This past Thursday, George Zimmerman's attorneys released new evidence relevant to the upcoming trial of their client on a second-degree murder charge for the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
The Martin family attorneys say the evidence is irrelevant. They are wrong. It is damning. The text messages and photos from Martin's cell phone tell a story wildly at odds with the one the State of Florida and the media have been peddling for more than a year, but one altogether truer and sadder.
In the way of recap, in February 2012, Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida, shot and killed the seventeen-year-old Martin.
Taking their cue from the Martin family's attorneys, Reuters ran the first national article on the shooting ten days after it happened. Zimmerman was a "loose cannon." He profiled Martin, stalked him, and shot him, disregarding police instructions. Martin, by contrast, was a "good kid." He had hoped to be a pilot. He was simply bringing the soon-to-be iconic iced tea and Skittles home to his "little brother."
This story was pure fable from the beginning, and the attorneys knew it. Even before going public, they moved to seal Martin's school records, and with good reason. Consider this exchange between Martin and a female friend on November 21, three months before his death. After he told her he was "tired and sore" from a fight, she asked him why he fought. "Bae" is shorthand for "babe."
MARTIN: Cause man dat nigga snitched on me
FRIEND: Bae y you always fightinqq man, you got suspended?
MARTIN: Naw we thumped afta skool in a duckd off spot
FRIEND: Ohh, Well Damee
MARTIN: I lost da 1st round :( but won da 2nd nd 3rd . . . .
FRIEND: Ohhh So It Wass 3 Rounds? Damn well at least yu wonn lol but yuu needa stop fighting bae Forreal
MARTIN: Nay im not done with fool..... he gone hav 2 see me again
FRIEND: Nooo... Stop, yuu waint gonn bee satisified till yuh suspended again, huh?
MARTIN: Naw but he aint breed nuff 4 me, only his nose
As his social media accounts show, Martin was a student of mixed martial arts. The fight followed the MMA format. A day later, he would tell a friend that his opponent "got mo hits cause in da 1st round he had me on da ground nd I couldn't do ntn." As his girlfriend complained, Martin was "always" fighting. He was also something of a sadist. His opponent, after all, did not bleed enough. Why might this be relevant?
Witness #6, the best of the eyewitnesses to the shooting, told the Sanford PD that a there was 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," and that black man on top was "throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style."
Martin was not the innocent little boy that the media relentlessly and corruptly portrayed him to be. At the time of his death, he was five feet, eleven inches and weighed 158 pounds. To put this in perspective, legendary boxer Tommy "The Hitman" Hearns was six feet, one inch and 145 pounds when he first won the world welterweight title as a twenty-one-year-old.
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Martin's parents failed him. The school system failed him. The sad vestiges of the civil rights movement betrayed him, and the media betrayed America. This all comes at a cost, and the piper has yet to be paid.


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