Summary Of The Trayvon Martin Case

Shortly after 7:00 P.M. on Sunday, February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin talked on his cellphone with his friend, Rachel Jeantel. He carried a bag of Skittles and an Arizona watermelon juice cooler as he headed along a sidewalk in the Retreat at Twin Lakes townhouse community in Sanford. When George Zimmerman, driving his SUV to Target for an errand, looked out his window he spotted Martin and concluded, as he told police in a phone call, he was "a real suspicious guy." What about Martin made him suspicious is not completely clear. What is known is that Martin is that he was unknown to Zimmerman, young, wore a hooded sweatshirt, walked slowly in the rain--and, most central to the debates that would later ensue, was black.

He told the dispatcher that the man in "a grey hoodie" was "just walking around looking at all the houses" and "now he 's staring at me." Telling the dispatcher "he 's coming to check me out," Zimmerman asked, "How long until you can get an officer over here?" Told by the officer "we 've got someone on the way," Zimmerman responded in frustration: "These assholes, they always get away."

Martin, meanwhile, was talking on his cellphone with a friend in Miami named Rachel Jeantel. He complained to Jeantel "that a man was watching him"--a man Martin described as "a creepy-ass cracka." Jeantel warned Martin that the man might be a rapist and urged him to run.

Zimmerman told the dispatcher, "Shit, he 's running," and got over his car to follow him. The dispatcher, sensing that Zimmerman was giving chase, asked, "Are you following him?" When Zimmerman replied, "Yeah," the dispatcher said, "Okay, we don 't need you to do that." Zimmerman answered, "Okay." The dispatcher suggested that Zimmerman meet the arriving officer "near the mailboxes," and he said, "Yeah, that 's fine." Seconds later, the four-minute call to the dispatcher ended. According to Zimmerman 's police interview later that night, "I was walking back through to where my car was and he jumped out from the bushes and he said, 'What the fuck 's your problem, homey? ' And I said, 'I don 't have a problem, ' and he goes, 'Now you have a problem,

In Zimmerman 's retelling of the ensuing struggle to Officer Doris Singleton later that night, Martin "grabbed my head and started hitting it into the sidewalk." Zimmerman managed to pull himself back to the grass and yell, "Help me, help me. He 's killing me." Martin, on top of him, responded by covering Zimmerman 's mouth with his hand and telling him, "You 're going to die tonight." At that point, as he tried to slide away, "my jacket and my shirt came up...and I felt his hand go down on my side and I thought he was going for my firearm. So I grabbed it immediately and as he banged my head again, I just