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Friday, March 30, 2012

A Mother’s Grace and Grieving

Miami Gardens, Fla.  

“They called him Slimm.”
That is what Sybrina Fulton, the mother of the slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, told me people called her son because he was so thin.
I talked with her Saturday in a restaurant near her home, four weeks to the day after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., shot Trayvon in the chest and killed him. Trayvon was unarmed, carrying nothing more than candy and a drink.
Ms. Fulton brought her own mother with her, Trayvon’s grandmother, and we talked for nearly an hour over iced tea and lukewarm coffee.
His mother lights up when she shows me pictures of Trayvon on her phone, even managing an occasional smile that lifts the shadow of grief and brightens her face. He was a gangly boy, all arms and legs but little weight, nearly six feet three inches tall but only 140 pounds and with the cherubic face of a boy years younger.
She grows distant when she talks about her loss, occasionally, seemingly involuntarily, wrapping her hands gently around her mother’s arm and resting her head on her mother’s shoulder like a young girl in need of comfort. The sorrow seems to come in waves.
She and her mother paint a portrait of an all-American boy, one anyone would be proud to call his or her own. He liked sports — playing and watching — and going to the mall with his friends. The meal his mother made that he liked most was hamburgers and French fries. “And brownies,” his grandmother chimed in, “with lots of nuts.”
He was a smart boy who had taken advanced English and math classes, and he planned to go to college.
He was a hard worker who earned extra money by painting houses, and washing cars and working in the concession of the Pee Wee football league on the weekends. He also baby-sat for his younger cousins, two adorable little girls ages 3 and 7, whom the family called the bunnies, and when he watched the girls he baked them cookies.
The only fight his mother could ever recall his having was with his own brother when Trayvon was about 4 and the brother was 8. They were fighting for her attention, and it wasn’t even a real fight. “They were wrestling. It was so funny,” she said with a smile.
This hardly fits the profile of a menacing teen who would attack a grown man unprovoked, but that is exactly what Zimmerman contends.
Zimmerman’s statement, as related by police, says he was following the boy but “he had lost sight of Trayvon and was returning to his truck to meet the police officer when he says he was attacked by Trayvon.”
Trayvon’s personal account of who initiated the physical encounter is forever lost to the grave, but the initiation is likely to be the central question in the case.
To believe Zimmerman’s scenario, you have to believe that Trayvon, an unarmed boy, a boy so thin that people called him Slimm, a boy whose mother said that he had not had a fight since he was a preschooler, chose that night and that man to attack. You have to believe that Trayvon chose to attack a man who outweighed him by 100 pounds and who, according to the Sanford police, was wearing his gun in a holster. You have to believe that Trayvon chose to attack even though he was less than a hundred yards from the safety of the home where he was staying.
This is possible, but hardly sounds plausible.
The key is to determine who was standing his ground and defending himself: the boy with the candy or the man with the gun. Who was winning the fight is a secondary question.
That said, we’ll have to wait for details of the investigation to be revealed to know for sure. But while we wait, it is important to not let Trayvon the person be lost to Trayvon the symbol. He was a real boy with a real family that really loved him.
And now he is gone from his mother forever, only able to stare out at her as a shining face on a cellphone. She has no home videos of Trayvon. She doesn’t even have voicemail messages from him saved. The only way that she could now hear Trayvon’s voice would be to call his phone and listen to his answering message, but she dare not do it. “If I hear his voice, I think I’m going to scream.”
Every night she says she dreams of him. Every morning she says she thinks he’s going to walk through the door and say, “Mom, I’m here. You were dreaming. It’s not true. I’m not dead. I’m here,” and give her a hug and a kiss.
And the bunnies — they still don’t understand where he is. They’re still asking for Trayvon, the cousin who came over and baked them cookies.
                                                                                                                  •
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.



Some comments:
    • Russell Grayson
    • Palm Beach, FL, USA
    The thing that's different about Trayvon's murder--that shows me a different America than the one I grew up in--is that EVERY parent sees in Trayvon their own child. That Zimmerman saw a black face as a weapon turns the stomachs of millions as a hallmark of a more repugnant time in our history--yet one that lingers in the shadows with nauseating effect when it now surfaces.

    Wannabe cops are amongst the most dangerous of our citizens: hypervigilant yentas who could never get past the psych screenings that still manage to fail in filtering out some of the damaged folks that carry guns. This is an ugly murder. Uglier because it is clearly the result of hatred and fear gone wild...and condoned by the pimps of fear on the extreme right. That anyone would try to justify this by extrapolating their own fears onto that cretinous blob, Zimmerman, says much more about whom THEY ARE, than who Trayvon was, or Zimmerman is. Hate kills, people. It's a cancer that eats your soul. We need to let the sunlight of truth burn off the fog of KKK rationalizing that's attempting to distract from the facts: an unarmed child was stalked and murdered like an animal by someone unfit to call himself a man. That this "man" was given a pass by the local cops is a shame and embarrassment for every thinking, feeling citizen. We need to take our outrage and turn it into a teaching moment. Leave our kids alone: they come in every color and size. They are our only hope for a tomorrow without Zimmermans.
    • Winemaster2
    • GA
    Mr. Blow tells a story with a caution, however far more accurate information is available to the facts on Wikipeda with links and references. The simplest of the question is Zimmerman was pursuing this 17 year old lad because he was black. Him wearing a hood has relevance because it was raining. There is no law that one should not wear a hood. Zimmerman was prejudiced. He used a racial slur when talking to the dispatcher. Who told him to stay put and do no pursue. Zimmerman with his overzealous history was known to go door to door and warning people of blacks that did not belong in their neighborhood.

    As a wanna be cop he was obsessed looking for suspects to add up his tally of doing a job and impressing the Sanford Police. Experts and politicians who wrote this absurd stand your ground hog wash, contend that it does not apply to Zimmerman and his self defense. The Sanford police from the Chief down with prior history racial of indifference are negligent if not covering this up a murder. The detective who interviewed Zimmerman has prior history racial prejudice in other cases, that were not pursued. The investigation by the FBI is going to open up a whole can or worms that Sanford FL would wish that it never heard of Trayvon Martin.

    His Mother's grace is for the loss of her son is comparable to any mother's and father's endearing. The only yahoo's like Newt can call President Obama 's sentiment a disgrace because , his kind are pure simple bigots and racists.
    • Robert Coane
    • Orange County, NY
    From a former colleague of yours at the Times, Mr. Blow, Bob Herbert: "There is nothing more American than brutal violence. The country was built on it, revels in it and shows every evidence of clinging to it with the crazed, destructive strength of an obsessive lover." *

    For more on this subject go to today's Paul Krugman op-ed, Lobbyists, Guns and Money.

    * An American Obsession
    Published: February 2, 2006
    • Melvyn Polatchek
    • New Jersey
    Black families across America have the fear that their young male children can be killed with impunity. It is widely forgotten that Martin Luther King rose to prominence at the same time Malcolm X, H.Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael were demanding a far more confrontational program for dealing with racial inequity. Now, after the Trayvon shooting, there is a new Black Panther party that is said to have raised 10,000 dollars for the capure of the shooter, Zimmerman. White America must not wait for the rise of another MLK to deter an understandable violent rage. We have to change this terrible environment now. I don't want my African-American neigbors and friends to live in fear. I don't want my grandchildren continuing to grow up in a world where their friends may be killed without a thought.

    Melvyn Polatchek
    • Alan Harbater
    • Ft. Lauderdale
    The wheels of justice are grinding exceedingly slow and NOT particularly fine.
    Why are we hearing nothing of the forensic evidence in this case? Are the Sanford police even smart enough to carry on a professional investigation? If they have just taken the word of Zimmerman and not fully scoped out the crime scene by now doing so would be a rather futile exercise. Which is why higher bodies of law inforcement such as the FBI should have gotten involved weeks ago. What's more, I understand the FEDS are are merely pursuing a civil rights violation, meaning they have NO INTEREST in the forensics.
    This situation has been genuinely mucked up from day one! It's doubtful justice will ever be served here.
    • Patricia
    • Pasadena, CA
    It's time people realized that young black men cannot escape the War on Drugs -- not even by NOT doing drugs.

    The War on Drugs is a race war by proxy. This is happening in spite of all the non-racist people who blindly support this policy with their Utopian good intentions.

    You can see that in my town of Pasadena, where blacks are arrested for marijuana at twelve times the rate of whites, despite marijuana use rates being about equal.

    That represents a systematic pattern across America and no amount of "dialogue over racial profiling" over the last 20 years has done a single thing to change it.

    Zimmerman chased Martin down with a loaded gun because Zimmerman thought the young man was "on drugs."

    Zimmerman thought he had a right to chase Martin down with a loaded gun because that is what our drug police do every single day -- they chase down young black men suspected of being "on drugs" while carrying loaded guns.

    Nobody wants to mention drug policy here, probably because of the stigma attached to the topic, and the desire to separate Martin from any taint from the other young black men who get chased down by men with loaded guns because they really are carrying drugs.

    But as long as our drug policy involves police officers chasing down young black men while carrying loaded guns, I don't see how life is going to change for the young black men in this country.

    Even the ones who don't do drugs are going to fit that racial profile and end up in danger.
    • JMK
    • Wash DC
    Where is the public outrage for the victims of black on black violence that take the lives of hundreds black youth each year? Why doesn't the Charles Blow and other media cover those stories in such depth and why doesn't the Black Panther movement offer $10K to find those suspects, dead or alive? It seems the point of the publicity is to inflame emotions because the shooter has a hispanic-white background.
    • Angela
    • Brussels, Belgium
    At least someone in the media is saying that we have to wait until all the facts are in. It seems that Zimmerman was paranoid and trigger happy to say the least, and an armed racist looking to kill at worst. Every day some new tidbit of information is released that reminds us to slow down and get the facts straight. Today we learned that most of Zimmerman's calls -including the night of the shooting- were not to 911 but to the non emergency number of the police department often answered by a 911 dispatcher, and that Zimmerman was elected, and not a "self appointed" neighborhood watch captain as so often reported in the media. Like everyone else, I, too, am anxious for justice for this young man and his bereaved family. The memory of the Duke University lacrosse rape case reminds me, "Whoa, slow down. Let's get it absolutely and positively right this time."

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/22/george-zimmerman-s-hist...

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/23/did-trayvon-shooter-abu...
    • Chris
    • Memphis
    Tragedy. Mr. Zimmerman has the appearance of guilt of something ranging from manslaughter to murder from what has been available to me. By the way, where was all the media outrage, the race baiters, and President Obama when two black teens allegedly doused a white kid with gasoline and set him on fire mainly for being white? Oh, I guess the Prez didn't get involved because there wasn't enough media coverage and because the victim didn't look enough like him.
    • cnh
    • Detroit MI
    This is a nice tribute to Trayvon, Mr. Blow. I'm sure he did some nice things and was loved by his mother.

    This begs the question of what he was doing at the time of the encounter. Even though you claim he was a peaceful kid,l there might have been motivation for him to fight and try to escape if he expected punishment.

    But this is conjecture, like your reasoning and your attempts to gin up sympathy for the plight of a black kid.

    If Trayvon had killed Zimmerman would we be reading your op-ed about how much his grieving mother loved him? Only you know if you would have written such an op-ed.

    Of one thing I am being as guilty as you, and that is being involved in trying Zimmerman in the court of public opinion without having the facts of the matter.

    chuckles
    • SR
    • Dallas, Texas
    Only the facts count:

    -Tray was not armed.
    -There were no indications that he had committed a crime.
    -There were no reports to the police of vandalism, break-ins or anything else from that neighborhood, that night.
    -Neanderthal Man, Cromagnon Man, Zimmer Man or what ever else you want to call him, pursued Tray despite the police telling him not to.
    -Zimmer Man was armed with a modern high power, easy to use, weapon.
    -To my knowledge, Tray had no history of violence.

    Zimmer Man needs to be stuffed, laminated and put into the Museum of Legislative Mistakes. Which hopefully, Mr. Blow will conjure up enough support to start.
    • JulieMac
    • California
    A front page story that should remain until justice is served. Using tactics to divert the truth or overtly mananging Mr. Zimmerman's PR only repulse this country's decency.
    • judithod
    • St. Paul, MN
    So, Charles, are you going to write a column about every young person who is killed, whether black, white, pink, yellow, or green? Or are you only going to write about those deemed politically correct by Obama, Jackson, and Sharpton?
    • Wormboy
    • Chapel Hill, NC
    Whether Mr. Martin chose to attack is immaterial. He was being stalked by a man intending to do him harm.The irony of this whole thing is that the "Stand Your Ground" law, as spectacularly stupid and perverse as it is, protects Mr. Martin and not Mr. Zimmerman. Zimmerman was the one initiating aggression and arguably intending to commit a felony. Zimmerman can try to hide behind the fact that he was just "protecting his neighborhood," but the simple fact is that he, a very large man in his prime, was aggressively pursuing a child much smaller and younger, as well as unarmed. Additionally, Martin was a legitimate citizen of the neighborhood.

    So how could Mr. Martin possibly be the aggressor here? Even if he did attack Mr. Zimmerman, doing so was simply unarmed self-protection against his lethally armed stalker.

    People nation-wide are shuddering at the travesty of this case. In it we find echoes of the xenophobia and macho posturing that led to the death of Yoshihiro Hattori, an innocent Japanese student murdered in Louisiana in 1992. Rodney Peairs, the murderer in that case, also hid behind a specious self-defense argument, and also got away scot-free. When do we start to hold gun-waving paranoiacs personally responsible for their actions? If you kill somebody who has actually entered your home, then you can argue self-defense. But a beefy man stalking and killing a scrawny neighborhood boy, out in the street? What is happening to America? God save us from ourselves.
    • Alexandra Brockton
    • Boca Raton, Florida

    Zimmerman called "911" many times in the past. Local law enforcement decided to treat him as a harmless "wannabe cop" who didn't need to be controlled and let him continue on.....unofficially patrolling.....and never bothered to ascertain whether he was riding around with a gun and would use it.

    The "stand your ground law" was never intended to protect someone who drove around in his car, looking for anyone he deemed suspicious, and then followed someone in his car and then left his car to follow, chase or confront that person.

    When I went to law school, 20 years' ago, my first shock was all of the "spring-gun" cases, and learning that the law was that, if I woke up in the middle of the night and someone was at the foot of my bed, in my apartment, having broken in, that, even if I had a weapon that I could reach, I could not just shoot....but, instead, had to know whether the intruder was threatening deadly force and tell the intruder to leave... and do nothing if it appeared that he was leaving/retreating. Really? I'm alone, and some guy is standing over my bed, and I'm supposed to say "Leave" and hope that he does?

    I didn't know about the "stand your ground" law until 2 weeks' ago. I don't have a gun. But, I'm glad that I know about that law now.

    The "stand your ground" law is not the problem. The problem is that it is being interpreted incorrectly and used to protect aggressors who do not deserve to be legally protected.
    • Phillip
    • Laguna Hills, CA.
    The tragedy of this story is overwhelming. Trayvon Martin is a victim of Florida's nonsensical gun law that smacks of a latter day Wild West. What is also evident is the American media's racial double standard [Yes, NY Times included] in covering this horribly sad story. Since Mr Zimmerman happens to be Hispanic there is no mention--from the media--of his ethnicity possibly playing a part in the incident [nor should there be!]. However, if Mr Zimmerman were a Caucasian boy there would be outrage from all media quarters of possible racist undercurrents to the confrontation. Indeed, there would be a march on Washington just about now. In this regard, the media double standard on "race" is glaringly obvious and, in my view, calls out for greater discussion.
    • migflyboy
    • osaka
    I was interested to learn that the victim was 6 ft 3. So what? Ever been a young guy on an unsupervised playground? When push comes to shove, size matters. That's why firearms were invented in the first place.

    Also, was he a resident or guest of the "gated community" where he was killed? If not, did he hop a fence to take a shortcut (sometimes referred to as "trespassing")? Details, please.

    At the moment no one (other than the shooter) knows what escalated the confrontation, only the very sad result. While we're waiting to find out, perhaps the NYT might like to investigate a recent incident in my home town. No firearms involved, thank you, just a 65 yo geezer who reportedly contributed quite a bit to society before being beaten to death by an 18 yo gang-banger. This was also a tragedy, no? Maybe Mr. Motta never got "the talk" (e.g. avoid angry young black men) from his parents. I know, not PC, but....

    http://www.kxly.com/news/spokane-news/Frank-Motta-dies-from-assault-inju...
    • John
    • Philadelphia
    It's high time that reasonable Americans of every stripe coalesce and call out the NRA and its radical sympathizers for what they are. They have blood on their hands in Trayvon's murder, and certainly in the disintegration of American society. BTW< I write this as a former NRA member who has a healthy respect for firearms and believes in the appropriate application of the Second Amendment.The lobbying for unfettered open-carry laws in every state, the demonizing of everyone who wants a little caution built into firearms design (can you say "trigger locks"?), and the incessant cloaking in "Second Amendment rights" according tho their interpretation have simple got to stop. The NRA should go back to its roots in responsible firearms ownership and safety. Whatever happened to the NRA of my youth????
    • lfrancis18
    • San Francisco
    At least the murderers in the Emmitt Till case were arrested and charged. Sure, they were found not guilty, but nevertheless there was a kangaroo court and jury of their "peers" that rendered a decision.
    Today black people in the south cannot even get lip service.....
    • 4Heavenssake
    • Westchestuh
    When Z called 911, the police officer told him to stay in his car. The police would come and investigate. Now where does "Stand Your Ground" suggest that Z should have gotten out of his car with a gun and chased the young man. Stand your ground means STAYING WHERE YOU ARE and defending yourself if necessary. Z did none of that. He chased the kid on foot and killed him for no legitimate reason whatsoever.
    • Eric
    • NY
    Based on what I've read and heard, it is hard to imagine a scenario in whch Zimmerman is not guilty of a crime. He followed - stalked? - Martin, didn't wait for the cops. He had a gun. He had a car. He instigated the confrontation. Hopefully he will be arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, and spend many years behind bars.

    Hopefully also there will be some rethinking of the horrendous "stand your ground" laws many states have enacted. They enable unstable "watchdogs" like Zimmerman - and many others - a license to kill.
    • plb
    • Connecticut
    Just one more reason to emigrate from the USA.
    • Julia
    • NY,NY
    Why can't Mr. Blow and others wait until all the facts are laid out before we pass judgement.
    • Lauren
    • Atlanta
    NYT Pick
    Let's stop and think about what we are saying here. Are we saying that George Zimmerman was in the wrong because Trayvon was a good kid?

    Why does it matter whether Trayvon was a good kid or a hardened criminal or anything in between?

    No one should get targeted and murdered by a vigilante just for walking down the street, period.
    • Liliana
    • Sottsdale
    Did anyone remember that if Mr Zimmermann lands in jail, ethier for life or just waiting for his death penalty tax payers will have to shed thair dollars to maintaln him room and board, TV and in jail gym privileges in jail for as long as his appeal lawyers keep his case going in the courts?

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