George Zimmerman is a racist raised in a crazy racist family. He had a long history of calling the police to report “suspicious persons” that showed he saw all black males as suspicious persons. It could have been Sunday morning instead of Sunday night and Trayvon could have been on his way home from church, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a bible, and Zimmerman still would have seen him as a threat.
I don’t know if Trayvon would be alive if he was white. Probably but maybe not. Besides being a racist, Zimmerman was a coward who compensated for his fears and insecurities by playing cop. A tall, well-built white kid in a hoodie walking alone in the dark could have frightened a coward like Zimmerman maybe not just as much but just enough. His cop wannabe-ness could have kicked in just as foolishly. He could have been just as determined to play hero to prove he wasn’t the coward he knew himself to be. He could have chased after the white kid, even after the 911 dispatcher told him to say put, and been just as surprised when his “perp” turned out not to be as scared of him as he was of the kid. Things could have turned out as they did, with the panic-stricken “hero” pulling his gun to “defend” himself while losing a fight he started.
I say “could have.” Given what we know, it’s not as likely as what did happen. Zimmerman was out hunting bad guys but in his mind all the bad guys are black.
He probably would have seen a white kid in a hoodie in a very different way than he saw Trayvon.
But say he had killed a white kid. There are other things that almost certainly would have happened differently.
Zimmerman would have been arrested on the spot.
The Sanford cops would have actually investigated instead of just taking Zimmerman’s word for what happened.
They wouldn’t have left the body unattended in the morgue for almost a day with nobody bothering to try to identify him and find his family.
It wouldn’t have taken an intense campaign by relatives and friends of the dead kid and pressure from Washington to get Zimmerman charged with a homicide.
Nobody would have shown photographs of the victim acting like a normal seventeen year old boy or used his short record of getting into minor bits of trouble by acting like a normal seventeen year old boy to “prove” that the kid was a thug and had it coming.
Nobody would have been arguing that wearing a hoodie made the kid look like a gangsta.
Nobody would have been implying that wearing a hoodie meant the kid was a gangsta and had it coming.
Nobody would be talking about this now because George Zimmerman would be in jail serving whatever time for manslaughter his public defenders office lawyers agreed to in their deal with the prosecution.
Everybody would be in agreement that what happened was what did in fact happen. An idiot and coward who wanted to play hero went out with a gun looking for trouble, found it, found he couldn’t handle it, panicked because he was losing a fight he started, and shot an unarmed seventeen year old boy who had the bad judgment to be stronger and braver than the idiot with a gun.
Very well done, Lance.
Posted by: Janelle | Sunday, July 14, 2013 at 12:33 PM
A billion comments and news stories out there and you nail it in your last paragraph.
Posted by: KC45s | Sunday, July 14, 2013 at 08:47 PM
What you write may be true, and it's what a lot of people believe. But the fact is the prosecution failed to make its case, and the jury ruled accordingly. So maybe we should be more concerned with the jury system or the rules of evidence than with our feelings about the outcome of this one trial.
Posted by: Lemastre | Monday, July 15, 2013 at 01:34 AM
This from Leonard Pitts, one of my favorite columnists: The killing of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman's acquittal shows "the cost of being black in a nation that considers black the natural color of criminality."
Posted by: the blonde | Monday, July 15, 2013 at 11:53 AM
Never should have charged him with murder - should have been manslaughter. The Prosecutors bowed to public pressure and tried to prosecute a case they couldn't prove. They should have had broader shoulders and faced down the calls for Zimmerman to be charged with murder.
Also, if Trayvon had been white, this case would have received next to zero national exposure. And the Stand Your Ground would have likely prevented any arrest.
Not saying race wasn't a factor (and Zimmerman certainly is not anyone you'd want walking around with a gun) but it wasn't murder, and race made a charge more likely, not less.
NBC doctoring Zimmerman's 911 call didn't help and should get Zimmerman some cash. All in all, not a good day for justice and common sense.
Posted by: Chris the cop | Monday, July 15, 2013 at 12:22 PM
Lance, you are undoubtedly absolutely correct. It's exactly what I thought. When I heard one juror say in an interview that race did not enter into their deliberations, I thought, "Yeah, right." But it may be true, because it was an unstated assumption, one that didn't need to enter the deliberation. Plainly and simply, the assumption was that a black person's life was not worth as much as a white person's life -- any white person.
Posted by: Mark | Tuesday, July 16, 2013 at 01:43 PM