A year after his death, Trayvon Martin — the Miami teen who was shot and killed inside a gated community in Sanford, Florida one year ago Tuesday — has come to symbolize many things: the fear black mothers have for their sons as they go out into the world, confronting police, or others who deem them suspicious; the fight over “stand your ground” and gun laws; or the wariness many African-Americans have for police, who many believe treat black victims of crime with less respect. But it is the question of what Trayvon Martin actually looked like, that final day of his life, which could become a central issue in the trial of the man who killed him.
George Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch volunteer who shot Martin after a violent confrontation inside the Retreat at Twin Lakes last February 26th, says he spotted “a real suspicious guy” who looked “like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something,” and appeared to be in his “late teens,” according to the 911 call he made that night. Zimmerman says that the person he saw eventually attacked him, and that he shot Martin in self-defense.
In making that case, Zimmerman’s lawyer, Mark O’Mara, has tried to focus attention away from the family photos released by Martin’s grieving parents: Martin smiling with his father, Tracy Martin; the teen on a skiing trip, or hugging his mother, Sybrina Fulton, saying in many cases those photos are years old — and that in any event, they don’t represent who Trayvon Martin was on the night Zimmerman spotted him. But it is two photos: one of Martin wearing a red t-shirt, and the now-iconic black and white picture of Martin wearing a hoodie — similar to the grey sweatshirt he was killed in, that O’Mara says have created an unfair and false representation of who Martin was on February 26, 2012.
The red t-shirt photo was taken in August of 2011, when Martin was 16 years old, according to Martin’s parents and their attorney, Ben Crump. Martin would have turned 18 this February 5th. O’Mara says that a truer representation of Martin on the night he died was the one captured by a security camera at the 7-11 where he purchased the candy and iced tea that were found near his body.
TheGrio: Joy-Ann Reid breaks down the Trayvon Martin case
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“There are obvious differences found when comparing the photo of Trayvon in the red t-shirt, with more recent photos of Trayvon released by his family, and the 7-11 security footage of Trayvon the night of the shooting,” O’Mara wrote on GZLegalCase.com, the website devoted to the Zimmerman defense, in response to a series of articles on the case — and the varying images of Martin — by Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart. “On the surface, it seems like a ridiculous pursuit to note the difference between these photographs, but here is the important distinction: it is lunacy to think that the ‘fresh-faced’ boy in the red T-shirt could successfully physically assault George Zimmerman — which is George’s claim, and it is no stretch to believe that the young man pictured in the 7-11 security footage could.”
O’Mara calls the 7-11 image, which shows Martin at the counter, his hoodie over his head, making his purchase, “the most relevant photo of all, not because it makes him look anything other than what he was,” and he has no reservations about using it as part of his legal case.
“People have gotten upset, saying that I’m trying to demonize Trayvon for being who he [was],” O’Mara told theGrio on Monday. “Well we’re not. But if in fact we are going to look at a comparison of the personalities, which everyone has now done, and continues to do. You know, did George have inappropriate sexual contact with his six year old cousin when he was seven? That’s everywhere. Was he a punk because he got into a fight with a cop, and the charges were dropped? That’s all over the place. So the reality is, we are doing some comparison of the two, and it is a reality, that person who’s on that 7-11 video, I resist a suggestion that that’s demonizing Trayvon. That is exactly who Trayvon was that night.”
The Martins on Tuesday released two new photos of Trayvon to theGrio — both taken on February 18, 2012, eight days before he died. The photos show Martin riding a horse, and posing with family members at his mother’s birthday party. The family is adamant that nobody, including O’Mara, can make a judgment about what their sons look like, except them.
“How would he know what Trayvon looked like?” Fulton asked regarding O’Mara on Tuesday, after her attorney, Ben Crump, showed her the newer photos and prepared to forward them.
O’Mara said he joins those who have denounced blogs and websites that have posted fake pictures purporting to be Trayvon, including pictures of a young man wielding a gun, and a picture of rapper The Game, who is 28 years old and covered in tattoos. But he dismisses any suggestion that his vigorous defense of Zimmerman, including pointing to that 7-11 security camera footage, has played into the hands of those in whom the case has, in his words, brought out the worst.
“Now people come in and say, oh well you make him look like a thug,” O’Mara continues. “No. You’re just making him look that way because you think he looks like a thug. No. That is the person who my client spied, and focused on. Good, bad or indifferently, that’s who he is, and who he was.”
And the attorney doesn’t shy away from the other portrayals of Martin in court, which he says are part of his obligation to provide a fulsome defense of his client.
“Will it ever come into a courtroom that Trayvon was suspended from school a couple of months before, and then suspended again, for writing on the wall, or having pot in his backpack or having a handful of jewelry in his backpack, I don’t think that’s gonna get anywhere near a courtroom. It might,” O’Mara said. “As a zealous advocate for my client, I’m going to look into everything I can look into that might lead to helping George defend himself against a second degree murder charge. And we have case law in Florida that says, a victim’s prior history of violence is relevant. I can’t ignore that. It may be seen to be socially unseemly to do that, but I’m a lawyer, and I know the law, and when the law says you’re allowed to get in a victim’s propensity towards violence in a self-defense case, I have to do my homework and go see if it’s out there. Now I didn’t take his school records and put them all over the Internet, cause they’re private, they’re protected. Those don’t go out there. But do I want them? Absolutely.”
Sanford native Natalie Jackson, an attorney for the Martin family, agrees that O’Mara must do everything he can to advocate for his client. But she and the rest of the Martin family legal team take issue with his approach.
“Who Zimmerman saw [on the night of the shooting] was a figment of his imagination,” Jackson says. “And that’s where Mark is being disingenuous, because Zimmerman did not know who Trayvon was. He didn’t know his school record. … All he saw, was a young, black male in a hoodie, walking ‘suspiciously,’ to Zimmerman. So what made him suspicious? If Mark is going to address that problem – and I agree, he should defend his client – and I agree that he should show why Zimmerman thought that Trayvon was suspicious. But the honest thing to do is to say why did Zimmerman think that Trayvon was suspicious? He didn’t know anything about him, so the only reason he thought he was suspicious is because he was a young, black teenage male wearing a hoodie, walking in a neighborhood that he didn’t think he belonged.”
“I think what people are upset about is the way that [O’Mara] is portraying a young, black male, who most people feel did nothing, and was just walking home,” Jackaon said. “And the way he is portraying him, and the way that, in defending his client, he’s had to demonize Trayvon. So that’s what people are taking offense to. I don’t think he understands why people are upset with him.”
O’Mara says the defense has been conscientious about its portrayals of Martin, but that the constant vitriol he says has been directed against his client has often forced the legal team’s hand.
“I think we’ve been quite sensitive about what we’ve said about Trayvon and his family,” O’Mara said. “But I’m not gonna shy away from the fact that my client had his nose broken, it looks like, or smashed, and that we have a witness who says that Trayvon was on top of him, because that’s fact. We have an obligation to zealously represent and defend our client, while still maintaining some sensitivity to the fact that we have a 17-year-old who’s passed away. … I will tell you, I feel like I’ve only responded to attacks against my client. If there wasn’t all of the groundswell of hatred of my client, based on mis-assumptions and misinformation, we wouldn’t have to be evening the playing field quite so much.”
O’Mara’s case will hinge in part on whether he can convince a jury that it was reasonable for Zimmerman, having spotted Martin on a dark, rainy night, to fear him. And he says he hopes that the trial doesn’t cause the public to miss an opportunity to have a real discussion about race, and racial stereotyping.
“My concern is that we’re tying so much to the verdict” in the upcoming trial, O’Mara says, “when it needs to be divorced from the verdict. Because I don’t want the nation to be split along racial lines because of the outcome of a verdict that is supposed to be decided upon the law and the facts by six people, who shouldn’t even hear the word race. … It’s also in a case where there is necessarily no suggestion of racism, but for the subtleties [of] what whites do in America where they just have a predisposition to view young black males a certain way. But there’s nothing to support, with the facts of this case, that George did it. … My contention is we need to have conversations about that, but we’re not having them, and we’re never gonna be having them, and we’re gonna be set back years if he gets acquitted, and the African-American population says, ‘you see? We told you the system doesn’t work, and it’s still not working.’ That’s my fear.”
Jackson insists the case has never been about accusations of racism on the part of George Zimmerman, but rather about what the Martin family believes was the racial profiling of their son, and the failure of Sanford police to make an arrest after the shooting, based on their own assumptions about Zimmerman and Martin that night.
“When I hear Mark O’Mara, it feels to me as though he’s saying that, you know, people still think this is a race issue — that George Zimmerman is a racist,” Jackson says. “What they don’t get is that whether or not he’s a racist, people are still offended by what he did. And what he did was, he saw a young, black male, and he assumed that he was a criminal. And you see it all over the evidence, and that is the problem. So whether or not [Zimmerman] is a racist, [he] ascribed a negative attribute to Trayvon Martin.”
“Being a criminal defense lawyer is a very hard job,” Jackson adds, acknowledging the complexities of the case O’Mara has taken on. “However, being a young black male in America is much harder.”
Editor’s note: George Zimmerman has sued NBCUniversal for defamation and the company has strongly denied his allegations.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport