All of those ‘facts’ you list don’t fit with the police report and follow up reports. In fact, I think everything you stated is false.
First, Martin was 6’ 160lbs, not the 6’3” 200lbs you list. See the police report below.
There is no statement by Zimmerman in the police report stating that Martin was on his chest. Zimmerman gave his statement to both officers at the time of the incident and did not state that. Zimmerman also did not tell either officer that he was being punched.
Martin was with his father visiting his father’s girlfriend who lived in the neighborhood, thus he had a legal right to be there.
Martin had no responsibility to stop for an unidenfiable individual who was trying to detain him.
The police report indicates that the responding officer had Zimmerman at gunpoint, then cuffed him and put him in his car.
The police report indicates that Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose. I don’t know where you get ‘broken nose’ from. I see no witness statements to that effect.
The police list charges of Negligent Homicide and Manslaughter on their first report. Apparaently, the two responding officers did not think Mr. Zimmerman was quite so innocent.
The Castle Doctrine is irrelevant here because Ziummerman innitiated the confrontation.
Info compiled here:
http://sanfordfl.gov/investigation/trayvon_martin.html
I obviously have my own opinion. But, that 6' 160lbs, is off the dead kids drivers license. That's how they knew who he was. He could have grown from when he was issued that card.
Dear Alma,
witnesses have been talking to reporters. Not everything pertinent to an incident is in a police report. I know, because my sister assaulted me, falsely accused me of the crime, and a police report resulted that did not include pertinent facts because a witness lied!
If Mr.Zimmerman is charged with a crime, I have no doubt he will be found innocent. Then he can sue the bejesus out of the Police Department. Now, won’t that make the taxpayers angry?
The Castle Doctrine very much applies here. It doesn’t matter whether Trayvon was 6’ or 7’ tall; beating someone in the face and about the head with fists can kill them. And now there are witnesses.
It doesn’t make you happy, I can tell.
Trayvon Martin was suspended from school for 5-days. Why, I really don’t care. But it is possible he was really ticked off about it, and Zimmerman was an irritant that set Trayvon off.
“Martin was with his father visiting his father’s girlfriend who lived in the neighborhood, thus he had a legal right to be there.”
So why didn’t he stop and tell Zimmerman that fact.
“Martin had no responsibility to stop for an unidenfiable individual who was trying to detain him.”
When I have the right of way at an intersection I don’t have to stop - but it isn’t worth dying for, either.
You state that Trayvon had a reason to be there, so why not stop and tell that to Zimmerman? This is really a shame, because Zimmerman probably knew the name of Trayvon’s dad’s girlfriend. All Trayvon had to do was be civil, stop and chat with Zimmerman.
If he had, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
“The guy on the bottom, who had a red sweater on, was yelling to me, ‘Help! Help!’ and I told him to stop, and I was calling 911,” said the witness, who asked to be identified only by his first name, John.
John said he locked his patio door, ran upstairs and heard at least one gun shot.
“And then, when I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on the top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point.”
Hate to jump into a good argument and all, but there is another key point to all this that is being roundly ignored.
If you are part of a neighborhood watch, you must have some knowledge of what you can, can’t, should, and shouldn’t do when you actually exercise your “duties” as a member of such.
This is doubly true if you happen to have a CCW or are otherwise armed. With carrying a weapon comes GREAT responsibility.
I don’t know what happened, exactly, in this case. I don’t know who took the first swing, who started what, etc. I frankly don’t care. What matters is this situation escalated way beyond what it should have because Zimmerman apparently got cocky due to the presence of a sidearm on his person.
Before anyone jumps me for attacking Zimmerman or claiming he should be arrested and strung-up from the highest tree, forget it. That’s not at all what I’m saying.
You can’t don that weapon and don a new personality a la Bronson’s character Paul Kersey in the “Death Wish” films or a Dirty Harry. Inexperienced, insecure people can find it way too easy to slip into such a mindset when armed....and that is a recipe for disaster, as it was here.
Zimmerman may very well have been within his rights to shoot the kid. I don’t know. All I do know is he never should have put himself and the kid in such a volatile and highly dangerous situation in the first place.
A weapon is a last resort tool. You pull it....you use it, period. No warning shots. You pull, you shoot, you aim to kill.
Unless you’re prepared to do that, one should never deliberately allow a situation to escalate (WHEN you can possibly avoid such) to the point where you have, in this case, a dead teenager, a probably decent man whose life is now in tatters, and a**hole black racists screaming for whitey’s blood all over the country.
It could have been handled better, it should have been handled better. I hope we all learn one hell of a valuable lesson from this.
Pardon the length of my rant, guys; I just feel very strongly about this.