Perhaps this is the most detail about what happened the night of Trayvon Martin's death. The narrative pushed by Al Sharpton and the New Black Panthers has been that George Zimmerman hunted the teen down despite being told not to by police. It's beginning to look like that may be demonstrably false. According to a source allegedly knowledgable of Zimmerman's account, it was Zimmerman who was attacked by Martin.
Via
Daily Beast:
Since the days immediately after the shooting, news outlets have widely reported the 911 calls Zimmerman made, during which he told a police dispatcher that he would follow Martin, whom he described as suspicious. The police dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that.”
As has been reported, Zimmerman told police officials that he lost sight of Martin and went around a townhouse to see where he was. Then he claimed Martin confronted him and punched him, knocking him down.
According to The Daily Beast’s source, Zimmerman told police that when he was on the ground, Martin straddled him, striking him, and then tried to smother him.
Zimmerman claimed that he yelled for help, and that various neighbors who peered out to see the fight from their backyards didn’t get involved. Zimmerman, the source said, told officers he was so paralyzed by fear that he initially forgot he had a gun, but he said that after Martin noticed his 9mm pistol, Zimmerman pulled it out of his belt holder and fired one round, a hollow-point—the round that killed Martin. (The autopsy report on Martin has not yet been released.)
According to the source, Zimmerman told police that Martin’s last words after the shooting were, “Okay, you got it.” He said the phrase twice, then turned and fell face-down on the ground.
Very few people are asserting that Zimmerman used good judgment that night but it's important to learn what happened after police told him to stop following Trayvon. Did he stop or continue? If he stopped and was attacked by Martin, we have a completely different set of facts that race baiters could regret attempting to alter.
Another interesting aspect to all of this involves the multiple attempts by Sanford police to find inconsistencies in Zimmerman's account.
The law-enforcement source said Sanford police investigators interviewed Zimmerman three times about the shooting. The last time followed a walk-through of the shooting site. Afterward, three detectives grilled Zimmerman at police headquarters in their most thorough and hostile questioning, according to the source. They told Zimmerman they didn’t believe him, the source said, and tried to poke holes in his story.
A spokesman for the Sanford Police Department declined to comment on the case.
The precise details of that story are crucial to the case against Zimmerman. Perhaps the key issue will be who instigated the confrontation. The brief affidavit filed by the special prosecutor in support of the murder charge contends that Zimmerman provoked the encounter by following and confronting the teenager.
Note the last part. If special prosecutor Angela Corey charged Zimmerman based on an affidavit that said he provoked the encounter while multiple police investigators determined something else entirely, this could be a battle between Sandford police and the special prosecutor, not just one between Zimmerman and the Martin family. In fact, Corey's decision to indict Martin actually makes the Sandford police look incompetent. If they aren't and got it right, they're likely going to defend themselves. If they have the truth on their side, they'll probably be able to back it up.
Read it all.
