Wow...what an unbelievable pile of...
Posted on 03/28/2012 5:28:51 PM PDT by maggief
(Note: Spacing added at line breaks for easier reading.)
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – On the night of Feb. 26, Tracy Martin and his girlfriend had gone out to dinner in Sanford, Fla., leaving his 17-year-old son, Trayvon, behind at the townhouse with plans to watch the NBA All-Star game scheduled to be televised at 7 p.m. from Orlando’s Amway Center.
Trayvon decided to walk to a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store to pick up a bag of Skittles candy and a can of Arizona iced tea before settling in to watch East v. West all-stars. On his way back to the gated community, however, Trayvon was stalked by George Zimmerman, a non-Black neighborhood watch captain armed with a 9 millimeter handgun and a head full of stereotypes about African-American males.
According to 911 tapes, Zimmerman, 28, told the emergency police dispatcher that he had spotted a suspicious young male walking in the neighborhood. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He is on drugs or something.” Zimmerman said, “These ***holes. They are always getting away.”
When the dispatcher asked Zimmerman if he was following the young man in his vehicle, Zimmerman confirmed that he was. The 911 operator said, “OK, we don’t need you to do that.” Still, Zimmerman continued to follow Trayvon, who was unarmed. At one point, Zimmerman got out of his SUV, confronted Trayvon and fatally shot him in the chest.
Tracy Martin was unaware that his honor roll son, who was visiting from Miami, had been killed around 7 p.m. that Sunday.
Martin, Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton; Benjamin Crump, the family lawyer; Al Sharpton and former New York Gov. David Patterson participated in an exclusive 1-hour telephone conference call last Thursday with more than three dozen publishers from the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA).
Martin told publishers how he learned that his son had been killed.
“I had been out to dinner. When we got back between 10:15 and 10:45, he wasn’t at home. The night before, he had been to the movies with my nephew, who had recently moved up to the Orlando area from Miami. Every time Trayvon would come up here, they would find something to do, usually they would go to dinner. My nephew is 20 years old, a very responsible young man. So there was not panic at that moment that he was not home. I made several attempts to call his cell phone and it was going straight to voicemail. I called my nephew’s cell phone and it was going straight to voicemail. So at that point, I figured they had been in the movies because they would always go to the movies.”
Tracy Martin and his girlfriend went to bed. But the next morning, the day Martin and his son had planned to return to Miami, he learned that Trayvon still wasn’t back in the house. Tracy called his nephew again, this time reaching him and learning that Trayvon wasn’t with him.
“I had [his girlfriend] call juvenile justice, just to check and see if anyone by the name of Trayvon Martin had been picked up. No Trayvon Martin,” the father told NNPA publishers. “My next call was to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Department to see if any kid had been picked up.
“My third call was to a non-emergency number at the Seminole County Sheriff’s Department and I informed them that I was filing a missing person’s report. I let them know it hadn’t been 24 hours, but it was unusual for Trayvon not to return home. I told them we were supposed to be leaving that morning when we woke up. They asked me a few questions about him: date of birth, height, complexion, weight and they told me they would dispatch a unit. Five minutes later, she called me back and asked what was he last wearing. I gave them a description of the clothes that he had on last. She said a unit would be out.”
At that point, Tracy Martin still had no clue that his son was dead.
He said, “I got up, got on clothes, went outside because I knew my kid was going to walk back up to the door. Instead, three cars pulled up to the door, one of them an unmarked police vehicle.
“The first officer approached. I introduced myself and told him I was filing a missing person’s report. The second person to approach was a plainclothes detective. He asked me if I had a recent picture of Trayvon and it just so happened that I had taken a picture in my camera, maybe a week or two prior to the incident. I showed them the picture. He told me to give him a second. He walked to his vehicle, retrieved a folder and asked could we go into the house. We walked into the house. He told me he was going to show me a photo and that he was going to ask me if this was my kid. And he pulled out the photo. From that point, it’s been like a nightmare.”
That nightmare was compounded by the decision not to arrest or prosecute Zimmerman, who admitted killing Trayvon. Led by Attorney Benjamin Crump, the family has been making the rounds of national television programs to share their story – and to express their outrage that Zimmerman hasn’t been brought to justice. Protests, many of them led by college students, have taken place across the country.
“In the Black community, we all see Trayvon in ourselves,” Sharpton said. “We all subconsciously know that we’re born as suspects rather than citizens and that’s what Trayvon was – he was a suspect.”
Sharpton explained, “What happened to Trayvon is that it brought to the surface the fear that all of us have for our children and ourselves. I think White America was stunned. Black America became ignited when we finally got it out there. They [Whites] thought having a Black president had solved it. And now, people working in their offices, in the next cubicle, were saying, ‘No, this is me.’ They relate to Trayvon – it was me.”
After three weeks of mobilizing on social media, keeping the story alive in Black newspapers and African-American radio, the mounting pressure forced Sanford, Fla. officials to release the 911 tapes. Those tapes – which show that Zimmerman disobeyed the 911 dispatcher’s directive that he not follow Trayvon – along with the decision not to arrest Zimmerman, forced Police Chief Bill Lee to temporarily step down as police chief on Thursday.
On April 10, a grand jury will be convened to determine whether Zimmerman should be indicted. Both the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division and the FBI are looking into the case to determine if any federal statues were violated.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has appointed a Task Force on Citizen Safety and Protection to investigate how such tragedies can be avoided in the future. Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll will chair the special panel. Rev. R.B. Holmes, Jr, publisher of the Capital Outlook in Tallahassee, will serve as vice chair.
Sharpton led a rally Thursday night of more than 30,000 people in Sanford, many of them arriving from around the nation. Referring to the police chief, Sharpton said, “We did not come here for a temporary leave of absence. We came for permanent justice – arrest Zimmerman now.”
On Friday, President Obama expressed concern about the case.
“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together, federal, state, and local, to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened,” Obama said. He added, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
If the son had dressed like Trayvon, he would have come under criticism.
On the March 23 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera said, “I am urging the parents of Black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”
For some reason, Blacks are stigmatized for wearing a hoodie – a sweatshirt with a hood attached to it – but Whites, such as New England Patriots football coach Bill Belichick and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, are not.
NBA star Dwayne Wade posted a photo of himself Friday in a hooded top to his social media pages, while LeBron James tweeted a photo of 13 Miami Heat players wearing black hoodies with their heads bowed in a tribute to Trayvon.
“I saw a post that D-Wade had saying, ‘I am Trayvon Martin,’” Tracy Martin said. “To see all these athletes put Trayvon in the same sentence with them, it feels real good. Trayvon was an excellent athlete and if he could hear them saying his name, he would be so moved by it.” On Sunday, many churches honored Trayvon, who was wearing a hoodie when he was killed.
Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, preached the 11 a.m. service in a Morehouse College hoodie. In his sermon, Warnock compared Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago youth who was murdered near Money, Miss. in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman. “Both young boys were killed for crossing some imaginary social line,” Warnock said. “Mr. Zimmerman took a gun to a Skittles fight. Apparently Zimmerman is innocent until proven guilty and Trayvon is guilty until proven innocent.”
Sybrina Fulton is still living with the pain of her son’s death.
“It just reminds me of an awful dream,” she said in the conference call with NNPA publishers. “It just seems like the pain goes away temporarily and then it comes back. It just feels like my heart is just heavy. I still have tears, I still cry. It’s just difficult. Each day is just difficult to get by.” Sanford police claim they couldn’t arrest Zimmerman because he was protected under Florida Statute 776.013 (3), the state’s stand your ground law that gives citizens broad protection if they are acting in self-defense.
Jeb Bush, who as governor of Florida signed “stand your ground” bill into law, said the law does not cover the neighborhood watch captain who shot Trayvon Martin to death.
“This law does not apply to this particular circumstance,” Bush said after an education panel discussion at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Stand your ground means stand your ground. It doesn’t mean chase after somebody who’s turned their back.”
Reflecting on the moment he was asked by police to identify his son, Tracy Martin said, “I can’t describe the feeling, I can’t describe what was going through my mind because I was actually staring at a photo of my pride and joy on the ground dead. I still see the photo now – his eyes weren’t closed all the way, his mouth wasn’t closed, it was the worst feeling of my life.”
How to ignite a race war ...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/24/142983/martin-familys-lawyers-no-strangers.html
Posted on Saturday, March 24, 2012
EXCERPTS
In Trayvon’s case, (Parks & Crump) alerted the news media more quickly. They phoned the Rev. Al Sharpton almost instantly, and organized marches with local civil rights activists. They also started pressing for federal involvement and alleging a cover-up from the get-go.
(snip)
“In court, you have the jury,” Crump says. “Our job is to get the case to a jury. We need to fight first in the court of public opinion. The jury is the American people.”
//
Someone Must Be Punished for Killing Trayvon Martin, Says Mom Sybrina Fulton
by Allison Samuels Mar 22, 2012 2:04 AM EDT
EXCERPT
The now controversial killing of Trayvon garnered virtually no mainstream media attention in the days immediately after he was fatally shot, but that all changed when the teenager’s parents decided to hire civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump and his law firm to get more answers on exactly how and why their son died.
“They called me the same day they were notified that their son was dead,’’ Crump told The Daily Beast. “When I heard their unarmed teenage son was shot to death, I just knew there’d be an arrest shortly. There wasn’t an arrest 48 hours later, and then I knew we’d have to take this outside of Sanford if we wanted justice.’’
Trayvon’s parents were told by the Sanford police that Zimmerman wasn’t arrested in their son’s death because the facts of the case did not dispute his claim of self-defense.
For Crump, taking the Trayvon Martin story outside of Sanford simply entailed dialing up a few well-placed friends such as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Crump worked closely with the civil rights leader in 2006 on another racially charged case—the controversial death of a 14-year-old, African-American inmate of a Florida boot camp.
“I had to call people like Sharpton and a few other black civil rights leaders and the black media to tell them about this story,’’ said Crump. “I had to get them to understand what happened to this young man and what hadn’t happened in his case so they could spread the word.’’
Historically, cases of murder and violence against blacks in the United States rarely have been given the same amount of attention as cases in which the victims of crime are white—and often go unnoticed and unprosecuted.
Just days after hearing the details of Trayvon’s death, Sharpton arranged to have Crump and the teenager’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, on his syndicated radio show and his popular MSNBC show, Politics Nation, to tell their story.
(snip)
In the wake of non-stop media attention from the likes of Sharpton and CNN’s Don Lemon concerning the Trayvon Martin case, black media blogs such as MediaTakeOut.com and Huffington Post Black Voices also began publishing accounts and editorials about the Florida case—daily. Almost instantly, readers of all races, ages, and backgrounds began tweeting and posting on Facebook their outrage over how the police have handled the case, and the lack of an arrest in the shooting. To date, almost 1 million people have signed a Change.Org petition to have Zimmerman arrested. In response to the widespread outrage, the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the shooting.
(snip)
//
STATEMENT BY REVEREND AL SHARPTON AND NATIONAL ACTION NETWORK REGARDING THE SHOOTING OF TRAYVON MARTIN– AN UNARMED AFRICAN-AMERICAN TEENAGER KILLED BY A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH CAPTAIN IN FLORIDA
March 12, 2012
The “Madison Times” has some mixed up facts.
How about that for a divisive statement?
wow.
Several people need to read the information you posted “how to ignite a race war. Maggie
RS, C is there a ping list for Martin/Zimmerman case?
It's too bad that the witness testimony doesn't corroborate this version of events.
More disinformation ...
Race and Justice: A National Conversation With Robin Roberts
Trayvon Martin Video Shows No Blood or Bruises on George Zimmerman
By MATT GUTMAN (@mattgutmanABC)
March 28, 2012
A police surveillance video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who says he shot Martin after he was punched in the nose, knocked down and had his head slammed into the ground.
The surveillance video, which was obtained exclusively by ABC News, shows Zimmerman arriving in a police cruiser. As he exits the car, his hands are cuffed behind his back. Zimmerman is frisked and then led down a series of hallways, still cuffed.
Zimmerman, 28, is wearing a red and black fleece and his face and head are cleanly shaven. He appears well built, hardly the portly young man depicted in a 2005 mug shot that until a two days ago was the single image the media had of Zimmerman.
Police Video Surveillance of George Zimmerman
The initial police report noted that Zimmerman was bleeding from the back of the head and nose, and after medical attention it was decided that he was in good enough condition to travel in a police cruiser to the Sanford, Fla., police station for questioning.
His lawyer later insisted that Zimmerman’s nose had been broken in his scuffle with 17-year-old Martin.
In the video an officer is seen pausing to look at the back of Zimmerman’s head, but no abrasions or blood can be seen in the video and he did not check into the emergency room following the police questioning.
(snip)
First comment:
Billjacobs9911
7:31 PM EDT
Mar 28, 2012
In the police report, it clearly states he received medical attention by EMS personnel prior to being driven to the police station. In this video, his face was clean, but you can clearly see the wound on the back of his head. The police report and EMS report indicate he sustained multiple wounds and was bleeding when they arrived. Yet another article with the intention to mislead readers. Ridiculous.
Nice piece of satire. A bit over the top, but a good attempt.
Is this a news or opinion piece? It seems to me that if this is being branded as “news”, this news organization could be held for libel if these facts aren’t correct.
“It’s too bad that the witness testimony doesn’t corroborate this version of events.”
Doesn’t matter ... see post #2.
Madison Times is a liberal rag..
Here’s website for the author
www.georgecurry.com
Sharpton on steroids...
Maggie has done a great job of posting material on this case. DOn’t miss the first ones.
Wow...what an unbelievable pile of...
Nice piece of satire, no ...
Metanarrative, yes.
The wagist blog has been doing all of the heavy lifting investigative reporting on the Trayvon case. They were the ones who found his Twitter account and the gangsta handle he had and those recent photos of him with grill teeth and tats that belied the angelic innocent image that the press swallowed hook line and sinker from the Martin family lawyer.
The reporter Dan Linehan from Wagist has been attacked from all sides for his stellar reporting. Even his editor wrote an editorial today saying that he had done stellar reporting, but then apologized for the content. I suggest that everyone go on wagist and commend Dan Linehan for his stellar reporting: http://www.wagist.com/2012/dan-linehan/misconceptions-in-the-trayvon-martin-case
The wagist blog has been doing all of the heavy lifting investigative reporting on the Trayvon case. They were the ones who found his Twitter account and the gangsta handle he had and those recent photos of him with grill teeth and tats that belied the angelic innocent image that the press swallowed hook line and sinker from the Martin family lawyer.
The reporter Dan Linehan from Wagist has been attacked from all sides for his stellar reporting. Even his editor wrote an editorial today saying that he had done stellar reporting, but then apologized for the content. I suggest that everyone go on wagist and commend Dan Linehan for his stellar reporting: http://www.wagist.com/2012/dan-linehan/misconceptions-in-the-trayvon-martin-case
The wagist blog has been doing all of the heavy lifting investigative reporting on the Trayvon case. They were the ones who found his Twitter account and the gangsta handle he had and those recent photos of him with grill teeth and tats that belied the angelic innocent image that the press swallowed hook line and sinker from the Martin family lawyer.
The reporter Dan Linehan from Wagist has been attacked from all sides for his stellar reporting. Even his editor wrote an editorial today saying that he had done stellar reporting, but then apologized for the content. I suggest that everyone go on wagist and commend Dan Linehan for his stellar reporting: http://www.wagist.com/2012/dan-linehan/misconceptions-in-the-trayvon-martin-case
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