re not releasing that,” Smith told CNN.

Authorities have also enlisted the help of local pastors who are acting as “observers” in the Zimmerman trial and will then report back to their congregation.

Scores of Twitter users have threatened to riot and loot if George Zimmerman is acquitted.

Other prominent voices have also warned of potential civil unrest, including former Chicago police officer Paul Huebl, who said that he fully expects “organized race rioting to begin in every major city to dwarf the Rodney King and the Martin Luther King riots of past decades” if Zimmerman walks.

With police already going door to door to calm Sanford residents in anticipation of unrest, some are worried that social disorder could be used as a pretext for gun confiscation in a similar vein to how Hurricane Katrina was used as a justification to disarm residents of New Orleans. – prisonplanet.com

Paula Deen, tell ’em all to go to hell – with their ‘racism’

Ilana Mercer
Ilana Mercer

by Ilana Mercer

[followbutton username=’IlanaMercer’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

I miss journalist Andrew Breitbart. Although he was not a libertarian, he was at least interesting, and certainly courageous. “Go to hell” was the late Mr. Breitbart’s message to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as its bullies prepared to cow the tea party into racial submission by accusing its members of, what else but, racism.

Interesting or courageous is not something your average conservative commentator can be accused of. (Settle down: Using a preposition at the end of a sentence is perfectly fine, not that debates about grammar matter any longer. They’re so white.) This a senior editor at a conservative magazine proved in spades. (No apologies will be forthcoming in the event that the reader construes the last turn-of-phrase to be racially unkosher.)

Celebrity chef Paula Deen has transgressed against America’s many Orwellian Ministries of Truth. While being deposed by a disgruntled employee, in May of 2013, Deen was forced to confess to using the “N-word” decades ago, upon which the Paula Deen Enterprises began to lose revenue.

Now the poor woman is on that familiar, modern-day Via Dolorosa: the apology tour.

To the typical invertebrate conservative pundit, Deen’s sins are self-evident and indisputable. Thus does the aforementioned editor – who simply typifies conservatism’s rigor mortis – noodle on, not about the abject folly, if not sheer wickedness, of waging economic warfare against an upright individual for her infelicitous speech. No! Marching with the media Mafiosi, our editor’s mission here is to contextualize Deen’s transgressions, rather than to dispute their gravity.

Contextualizing Deen’s sins is achieved by alluding to her age, as racism trumps ageism on the pyramid of politically dictated Thou shalt Nots. Deen’s tainted upbringing in the Deep South forms another context. You see, Deen is a 66-year-old white woman who “grew up in a small Georgia town in the Jim Crow South.” Says our author: “If a Southern white person of Deen’s age told me they had never used the N-word, I wouldn’t believe them. The word had not the slightest element of taboo at the time.”

In belaboring the context of Deen’s use of naughty words, the writer has implicitly and unintentionally justified the histrionic reaction to such speech. It is part of “the daintiness of our popular culture in some areas,” a “depressing aspect of modern life,” he demurs meekly.

There is nothing dainty or merely depressing about tyrannical speech codes, whose enforcement by the centrifugal forces in our culture and politics is meant to make malleable clones of each one of us, on pain of boycotts, bankruptcy and excommunication.

Political authority depends on this sort of ritual sacrifice, reflexively coordinated by the country’s Ministries of Truth – the self-anointed “intellectuals” (who aren’t intelligent) in education, academia, the entertainment industry and the churches; among the ruling duopoly and everywhere in the malpracticing media.

A national, media-fanned contagion over bad words is perverse. It must be resisted, not contextualized.

Blaming Old-South culture – as the prototypical knaves of conservatism are doing – is, moreover, unlikely to help exculpate Ms. Deen in the minds of the morons who judge her for her words, rather than for her deeds. The bad Old South macro-narrative is as ineffective in mitigation as is pointing out that Deen misspoke because of a near-death experience. “A black man [once] burst into the bank that I was working at and put a gun to my head,” recounted Deen. “I didn’t feel real favorable towards him.”

It is for the same reason that the young mother, seen here in a video gone viral being kicked and punched repetitively and mercilessly by a burly black man, should watch her words in the future. The home of the mom was invaded by the man, who delighted in brutalizing her in front of her toddler.

Instead of sticks and stones that break bones, there can be no doubt that the mother from Millburn, N.J., would have settled during that terrifying attack for the kind of cuss words that “will never hurt me” – “cracker,” to quote Trayvon Martin, RIP.

But those who watched the persecution of the mom from Millburn and the tycoon from Georgia took away a different lesson than the one implied by that wise old adage.

Mind your mouth, mom! The hate crime you endured will not mitigate or explain any future slip-of-the-tongue. You may stereotype an elderly, highly successful white woman, based on her tribe’s past wrongdoing; but you dare not attach statistical significance to the misdeeds of a black man, because of his group’s considerable contribution to crime.

Ms. Deen appears to be a productive person who works hard and leads a good life. The Food Network, Wal-Mart and Caesars Entertainment have purged Paula, but her fans – hungry for the treacle of her voice and cooking – are packing into the “Paula Deen Cruise” liner and buying up her latest cookbook from Amazon.

“Go to hell” is what Ms. Deen should tell her detractors and wishy-washy, condescending defenders alike. The latter, it would seem, are offering up in her defense nothing but mitigating circumstances, the kind that attach to a crime.

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Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Trayvon Martin: America takes sides

That young black man Trayvon Martin was killed last year by white neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman is not in dispute. But as Zimmerman’s trial begins today it may be harder to establish what represents justice.

Frank Taaffe ponders how fast the gated community here in Sanford where he bought his house seven years ago went to pot once the economy went south. Other buyers went into foreclosure or rented their homes out to strangers. Burglaries went up. A heroin ring was cracked by the police a few doors down.

“I could see the ambience here eroding,” Mr Taaffe, 56, says. “I don’t want to say darker, but that too.” Until a few months ago, the only gap in the perimeter fence around the community – “the Retreat at Twin Lakes” – was here right behind his house. “The scum that used to come through here…” he says, gesturing to the sliver of grass separating him from next door. “This was the corridor of crime.”

Mr Taaffe doesn’t mean to be racist discussing the trial that starts today of his friend, George Zimmerman, accused of murdering Trayvon Martin last year here at Twin Lakes. Zimmerman is white Hispanic while Trayvon, just 17, was black.

“There are cases of African-Americans being castigated because of the colour of their skin, I do believe that,” he acknowledges. It’s just that he thinks he knows better than most what happened here that February night.

Others in Sanford might tell you something similar. No town wants to be called racist. “We have been portrayed as some kind of racially charged city but that’s not the case,” City Manager Norton Bonaparte notes over coffee at a recent Chamber of Commerce breakfast at Sanford Zoo. “This was a tragic interaction between two individuals.”

But that, of course, is a sparse version of the truth and even Mr Bonaparte knows it. The reason this trial will be besieged by media crews from around the world has everything to do with the perception, at least, of racial  stereotyping. It’s also why everything is being done to get ready for when the verdict comes in – to keep Sanford from blowing up all over again.

The worst might actually be over. What ignited the African-Americans nearly 18 months ago and sparked Trayvon support rallies everywhere was the police decision to release Mr Zimmerman without charge soon after taking him in. He had belonged to the Twin Lakes Neighbourhood Watch, had seen Trayvon outside a house (Mr Taaffe’s, in fact), figured he was “up to no good” and given chase. He didn’t know the boy was staying in the house of his father’s girlfriend at Twin Lakes and was merely returning from a corner shop.

Most outrageous to some was the notion that he had been freed under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law that says if you are facing possible lethal danger you are not obliged to try to flee and can act right there to save yourself. That means shooting your assailant if you have a permit to carry a weapon, which Mr Zimmerman did, without fear of prosecution. The African-American community saw a pattern.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” explains Francis Oliver, who runs the Goldsboro Historical Museum in a double-wide trailer in the worn down and mostly black Goldsboro section of Sanford. “They got the man who pulled the trigger, he admitted pulling the trigger and they had him in the police station. He tells them he stood his ground. You can’t stand your ground against a boy with a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea.”

As Mr Bonaparte, who is black, puts it at the Chamber breakfast, the killing of Trayvon Martin highlighted what “has not been resolved in America even going back to the lynchings. A white man shot and killed a black person and nothing happened, again. That’s what struck a chord.” Locally, he adds, “it was the like the removal of a scab that showed that the healing that should have happened had not”.

But that early boil of outrage has been partially lanced. Mr Zimmerman, 28, turned himself in and eventually was charged with second-degree murder. The then chief of police, Bill Lee, was sacked by Mr Bonaparte. (Mr Lee was white and his replacement is black.) In the spring of this year, lawyers for Mr Zimmerman said they would not use a Stand Your Ground defence. To some it is enough that the wheels of justice are finally turning as they should.

“It’s in God’s hands now,” says Frederick Turner, a Goldsboro resident, “but I can’t say the community is happy because a young black man died for no reason”. He also echoed many in voicing dismay at the attempts by the defence to introduce evidence, including records from his mobile phone, that disparage Trayvon as wayward at least, even a wannabe gangster with an enthusiasm for marijuana and violence.

“All that stuff doesn’t have nothing to do with what happened to him in those seconds, minutes and hours.” Even if the judge in the case refuses to admit it, the publicity around these claims is unlikely to have escaped potential jurors.

Jury selection begins today. When it is over and the trial proper begins, the nub will be determining exactly what happened in those “seconds and minutes” between Mr Zimmernan spying the teenager outside Mr Taaffe’s house and shooting him from close range.

We know a bit – for example that he got out of his car and pursued the youngster on foot through the neighbourhood. It’s on the tapes of his call with the police dispatcher, who asked: “Are you following him?” “Yeah,” he replied. “OK, we don’t need you to do that,” said the dispatcher. “OK,” Zimmerman said. But he followed him anyway.

The difficulty is that no one else actually witnessed that final, fatal confrontation at a bend on Twin Trees Road, about a minute from Mr Taaffe’s house if you are running quickly. Some residents phoned the emergency services and screaming is heard on the tapes of those calls but experts do not agree which of the two men is doing the screaming. Do the lacerations that were on the back of Mr Zimmerman’s head support his claim that it was Trayvon who turned on him and that he fired in self-defence? Or was Trayvon indeed the sole victim?

“It’s called ‘prevent-defence’ – it’s a football term,” say Mr Taaffe, who expects to be called as a witness by both sides. “That’s what [Zimmerman] did. He cared for his neighbours and for his community. He wasn’t profiling anyone… He wasn’t chasing anybody. How could it be Trayvon screaming? If it was me, I would have gone into ‘prevent-defence’.”

Indeed, Mr Taaffe, who is in internet marketing, is about as exasperated now as the Travyon Martin supporters were when Mr Zimmerman was first allowed to walk free.

“This case has become so polarised and the other side just don’t want to take the cotton wool out of their ears. Where is the common sense? What happened to common sense?”

As for the verdict he is in no doubt. “George Zimmerman will walk out a free man,” he predicts. “But he will have to spend the rest of his life either in hiding or trying to justify his actions.” Such are the passions of this case. – The Independent

Black-on-black murders in the USA rising, reports the Wall Street Journal

In this article, The Wall Street Journal looks at the rise in black-on-black crime in the United States. Whereas the media focus on killings of blacks by other races, such as in the Trayvon Martin case, the reality is that most blacks are killed by other blacks.

Communities Struggle to Break a Grim Cycle of Killing

BATON ROUGE, La.—Police found Silas Gibbs Jr. early in the morning of March 3, slumped against the seat belt in a red Mustang, with blood streaming from his ears and mouth. He had been shot, allegedly by one of his closest friends.

Mr. Gibbs, 24 years old, is one of hundreds of young black men across the U.S. to die violently in the past six months. Their deaths are overshadowed by tragedies like the massacres at the Aurora, Colo., movie theater and the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, as well as the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. The latter case prompted nationwide outcry in part because of its racial aspect: Mr. Martin’s killer is white and Hispanic, and Mr. Martin was black.

But Mr. Martin’s death is a racial aberration, according to data kept by the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Law-enforcement officials nationwide are battling a far more widespread and intractable problem: the persistent killing of young black men by other young black men.

Battling Black-on-Black Violence

[SB10000872396390443324404577595643201707400]
Brandon Thibodeaux for The Wall Street Journal
Hillar Moore, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, met with investigators at the scene of a homicide.

Homicide victims usually are killed by people of their own race and ethnicity. The pattern goes back at least a generation.

Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.

Then there is the matter of who is dying. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.

Overall, more than half the nation’s homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men.

Despite the declining U.S. murder rate, killings remain stubbornly high in poor pockets of cities large and small. In some cases, the rate is rising sharply. That increase is draining resources from police, prosecutors, social workers and hospitals.

As of Friday, Philadelphia police had been called to 223 homicides, compared with 198 last year. Chicago has recorded 337 murders, compared with 263 in the year-earlier period, a 28% jump. Public outcry there escalated after June 27, when stray bullets fired by an alleged gang member killed 7-year-old Heaven Sutton in a poor area on the city’s West Side. Uproar over the little girl’s death led Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to announce a gang crackdown in neighborhoods with high murder rates.

The increase isn’t uniform. In New York, 246 people this year have been murdered as of August 5, a 17% decline from a year earlier, police say.

Overwhelmingly, the victims are black men like Mr. Gibbs, who was shot in the back of the head in his car in Louisiana. Or Rahiem Bailey, 29, who was killed during an apparent robbery in Norfolk, Va. He died the evening of Feb. 26, an hour before Mr. Martin, the Florida teenager, was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman. Lecarlos Todd, a 19-year-old college student, was shot to death earlier that same day in Jackson, Tenn., one of numerous people hurt during a melee at a local night spot. Jackson police said he was an innocent bystander.

In each of these cases, the victims were African Americans younger than 30, and the people charged also were young black men.

Law-enforcement officers know the pattern, said Fraternal Order of Police vice president Frank Gale, during recent testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “As a black law-enforcement officer, I sure would like to see a serious approach to the epidemic levels of violence that exist in far too many of our black communities,” he said.

There is little national attention from policy makers. “I have not seen any federal legislation which would tackle the huge problem” of crime among black Americans, said Mr. Gale, a captain in the Denver County sheriff’s department. “I am not even sure what such a bill would look like,” he added.

Because black-on-black violence tends to stay concentrated within poorer, inner-city areas, there is a lack of wider awareness of the depth of the problem, said Jack Levin of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston. “Nobody in this room would even know the name Trayvon Martin if it had been a black kid who shot Trayvon Martin,” said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, an African American, speaking at a gun-violence research forum.

Beyond the race question, the case sparked a national debate over controversial “stand your ground” laws, such as Florida’s, which don’t require a person to retreat from a threat. It also raised questions about the role of neighborhood watchmen like Mr. Zimmerman, who faces second-degree murder charges and says he shot Mr. Martin in self-defense. Prosecutors say Mr. Zimmerman ignored a dispatcher’s instructions to not pursue Mr. Martin, precipitating the fatal encounter.

People who dismiss high homicide rates in poor, mostly black neighborhoods as someone else’s problem ignore the cost to society, from police efforts to social services for victims’ families, said Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank that conducts research on criminal justice initiatives. His group calculated the national cost for gun homicides alone in 2010 was more than $43 billion. That encompasses victim costs like lost productivity and medical care, as well as costs for police, prosecution, courts and prison. It also includes costs to the offender’s family.

A 2009 study by Iowa State analyzing other data estimated that a single murder runs up more than $17 million in costs to the police, courts, prisons, social services and to the families of victims and suspects.

“We can and must find a way to stop the killing,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in May as he announced a new strategy there to combat homicides. It takes a “public health” approach, emphasizing prevention of murder through education, community policing and targeting possible offenders.

The effort, now under way, focuses on poor neighborhoods that are hot spots for violent crime. Some poor black neighborhoods in New Orleans are dominated by “a culture of death” that needs to be broken, Mr. Landrieu, who is white, has said.

It isn’t just major cities. Baton Rouge, La., with 230,000 people, Kalamazoo, Mich., 74,000, and other small metropolises have violent neighborhoods, some with rising numbers of murders, although the numbers are much smaller.

Baton Rouge has had at least 54 murders so far this year, according to police. By the end of August last year, 43 people had been murdered.

In Kalamazoo, police and community leaders have brought in an expert on inner-city violence because of concerns that one neighborhood has been generating most of the city’s murders in recent years. So far this year, four of Kalamazoo’s five murders took place in this one area.

“’Sometimes you can guess who is next by who was killed the night before.’” Hillar Moore, district attorney

“The last national data we have says it’s increasing and it’s been increasing fastest in medium-size and small cities,” said David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College in New York.

Government numbers, while imperfect, show the homicide rate in cities of 1 million or more declining to 11.9 per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2008 from 35.5 in 1991, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics last year. But it appears to be rising in smaller cities: Separate FBI numbers indicate that homicides rose 4.3% in 2010 from the previous year in cities of 250,000 to 499,000 people.

Mr. Kennedy says one promising solution involves bringing in violence-prone people in specific neighborhoods to meet with law enforcement, clergy, relatives, residents and other government services. People who cooperate get employment and education help. If bad behavior continues, prosecutors push for maximum penalties.

Boston tried a version of this in 1996, and saw youth homicides drop precipitously. In one two-year period, no teenagers younger than 18 were killed. The program ended in 2000, in part because of its success. It restarted several years later when youth murders increased.

Critics say the Boston plan gets too much credit. They cite an overall decline in homicides nationwide during the period it was in operation.

In the area where Mr. Gibbs died in Baton Rouge, a variation of this kind of intense anti-violence effort is being tested. Known as the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination Project, it focuses on a three-mile-square economically depressed area considered the epicenter for violent crime in the city. About 160 young men have been identified and are being brought in to talk to police and other officials.

Northeast of the Louisiana state capitol, fast-food restaurants, bail-bondsman offices and rundown homes abound. The area holds 13% of the city’s population but accounts for 30% of homicides, according to the District Attorney’s Office. From 2007 to 2011, police reported 11,256 people were victims of firearm crimes in the area, more than 90% of them African-American.

Hillar Moore, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, says authorities must try new methods to break the pattern. Mr. Moore tries to go to every homicide scene, he says, and finds that the “vast majority” of the killings “will be over nonsense.”

At 3 a.m. just this Friday, Mr. Moore was out again, this time at the scene of the shooting death of 18-year-old Ty O’Brian Porter. Police don’t have a suspect but say they believe the shooting resulted from a neighborhood dispute.

Retaliation is a recurring theme in the homicides he investigates, Mr. Moore said, which perpetuates the cycle of killing. “Sometimes you can guess who is next by who was killed the night before,” he said.

But because people often are reluctant to cooperate with an investigation, the next killing can be tough to prevent. “They know they’re next, and yet still they do not want police intervention,” he said.

image
Silas Gibbs

 

Silas Gibbs was murdered in early March. He was allegedly shot by a friend.

It was quick-trigger violence that ended the life of Silas Gibbs, once an aspiring football running back, in the early morning hours of a rainy Saturday in March. Mr. Gibbs grew up in the small town of Clinton, about an hour’s drive northeast of Baton Rouge, and is remembered as “quiet and respectful,” said Clinton police Chief Eddie Stewart. He was the kind of young man who would go unnoticed, “until Friday nights. Under the lights on the football field, playing for Clinton, that’s when you noticed him. He came alive.”

He headed to Southern University in Baton Rouge in 2007 to play football. But things started to fall apart. Because of poor grades, he remained academically ineligible to play ball for most of his time at the school.

When his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he started traveling back and forth to Clinton to care for him, his mother said. At the same time, Mr. Gibbs had a daughter, born in 2008, and sought ways to support her.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor conviction for intent to distribute marijuana in 2008 following a traffic stop, when a Drug Enforcement Administration agent found Mr. Gibbs in possession of 23 bags of marijuana and $900 in cash. When the DEA agent who stopped him asked why he was involved, Mr. Gibbs answered he had a small child to support, according to court records.

Mr. Gibbs received probation for a year. The judge set aside the conviction in 2011 after Mr. Gibbs had no further legal problems.

Mr. Gibbs dropped out of Southern. He hauled scrap in the absence of full-time work. His father, the man who had guided him to football and helped him find odd jobs, was dead from cancer. He had a second daughter and helped raise a young nephew whose mother had died in a car wreck.

Toya Williams, Mr. Gibb’s live-in girlfriend and mother of his second daughter, described in an interview the night he died. The two had argued, by text message, as Mr. Gibbs spent the evening with friends while she stayed with her daughter in the mobile home they shared. She went to bed.

[image]

When she awoke in the morning, she noticed two missed calls on her cellphone from 1:20 a.m. They were both from Mr. Gibbs’s phone. She called back. “It just kept ringing and ringing,” she said.

Hours earlier, at 2:45 a.m., police received a call of an abandoned car on the highway. An officer found Mr. Gibbs in the car with the stereo blaring. At first, the officer thought Mr. Gibbs was sleeping, but then he saw the blood.

He summoned an ambulance, followed soon by a homicide team. The detectives began canvassing relatives and friends in the early morning for possible leads.

Ms. Williams caught a ride to her job at Wal-Mart, where she works in maintenance. She first learned of Mr. Gibbs’s death around 8 a.m., when a neighbor phoned with the news. His sister texted the message next. Then a Baton Rouge police detective called. Only when Mr. Gibbs’s mother, Rosie Triplett, phoned to talk about his funeral, Ms. Williams said, did she accept that he was dead.

Her life, already a financial struggle, is now more difficult. Among other things, she must now hire baby sitters when she is at work. Previously, Mr. Gibbs provided child care.

Witnesses to the killing told Baton Rouge police that Walter Fort, 22, a longtime friend of Mr. Gibbs and his former dorm-mate in college, shot him from the back seat of the car. Prosecutors say Mr. Fort pulled the gun during a heated argument, and haven’t said what caused the dispute.

Mr. Gibbs’s family say they believe Mr. Fort had been jealous of Mr. Gibbs’s popularity and athletic success, but they are struggling to understand the rationale for the alleged shooting. “Nobody’s giving us a motive,” said his mother, Ms. Triplett. “I just want…I just want to know why he did it. For what reason? Is it a hate thing or a jealous thing?”

Mr. Fort had no previous criminal record aside from a 2008 rape charge that was dropped when the alleged victim declined to cooperate.

Mr. Fort fled Baton Rouge and was arrested at Texas Southern University in Houston. He is currently being held in the parish jail in Baton Rouge, without bond, as he awaits trial on charges of second-degree murder and illegal use of firearms. Prosecutors are now preparing their case. Barry Milligan, Mr. Fort’s public defender, declined to comment.

Mr. Gibbs is buried beside his father and his sister at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Clinton, La. The family is trying to pull together the funds to buy a headstone.

Mr. Gibbs’s younger sister, Lakitia Triplett, was pregnant at the time her brother died. She lives with her mother, a few blocks east from where her brother’s body was found, in Baton Rouge’s most dangerous neighborhood. Earlier this year she described her anxieties over the future prospects of her then-unborn child. “I have to be worried, you have to,” she said. “People killing people every day over just nonsense.”

A few weeks ago, Ms. Triplett gave birth to a son. She named him Silas.

Read the original article in the Wall Street Journal.

Trayvon Martin case shows up American racial divide

(Reuters) – Tracy Martin had been looking for his son Trayvon since the night before. He went to bed figuring the teen must have gone to the movies and turned off his phone. When Trayvon still wasn’t home in the morning, Martin called the police.

After a flurry of phone calls back and forth, an officer told him a police unit was on the way. “So I went outside waiting for Trayvon to show up,” Martin said.

Instead of one squad car with his son in the backseat, three vehicles pulled up: a police cruiser, an unmarked sedan and another official-looking car. Martin would discover the third car belonged to a chaplain.

It was not yet 8 in the morning, barely 12 hours since the shooting that took place about 100 yards away, and Martin was still unaware of the fate of his son.

The February 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, at the hands of George Zimmerman, 28, a neighborhood watch captain who said he acted in self-defense, has riveted the nation, largely because of race. Trayvon Martin was black. George Zimmerman is white and Hispanic.

For about 10 days, the story remained obscure. Television news from nearby Orlando aired a few segments. The Orlando Sentinel published two brief articles, and the twice-weekly Sanford Herald ran 213 words. Otherwise, there was media silence. This is an account of what happened before everyone knew Trayvon Martin’s name.

BREAKING THE NEWS

When Tracy Martin greeted the police that morning, a plainclothes detective asked him to describe his son. “He asked me what he last had on. He asked me if I had any recent pictures,” Martin said.

“I showed him a recent picture in the camera and he shook his head and said, ‘OK, let me go to my car and get something.'” The detective returned with a folder.

It was drizzling, and he asked Martin if they could go inside. When they were seated he pulled out a photo. It was Trayvon, dead at the scene – his eyes rolled back, a tear on his cheek, saliva coming from his mouth. “From that point, our nightmare,” Martin said.

“YOU GOT ME”

The night his son was killed, Martin, 45, was out to dinner with his fiancée, Brandy Green. Martin, who was divorced from Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, in 1999, is a truck driver from Miami who has a long-distance relationship with Green, a resident of the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision in Sanford where Zimmerman also lived.

Martin would visit Green on weekends, making the four-hour drive to the Orlando suburb of Sanford. In late February he was able to bring his son because Trayvon, a junior, was serving a 10-day suspension from Miami’s Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School. He’d been caught with a plastic baggie that contained traces of marijuana.

On Wednesday, the day after receiving the news, Martin went to the Sanford Police Department looking for answers – and his son’s body. Police took him to a room and played some of the 911 recordings of neighbors who called to report a disturbance followed by a gunshot.

They did not play an earlier call to a police non-emergency line, during which Zimmerman reported a “suspicious guy” and ignored the operator’s suggestion to quit following him. Investigator Chris Serino then took Martin to another room and told him Zimmerman’s version of events.

Sanford police have stopped talking to reporters about the case, and Serino has never spoken publicly about his role in it, but here is how Martin recalls what Serino said: “He told me Zimmerman’s story was that Zimmerman was of course following him and that Trayvon approached his vehicle, walked up to the car and asked Zimmerman, ‘Why are your following me?’ Zimmerman then rolls his car windows down, tells Trayvon ‘I’m not following you.’ He rolls his car windows up.

“Trayvon walks off. Zimmerman said he started running between the buildings. Zimmerman gets out of his car. He comes around the building. Trayvon is hiding behind the building, waiting on him. Trayvon approaches him and says, ‘What’s your problem, homes?’ Zimmerman says ‘I don’t have a problem.’

“Zimmerman starts to reach into his pocket to get his cellphone, and at that point Trayvon attacked him. He says Trayvon hits him. He falls on the ground. Trayvon jumps on top of him, takes his left hand and covers Zimmerman’s mouth and tells him to shut the F up and continues to pound on him.

“At that point Zimmerman is able to unholster his weapon and fire a shot, striking Trayvon in the chest. Trayvon falls on his back and says, ‘You got me.'” The Martin family has been telling their story as part of a campaign to have Zimmerman arrested. He himself has kept quiet.

Sanford police have declined numerous requests for comment on any aspect of the story, even before a special prosecutor overseeing the case invoked a state law that restricts otherwise public information in the course of an active criminal investigation.

Zimmerman has not spoken publicly, since any statements he makes could affect future litigation against him. Though he is free, he remains in hiding.

His father, brother, and defense lawyer, Craig Sonner, have said in interviews that Zimmerman is not racist and has been unfairly vilified. He feared for his life during his altercation with Trayvon Martin, they say, and was justified in using deadly force. In his conversation with Martin, Serino referred to Zimmerman’s background as “squeaky clean.”

Zimmerman had been arrested in 2005 for shoving a state alcohol agent officer during an argument at a bar. Charges were dropped after he entered a special program for first-time offenders. Later that year, his then-girlfriend took out a restraining order, accusing him of domestic violence.

Sanford police released Zimmerman without charge, but Martin says Serino told him he would challenge Zimmerman’s account. “The detective’s words were, ‘I want to interview him again to catch him in a lie,'” Martin said.

A law-enforcement source, who had been informed of the case by investigators, told Reuters that Serino was eager to bring a charge but encountered resistance from the office of the prosecutor, State Attorney Norman Wolfinger.

“Chris (Serino) would have made a recommendation for manslaughter, but Norm Wolfinger’s office wanted it to be a slam dunk,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They don’t want to hear that this is wrong or that is wrong with the case. That’s the way this county does business.” Wolfinger on Monday broke a long silence about the case, denying reports he quashed police intentions to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter.

Although police found no contradictions within Zimmerman’s story, their decision not to arrest Zimmerman was lambasted by critics and has sparked demonstrations around the country.

For now there is one arbiter who matters. Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, a state attorney from northern Florida appointed by Scott on March 22, has taken over the investigation and will decide whether charges are warranted.

ZIMMERMAN DROPS OUT OF SIGHT

Immediately after the shooting, while waiting for police to arrive, neighbor Selma Mora Lamilla saw Zimmerman pacing back and forth, holding his head in his hands. “He was like, ‘Oh my God, what just happened?'” said Mora Lamilla’s roommate, Mary Cutcher.

Zimmerman understood the magnitude of his situation right away, said Joe Oliver, a family friend and colleague of Zimmerman’s at mortgage risk management firm Digital Risk LCC.

“The day after, he went into his job to let them know what was going on,” said Oliver, who has spoken to Zimmerman at least twice since the shooting. “That is the last I know of anyone seeing George.”

Zimmerman and his wife moved out of the townhouse they rented in the Twin Lakes complex almost immediately, Oliver said, and they are now living in seclusion. Across town in Sanford’s black neighborhood, word spread quickly that a black teenager had been killed.

The shooter, said to be white, had gone free. As in many cities in the South, Sanford has a long history of racial tension, and black mistrust of the police runs deep. In 2011, a previous Sanford police chief was forced out of the job after a white police officer’s son was captured on video sucker-punching a black homeless man outside a bar.

Sanford police did not arrest the assailant until video of the attack surfaced on local TV and provoked an outcry from Sanford civil rights leaders. Now, once again, anger was building. A rumor that superiors had quashed an investigator’s intent to charge Zimmerman had already made the rounds in the black community, said Velma Williams, the only black member of the five-person Sanford city commission.

“People were getting suspicious, saying we knew that was going to happen based on history,” Williams said in an interview. She went to see Police Chief Bill Lee on Thursday, March 1, four days after the shooting.

“I told him, ‘I can see a train coming down the track at 50 miles an hour, and you better get a handle on this,'” Williams said. “He said to me, ‘You can rest assured that it’s a thorough and objective and fair investigation.'”

Three weeks later, on March 22, when there was still no arrest and the city commission had voted “no confidence” in Lee by 3-2, the chief announced his temporary resignation. Lee told a news conference that while he stood by the Sanford Police Department, he was stepping aside.

“It is apparent that my involvement in this matter is overshadowing the process,” he said. “I do this in the hopes of restoring some semblance of calm to the city, which has been in turmoil for several weeks.”

TRAYVON MARTIN AS JOHN DOE

At the time of the shooting, Trayvon Martin was not carrying identification – only $22, a cellphone, and the now familiar bag of candy and can of iced tea. His body, taken to the Volusia County Medical Examiner’s office, was tagged as a John Doe.

Although Martin had identified his son to police on Monday, February 27, and asked Serino the next day to issue police clearance for releasing the body, not until Wednesday was a funeral director permitted to drive it back to South Florida. In Miami, the boy’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, 46, a program coordinator for the Miami Dade Housing Authority, stayed home in bed.

“Every little thing kind of frustrates you, especially if you don’t have the body … Just to know the funeral home had the body gave us some comfort,” Fulton said.

“I cried every day. There was nothing else I could do as a mother. Thank God his dad was able to run around and take care of things,” she said. The family held a viewing on Friday, March 2. The memorial service and interment were Saturday. The painful work of laying Trayvon to rest was complete. Now would begin the more difficult search for justice.

FINDING BEN CRUMP

Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton wanted George Zimmerman arrested. They believe he stalked their son because he was black, and they were outraged that Sanford police had accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense.

Lee, the police chief, would contend under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law that police could not arrest Zimmerman without evidence to contradict his story. Martin turned to Patricia Jones, his sister-in-law.

An attorney herself, she knew whom to call: Benjamin Crump, the state’s best-known civil rights attorney, based in Tallahassee. Crump and law partner Daryl Parks had previously gained renown representing the family of a black teenager who died in a boot-camp-style youth detention center in 2006, winning the boy’s family $7.2 million in damages from the state of Florida and Bay County.

On Tuesday, February 28, Crump was at the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, about 125 miles north of Sanford, arguing that public records should be released in civil litigation over Antonio Cooks. Cooks, a black bail bondsman, had been shot and killed by Jacksonville Sheriff’s Officer Jason Bailey while Cooks was serving a warrant and Bailey was responding to a burglary call.

During a break in the hearing, Crump noticed messages from Tyrone Williams, another attorney he knows, and Jones. They urgently asked for his help. Soon Jones put him in touch with Tracy Martin.

“I told him to believe in the system,” Crump said of that first call. “I really believed they were going to arrest Zimmerman. I said, ‘He’s a neighborhood watch person with a gun. Of course they are going to arrest him just for that.'” “Then 48 hours passed and they still hadn’t arrested him,” Crump said. “After that we just had to do what we had to do.”

He took the case pro bono. Realizing he needed a lawyer who knew Sanford and Seminole County, Crump turned to Natalie Jackson, a former Navy intelligence officer who founded the Women’s Trial Group, which specializes in cases for women and children. Her mother lives in Sanford.

Now Crump and Jackson needed a media strategy. On March 5, Jackson brought in Ryan Julison, a publicist who had worked with her on a number of high-profile cases. After speaking with Tracy Martin, Julison said he also took the job for free and went to work pitching the story to national media.

Crump knew from his experience on the boot-camp case that publicity could force officials to act, but it would require persuading two people who had never stood before a television camera to withstand the spotlight.

“I got on the phone with Tracy Martin and I told him, ‘It’s not going to be any fun, but this is the only way to find justice,'” Julison said. “You are going to have to bare your soul and express your emotions and your inner grief.” Martin and Fulton agreed. There was only one problem. At first, the media weren’t interested. Julison pitched the story to a long list of media contacts.

Eventually, on March 7, Reuters published a story titled “Family of Florida Boy Killed by Neighborhood Watch Seeks Arrest.” The next day, CBS News aired a segment on “This Morning,” and by 10 a.m. a crowd of reporters gathered at Natalie Jackson’s law office for a news conference with Ben Crump and Tracy Martin. A media firestorm had begun.

EPILOGUE: THE 911 RECORDINGS

The day after the news conference, on March 9, Velma Williams went back to see Police Chief Bill Lee with community activist Kenneth Bentley. “We said, look, chief. Last time I was here I told you a train was coming down the tracks and it was going 50 miles an hour,” Williams recalled.

“I said it’s going 150 miles an hour now. And it doesn’t have any brakes.” Back in New York, civil rights activist Al Sharpton was monitoring events, his interest piqued by an earlier call from Crump.

After the police chief told reporters on March 12 he lacked a probable cause to arrest Zimmerman, Sharpton took up Trayvon Martin’s cause on his MSNBC show, fueling cable television competition.

The twist that catapulted Martin’s shooting into a world story was the release of recorded 911 emergency calls, including one that captures screams for help in the background that end with a gunshot.

Chief Lee had resisted Crump’s requests to make the tapes public, but he was overruled by Sanford Mayor Jeff Triplett. On the night of Friday, March 16, Triplett invited Trayvon Martin’s parents and their legal team into his office to listen to each of the calls, which he played on his computer.

“When we got to the cries for help, that was when Sybrina burst into tears,” recalled Jackson. “She said, ‘That’s Trayvon. That’s our son.’ She ran out of the room crying.” (Zimmerman’s brother, Robert, would later swear the voice belonged to George.)

“The mayor himself started to cry,” Jackson said. “Everybody in the room was in tears.” Mayor Triplett overruled his police chief and distributed disks of the phone calls to the media that night. They have been broadcast unceasingly ever since.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Lee Aitken and Prudence Crowther)

Racist T-shirt mocks Trayvon Martin’s killer

The T-shirt

Expanding the definition of “cracker,” a t-shirt featuring the photo of the man who shot Trayvon Martin is now available for purchase.

As seen at left, the shirt has a picture of George Zimmerman and the words “Pussy Ass Cracker.” Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic, killed Martin, 17, last month while acting as a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida.

The shirt’s “pussy ass cracker” line is apparently a reference to lyrics from the rapper Plies’s song “100 Years,” which bemoans stiff sentences handed out by racist judges.