According to Tracy Martin, the Sanford, Fla., detective recounted this sequence of events: Trayvon Martin walked up to Zimmerman’s vehicle and asked why he was following him. Zimmerman denied following the youth and rolled up the car window. Minutes after Trayvon walked away, Zimmerman got out of his vehicle.
Then came the second encounter, according to Tracy Martin’s recollection of the detective’s account. Trayvon Martin appeared from behind a building in Zimmerman’s gated community, approached him and demanded, “What’s your problem, homie?”
When Zimmerman replied that he didn’t have a problem, Martin said, “You do now.” The unarmed teenager hit Zimmerman, knocked him to the ground, pinned him down and told him to “shut the [expletive] up.”
During the beating, Zimmerman pulled his gun and fired one shot at close range into Martin’s chest. “You got me,” the teenager said, falling backward.
Tracy Martin and the 17-year-old’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said Wednesday that they have never accepted this explanation for their son’s death.
“That was bull,” Tracy Martin said. “No way. At that point, I knew there was something terribly wrong.” The Sanford Police Department said in a statement Wednesday that it will no longer answer questions from the news media.
On Wednesday night, ABC released a police surveillance video taken the night of the shooting. The video shows Zimmerman, hands cuffed behind his back, arriving at the police station in a cruiser. He is frisked and led down a series of hallways. The video shows no blood or bruises on Zimmerman, and he did not check into the emergency room that night, the network said.
The official account given to Trayvon Martin’s parents conflicts with a version of the incident from his 16-year-old girlfriend, who was on the phone with him in the minutes before the shooting and has described their conversation to interviewers on the condition that she be identified only as DeeDee. According to her account, Trayvon Martin told her that someone was following him in a car. She has said that she heard another voice asking him what he was doing in the area before the phone went dead.
Tracy Martin said police asked him to identify his son from a crime-scene photograph. He said that authorities have yet to provide him with the autopsy report and that he was unable to view any injuries his son may have suffered in the fatal struggle.
“We didn’t see the body until it got back to Fort Lauderdale and he was cleaned up and dressed up for the funeral,” Martin said.
Loading...
Comments