Morgue (3 page)

Martin's blood and urine also contained low levels of THC—the active ingredient in marijuana—but nobody knows exactly when he used the drugs or if he was high the night he was killed.

This struck Bao as a routine shooting case. He wrapped up his examination in ninety minutes.

“The wound,” Bao wrote in his final autopsy report, “is consistent with a wound of entrance of intermediate range.”

Those two words—
intermediate range
—quickly reverberated in the echo chamber of American media, which didn't really know what they meant but seized on the phrase as somehow important. If the muzzle of George Zimmerman's Kel-Tec wasn't against Trayvon Martin's chest when he fired, how far away was it? Was this “intermediate range” shot fired into the kid's chest from an inch away? Five inches? Three feet? Different forensic experts (and a slew of inexpert commentators) couldn't seem to agree on the precise meaning of the term.

Worse, the angry drumbeat against Zimmerman was becoming deafening, and this single phrase—intermediate range—only turned up the volume. One side saw “intermediate range” as proof of a summary execution; the other side saw it as a validation of self-defense.

They were both wrong.

When a gun's trigger is pulled, the firing pin strikes the bullet's primer, creating a tiny jet of flame that ignites the powder in a cartridge. That sudden ignition creates a burst of hot gas that propels the bullet down the barrel of the gun. It all bursts out—the bullet, hot gases, soot, vaporized metals of the primer, and unburned gunpowder—in a spectacular and deadly plume.

How far this cloud of superheated debris travels varies by gun, barrel length, and the type of gunpowder. Gunshot residue can be found on the clothing and the body of a human victim. It might leave a film of soot, or tattoo the skin around the wound with unburned or partly burned particles of gunpowder that puncture the top layer of the skin, or produce nothing at all. The pattern of this damage—or lack of it—can tell us how far away the gun's muzzle was when it was fired.

That tattooing (sometimes also called stippling) is the hallmark of an intermediate range gunshot. Shots within a foot or less might leave soot residue. Without stippling, without soot, and without any other residue on the skin or clothing, a gunshot will be classified as distant. A contact wound, in which the muzzle is touching the skin when fired, leaves a completely different wound.

In Trayvon Martin's case, this tattooing or stippling encircled his wound in a two-inch pattern. The examiner noted soot, too. The pattern suggested to me that the Kel-Tec's muzzle had been two to four inches from the boy's skin—
intermediate range
—when George Zimmerman pulled the trigger.

But while the media-sphere haggled over what the stippling proved, few people noticed a tiny fact in another report hidden deep inside the mountain of documents investigators and prosecutors had dumped on the public before trial.

On this obscure little detail, the whole case pivoted.

*   *   *

Amy Siewert was a firearm and gunshot expert in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's (FDLE) crime lab. With a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Massachusetts's Worcester Polytechnic Institute, she'd worked in the FDLE's forensic toxicology section before transferring to the firearms section, where she'd been an analyst for three years.

Her job was to examine George Zimmerman's Kel-Tec 9mm handgun and the teenager's light gray Nike sweatshirt and the dark gray hoodie he wore over it. Her main job was to connect all the dots that proved this was the gun that fired the bullet that penetrated the clothing and pierced the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy the world knew as Trayvon Martin. She'd also examine the garments microscopically and chemically for telltale gunshot residue that might suggest how the shooting happened.

The first thing Siewert noticed was an L-shaped hole in Martin's hoodie, about two by one inches. It lined up perfectly with the boy's wound. She noted soot around it, both inside and out. Frayed fibers around the hole were also burned. Chemically, she discovered vaporized lead. And a large, six-inch orange stain surrounded it all—Trayvon Martin's blood.

Martin had worn a second sweatshirt underneath the hoodie. It, too, was sooty and singed from the muzzle blast. Its bloodstained two-inch bullet hole bore a star shape.

But what Siewert couldn't find in two separate tests was a pattern of gunshot residue around and away from the holes.

The stellate hole, soot, vaporized lead, and no discernible pattern from the powder led Siewert to only one possible conclusion: The muzzle of George Zimmerman's pistol was touching Trayvon Martin's hoodie when he pulled the trigger. Not just close, but actually against the fabric.

But few people, much less the national media, realized the significance of Siewert's brief report.
Intermediate range
fit the narrative so much better. If they noticed Siewert's findings at all, they didn't grasp the forensic distinction between contact and intermediate range, or ask the vital question: How could a gun's muzzle be touching a sweatshirt but still be as much as four inches away from the skin of the person who wore it?

It was chalked up to a simple, minor contradiction. The media quickly moved on to the more emotional events swirling around Trayvon Martin's death.

The question nobody was asking would provide the answer nobody was expecting.

*   *   *

That single shot in the night set a tragedy of mythic proportion in motion, quietly at first but slowly building toward a deafening din.

For more than a week, the shooting of Trayvon Martin wasn't even much of a story. Local TV stations ran short items about it, the
Orlando Sentinel
published two news briefs, and the twice-a-week
Sanford Herald
ran just 213 words. But then on March 7, Reuters News Service circulated a 469-word wire story, based mainly on an interview with a lawyer for Trayvon's family, that made it sound more like a white vigilante had purposely hunted down an unarmed, innocent black child and shot him in cold blood, a murder being covered up by local cops. The wires carried an old childhood photo of Trayvon, provided by his parents, leaving the impression that the victim had been a happy, harmless, baby-faced middle schooler.

It was the first blood in the water, and the national media smelled it.

Reporters swarmed to Sanford, both covering and cultivating the burgeoning conflict. When black leaders began to cry racism, the stakes grew instantly more intense; ratings and readership soared. Tapes of Zimmerman's call to dispatchers were edited by one news network to make it appear he used a racial slur before the shooting; Martin's parents endorsed a petition on
Change.org
calling for Zimmerman's arrest and it got 1.3 million “signatures”; Reverend Al Sharpton and the rest of the racial-grievance industrial complex showed up to stir the pot; members of the New Black Panther Party offered a $10,000 reward for Zimmerman's “capture”; and the newest parlor game became “Guess what slur George mumbled in his 911 tape” when no such slur was apparent.

A lot of bloggers and TV talking heads became armchair crime scene specialists, offering forensic theories that came more from Hollywood whimsy than medical school.

President Barack Obama elevated the case to a presidential issue when he said, “Trayvon Martin could've been me thirty-five years ago,” and “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” as he called for nationwide “soul-searching.” Instead of tamping down the rage, the president fueled it.

Angry rallies converted bags of Skittles into flags of protest. Hoodies and cans of tea became symbols of American racism.

“He may have been suspended from school at the time, and had traces of cannabis in his blood,” wrote London's
Guardian
newspaper, “but when you look behind the appearance of a menacing black teenager, those Skittles say, you find the child inside.”

Celebrities, politicians, and throngs of ordinary people demanded justice for Trayvon, but the only suitable justice they would accept seemed to be the arrest, conviction, and swift execution of that vile racist George Zimmerman.

*   *   *

On April 11, 2012—more than six tense weeks after Trayvon Martin was shot dead and a local district attorney found no evidence to file criminal charges—a special prosecutor ordered the nearly broke George Zimmerman arrested and charged with second-degree murder. A new defense team volunteered: Mark O'Mara and Don West, both well-known legal veterans and both top-notch defenders. The old friends made a good team: O'Mara was a masterful litigator, dignified and unflappable; West was a fighter who didn't apologize to anyone for feeling that the case against Zimmerman looked like mob justice.

And both had long experience in self-defense and Stand Your Ground cases. In fact, the deceptively affable Pennsylvanian West quit his job as a federal public defender in death-penalty cases to take Zimmerman's case.

He wasn't born yesterday. Regarded as one of the nation's top criminal defense lawyers, he'd worked some tough cases with even tougher clients. He knew defendants sometimes lied. He knew the evidence wasn't always perfect. He'd seen how the genuine facts in a shooting could be twisted beyond recognition by media.

But after spending time with Zimmerman, he barely recognized the public's monstrous caricature of him.

And soon both O'Mara and West recognized that the fanatical public clamor and local politics threatened to capsize some serious legal questions.

Many court watchers expected Zimmerman to claim immunity under Florida's so-called Stand Your Ground law, which said a victim under attack wasn't required to retreat and could legally use lethal force in self-defense.

But for many Trayvon supporters recalling the image of that smiling child, the possibility that George Zimmerman had feared for his life seemed absurd. To them, Stand Your Ground was a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Outside of the courtroom, this case was more about race than self-defense, and blacks vocally decried a law they believed gave white people carte blanche to kill black folks. They demanded the immediate repeal of Stand Your Ground, and many politicians stood ready to accommodate.

Ironically, at the time of the Martin shooting, Florida's Stand Your Ground law had benefited blacks disproportionately. Since poor blacks who live in high-crime neighborhoods were the most likely victims of crime, the law made it easier for them to protect themselves when the police couldn't arrive fast enough. Blacks make up only about 16 percent of Florida's population, but 31 percent of the defendants invoking Stand Your Ground were black, and they were acquitted significantly more often than whites who used the very same defense.

The tumult didn't matter. O'Mara and West decided against a Stand Your Ground defense simply because they believed Zimmerman had a solid traditional self-defense case: He was on his back and couldn't retreat from Trayvon Martin's vicious pummeling. The law was irrelevant.

Even if Zimmerman had screwed up, they believed he had no evil intent. Would a killer call the police before he murdered someone?

And it was also possible that both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman feared for their lives, and that both chose to use force to defend themselves. If the jury believed that, under Florida law, Zimmerman was innocent.

But the prosecution had a different theory. Zimmerman had lied about everything except shooting Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had stalked the unarmed teenager and forced a violent confrontation. He shouldn't have been armed at all. Zimmerman's wounds were minor, and he had no reason to think he might die. The cries for help overheard on the 911 tapes came from Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman. The neighborhood watchman shot the kid in cold blood as he lay in the wet grass.

The scene was set for an epic courtroom battle.

As each week passed, the protests grew, and a horrible event was simplified for mass consumption: A good-natured black child had simply gone to the store for some candy and a drink, only to be bushwhacked by a racist white man.

Some were already calling Trayvon Martin a modern-day Emmett Till. Hundreds of death threats drove George Zimmerman into hiding, while reporters described him as a “white Hispanic,” seeming to accentuate the racist subtext in the tragedy. It didn't take long for the real Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman to be lost in the Category 5 rhetorical storm that raged about race, guns, profiling, civil rights, and vigilantism.

O'Mara and West focused on the legal questions, but they weren't cloistered from the commotion on the street. They knew their future jurors were listening.

Zimmerman's defense team divvied up the daunting task brilliantly. Battling restive public opinion and prosecutorial sandbagging while trying to stay afloat, the smooth-talking O'Mara handled the intense media attention while West dived into the forensic issues.

Even if the media, the race-baiters, and the general public had already leapt to their own conclusions, justice moved more deliberately. Legal issues remained unsettled. The whole tragedy—the entire question of George Zimmerman's guilt or innocence—boiled down to a single legal question:
Who was the aggressor at the moment the trigger was pulled?

*   *   *

This was a real case with real forensic issues, but for O'Mara and West, it was a nightmare. The case was complicated enough without a frustrating discovery process. Prosecutors were slow with or unresponsive to the defense's requests for evidence. A simple color photo of George Zimmerman's face after the crime took the prosecution months to deliver. Key exhibits like the complete Florida Department of Law Enforcement case file were withheld. The state claimed no evidence was recovered from Martin's phone, but a whistleblower claimed otherwise.

With almost no money for the defense, West began the arduous process of finding legal experts who could interpret the evidence, looking for any clue that could help explain what happened. He needed experts on gunshots, forensic pathology, toxicology, voice analysis, and computer animation.