Trayvon Martin Case Shadowed by Series of Police Missteps
May 16, 2012
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Trayvon Martin was killed Feb.
26 at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. The initial investigation into his
death was dogged by problems.
Related
Mario Tama/Getty Images
“There was no bias in the investigation. We did not
lean one way or another. We were looking for the truth," said Bill Lee
Jr., center, the Sanford police chief.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
The Retreat at Twin Lakes. What happened there may come to rest on the word of George Zimmerman.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
A memorial to Trayvon Martin outside the gated community.
David Manning/Reuters
A rally for George Zimmerman at the county courthouse.
Sanford Police Department, via Associated Press
Mr. Zimmerman in handcuffs at the Sanford police station the night of the killing.
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI
SANFORD, Fla. — The killing of Trayvon Martin
here two and a half months ago has been cast as the latest test of race
relations and equal justice in America. But it was also a test of a
small city police department that does not even have a homicide unit and
typically deals with three or four murder cases a year.
An examination of the Sanford Police Department’s handling of the case
shows a series of missteps — including sloppy work — and circumstances
beyond its control that impeded the investigation and may make it harder
to pursue a case that is already difficult enough.
The national furor has subsided for the moment. But as the second-degree murder case against the defendant, George Zimmerman,
moves from the glare of a public spectacle to the grinding procedures
of the court system and eventual trial, the department’s performance,
roundly criticized by Mr. Martin’s family as bungling and biased, will
be scrutinized once again, though in more meticulous detail.
With doubts shadowing the quality and scope of the police work, the
prosecution and the defense will be left to tackle critical questions
even as they debate the evidence. And ultimately, what happened on the
rainy night of Feb. 26 may come to rest on the word of one man, George
Zimmerman, the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who fired the
fatal shot.
In interviews over several weeks, law enforcement authorities, witnesses
and local elected officials identified problems with the initial
investigation:
¶ On the night of the shooting, door-to-door canvassing was not
exhaustive enough, said a law enforcement official familiar with the
investigation. If officers had been more thorough, they might have
determined that Mr. Martin, 17, was a guest — as opposed to an intruder —
at a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. That would have
been an important part of the subjective analysis that night by officers
sizing up Mr. Zimmerman’s story. Investigators found no witnesses who
saw the fight start. Others saw parts of a struggle they could not
clearly observe or hear. One witness, though, provided information to
the police that corroborated Mr. Zimmerman’s account of the struggle,
according to a law enforcement official.
¶ The police took only one photo at the scene of any of Mr. Zimmerman’s
injuries — a full-face picture of him that showed a bloodied nose —
before paramedics tended to him. It was shot on a department cellphone
camera and was not downloaded for a few days, an oversight by the
officer who took it.
¶ The vehicle that Mr. Zimmerman was driving when he first spotted Mr.
Martin was mistakenly not secured by officers as part of the crime
scene. The vehicle was an important link in the fatal encounter because
it was where Mr. Zimmerman called the police to report a suspicious
teenager in a hooded sweatshirt roaming through the Retreat. Mr.
Zimmerman also said he was walking back to the vehicle when he was
confronted by Mr. Martin, who was unarmed, before shooting him.
¶ The police were not able to cover the crime scene to shield evidence
from the rain, and any blood from cuts that Mr. Zimmerman suffered when
he said Mr. Martin pounded his head into a sidewalk may have been washed
away.
¶ The police did not test Mr. Zimmerman for alcohol or drug use that
night, and one witness said the lead investigator quickly jumped to a
conclusion that it was Mr. Zimmerman, and not Mr. Martin, who cried for
help during the struggle.
Some Sanford officers were skeptical from the beginning about certain
details of Mr. Zimmerman’s account. For instance, he told the police
that Mr. Martin had punched him over and over again, but they questioned
whether his injuries were consistent with the number of blows he
claimed he received. They also suspected that some of the threatening
and dramatic language that Mr. Zimmerman said Mr. Martin uttered during
the struggle — like “You are going to die tonight” — sounded contrived.
The Sanford police — who contended that their 16-day investigation, done
in consultation with the original prosecutor in the case, was detailed
and impartial — also encountered other obstacles. One involved the
investigators’ inability to get the password for Mr. Martin’s cellphone
from his family, who apparently did not know it. That was significant
because Mr. Martin had been talking to a girl on the phone moments
before he was killed, but the young woman did not contact the police
after Mr. Martin’s death was made public.
From what is known of the investigation and the available evidence, what
exactly happened in the dimly lighted residential development that
Sunday night may remain out of reach. Given Mr. Zimmerman’s assertion
that he was acting in self-defense, and lacking enough evidence to the
contrary, the original prosecutor in the case, Norm Wolfinger, whose
jurisdiction includes Sanford, filed no charges against him.
That decision resulted in an increasingly strident public outcry. After
Gov. Rick Scott of Florida contacted Mr. Wolfinger and had a
conversation with him in late March, the prosecutor recused himself,
citing, among other things, an unspecified conflict of interest.
The governor selected another state attorney to handle the case, Angela
B. Corey of the Jacksonville area. On April 11, after nearly three weeks
of investigation, Ms. Corey charged Mr. Zimmerman with second-degree
murder. An accompanying affidavit said that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled”
Mr. Martin, who was black, and had assumed he was a criminal. Mr.
Zimmerman is Hispanic.
Ms. Corey declined to be interviewed, as did Mr. Wolfinger. Governor
Scott also declined several requests for an interview about how and why
he selected Ms. Corey for the case.
In announcing the charge, Ms. Corey praised the Sanford Police
Department’s work, indicating that it had conducted a “thorough and
intensive” inquiry and was a “tremendous help” to her office.
Eight Minutes
What appears unchanged since the beginning, however, is that
investigators say they do not know who started the fight. Florida’s
controversial Stand Your Ground law, which has come to shadow a number
of homicide cases since it was adopted in 2005, justifies the use of
deadly force in certain threatening situations but does not require a
person to retreat. The law became the framework within which the police
and prosecutors had to work after Mr. Zimmerman claimed that Mr. Martin
confronted and pounced on him.
Mr. Zimmerman had called the police from his vehicle to report what he
believed was a suspicious person in the Retreat, something he had done
numerous times in the past. He later told investigators that he got out
of his vehicle and followed Mr. Martin but lost sight of him. As Mr.
Zimmerman was returning to his vehicle, he told them, Mr. Martin emerged
and then attacked him. Mr. Zimmerman told investigators that at one
point, Mr. Martin had his hand over his mouth. And before he shot the
youth, he explained to the police, Mr. Martin had reached for Mr.
Zimmerman’s gun.
“There is a perception that we were trying to protect George Zimmerman,”
the Sanford police chief, Bill Lee Jr., who temporarily stepped aside
in March to quell the furor and later offered to resign, said in a
recent interview. “We think that what he did was terrible. We wish that
he had just stayed in his vehicle.”
“There was no bias in the investigation. We did not lean one way or another. We were looking for the truth,” he said.
Chief Lee declined to discuss specifics about the case, but he added, “I
have been frustrated by the negative attention the police and the city
have received that does not accurately reflect who we are and what we
have done in this investigation.”At 7:09 p.m., Mr. Zimmerman, who was
driving to a Target store, made his call to a police dispatcher.
Within eight minutes, Mr. Martin was dead from a gunshot wound to the
chest, his body crumpled on a stretch of grass behind a row of town
houses. When the first officer arrived at 7:17, Mr. Zimmerman was
waiting not far from the body. He raised his hands in surrender before
relinquishing his 9-millimeter pistol from the holster in his waistband.
He was handcuffed and taken into “investigative detention” at Sanford
police headquarters, where he was read his Miranda rights and answered
questions without a lawyer present. Investigators described him as
unhesitatingly cooperative. At some point, Mr. Zimmerman provided the
police with a permit allowing him to carry a concealed weapon. His
clothes were taken into evidence after his wife came to the station with
a new set.
A law enforcement official said officers did not seize Mr. Zimmerman’s
vehicle because they thought that he had been on foot. They did not
realize that he had been driving until after his wife had moved the
vehicle, the official said.
The official said he believed that the police, in the hours after the
shooting, sought to determine whether Mr. Zimmerman was wanted for any
crimes. But he said they did not have a complete background check in
hand until midmorning the next day — after Mr. Zimmerman had been
released. The records showed a domestic violence dispute with a woman
who identified herself as his ex-fiancée and a run-in with a state
alcohol agent, neither of which resulted in a conviction.
As for the officer at the scene who took the single full-face photo of
Mr. Zimmerman — he suffered a nose fracture and other injuries during
the struggle — he called an investigator “in a panic” over his failure
to download it sooner, according to a person familiar with the case.
Other photos of Mr. Zimmerman’s injuries were later shot at police
headquarters, although he had been cleaned up by paramedics by then.
Another investigator briefed on the case said officers should have been
more thorough as they knocked on doors in the neighborhood: they might
have learned Mr. Martin’s identity early and that he was staying at the
town house of his father’s girlfriend and was not trespassing. At the
time of the shooting, the girlfriend’s 14-year-old son was waiting for
Mr. Martin to return from a 7-Eleven store, where he had bought a bag of
Skittles candies and a can of iced tea. Mr. Martin was not identified
until Monday morning, about 13 hours after he was killed, when the
police learned that his father, Tracy Martin, had reported him as
missing.
One witness said a police investigator twice declined her offer to show
him the close and unobstructed vantage point from a partly opened
bedroom window where she had watched and heard the struggle between Mr.
Martin and Mr. Zimmerman. The witness, who agreed to be interviewed on
the condition she remain anonymous because the investigation is active,
said the detective taped part of her account.
She also recalled telling him that night that she was haunted by the
cries for help she believed came from Mr. Martin during the struggle.
But she said the investigator seemed to have already formed an opinion
about what had happened. He told her, she said, that it was Mr.
Zimmerman — not Mr. Martin — who was the one screaming, an assertion
that remains in dispute.
More than a month later, she and her lawyer, Derek Brett of Orlando, met
with two investigators from Ms. Corey’s office. Mr. Brett said his
client was subject to only 15 minutes or so of “substantive
questioning.”
“This surprised me because when something is not done properly, in this
instance by the police, you sit down and do more than just fill in the
blanks,” he said.
On the night of the shooting, the police were assisted by the Seminole
County sheriff’s office, which sent a representative to the scene with a
live fingerprint scanner to see if a match showed up for Mr. Martin. It
did not.
Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for the Martins, said that Mr. Martin was
carrying a T-Mobile Comet phone and that the police contacted his father
a day or two after the shooting to get the password, but he did not
know it.
A law enforcement official said that the phone had died not long after
the police retrieved it, and that it took days for the authorities to
get a charger and an expert to try to get into the device. If the police
had been able to get access to it, they could have interviewed Mr.
Martin’s friend about what he had told her in those final moments of his
life and what else she had heard. The police eventually subpoenaed Mr.
Martin’s cellphone records, but did not receive them in a timely
fashion.
The official said that while the police never tested Mr. Zimmerman for
alcohol or drugs, such decisions are left to the discretion of
investigators based on whether they have reason to suspect the person is
under the influence. (The medical examiner in the case did a routine
toxicology screening of Mr. Martin; the results have not been made
public.)
Sgt. David Morgenstern, spokesman for the Sanford police, said he could
not say much about the case because the investigation was continuing.
But he said of the officer who took one photo of Mr. Zimmerman at the
scene: “I don’t think that is wrong because subsequent photos can be
taken within hours. They might not be as graphic but they still will
depict the injuries somebody might have.”
Over all, Chief Lee, whose resignation was not accepted by the City
Commission last month, said in an interview that his department’s work
was as fair and thorough as possible.
“I am confident about the investigation, and I was satisfied with the
amount of evidence and testimony we got in the time we had the case,” he
said.
“We were basing our decisions, which were made in concert with the state
attorney’s office, on the findings of the investigation at the time,”
he added, “and we were abiding by the Florida law that covers
self-defense.”
Sorting the Evidence
The Sanford Police Department assigns homicide cases to its five
investigators who handle major crimes. Their wide-ranging
responsibilities cover everything from sex crimes to carjackings. On the
evening that Mr. Martin was fatally shot, the head of the major crimes
unit was on vacation. The rotation supervisor on call was a sergeant who
works narcotics cases. In all, more than a dozen officers and
department superiors were on the scene of Mr. Martin’s killing — which
the police said was Sanford’s first homicide of 2012 — including Chief
Lee, who joined the department last May.
In the two weeks after the shooting, the police were in regular contact
with the office of Mr. Wolfinger, sharing their findings and suspicions
with him.
The police conducted a lie-detection procedure, known as voice stress
analysis, on Mr. Zimmerman that he passed, and they had him re-enact the
encounter with Mr. Martin back at the Retreat the day after the
shooting. But the operating belief was that the police did not have
enough evidence to establish probable cause for a manslaughter charge
and an arrest, according to officials with knowledge of the case.
At one department meeting a few days after Mr. Martin’s death, a
representative from Mr. Wolfinger’s office was told about the
inconsistencies the police saw in Mr. Zimmerman’s account. The
prosecutor told them he understood that the police were trying to build a
case against Mr. Zimmerman, though they did not have adequate evidence,
according to a law enforcement official. It was decided that more work
was needed on the case.
As the national uproar intensified, the Sanford city manager, Norton N.
Bonaparte Jr., and Mayor Jeff Triplett were growing eager to have the
police send the case to Mr. Wolfinger to get it moving through the
justice system. The police did so just over two weeks after Mr. Martin’s
death. They included a recommendation that Mr. Zimmerman be charged
with manslaughter, a position that one law enforcement official
described as “weak,” and that the prosecutor did not act on.
Ms. Corey’s decision to charge Mr. Zimmerman with second-degree murder
fueled even more criticism of the police. Mr. Zimmerman has since
entered a written plea of not guilty.
I have an acquaintance who's a big gun nut who insists that when people are carrying, they're "always" on their best behavior and go out of their way to avoid confrontation. Following someone around in the dark is not best behavior, and it certainly is not a way to avoid confrontation.
While I do not believe George Zimmerman is racist, I do wonder about the SPD’s priorities when it comes to the death of another black kid. Was it apathy or laziness or worse that lead the SPD to file away Trayvon Martin’s body as a John Doe in the county morgue because they couldn’t be bothered to knock on a few doors?
Unless of course the State has intentionally over-charged Zimmerman, knowing that it doesn't have strong enough evidence and that Zimmerman will therefore walk, but only after quelling the public outrage by staging a phony 2nd degree murder charge. Whether or not this is the case will become plainly obvious during the trial when the prosecution presents its evidence.
There are so many details that are unknown at this point. How close was the gunshot that killed Trayvon? What angle was the gun fired from? What type of residue or DNA was on either of the men?
It's clear the police didn't bother to do a thorough investigation because they made assumptions. One would think that these officers were taught to treat every crime scene as though it were a crime scene....
Shameful.
As far as people saying that Zimmerman's injuries support his defense that he had to defend himself, that correlation cannot be made. His victim was most likely the one trying to defend himself. If someone chased me down with a gun you better believe I would fight for my life, and there is a strong likelihood based on what we know and the fact that Trayvon was aggressively pursued (against police instructions), that might be exactly what happened. Zimmerman being beat up may only confirm the threat that Trayvon felt, having no idea this guy was a neighborhood watchman but only knowing he was pursuing him with a gun. I can't imagine any of us would feel otherwise if we were in his situation.
Justice, whatever that may be in this case, might never come though because the police from the moment they arrived, didn't take this murder investigation seriously enough.
It would be interesting to know the demographics of those who have used Stand Your Ground to justify what hither-to-before, might have been considered 2nd degree murder.
I am tired of the armchair experts deciding what Mr. Martin and/or Mr. Zimmerman did or said at the time of this extremely unfortunate confrontation.
I believe that Mr. Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder due to the publicity that the case received and that the charge makes no sense based on the evidence that the police and prosecutors have at their disposal and Florida law.
Zimmerman was determined not to let this one get away. After a verbal and physical altercation he drew his gun and quite literally "took control" of the situation at which point Trayvon started screaming for help. Trayvon reached for his cell phone to call for help, Zimmerman mistook it as Trayvon reaching for a gun, and to save his own life (in his minds perceived reality) shot him dead.
When the police get there they find a flustered 20 something kid who obviously took the law into his own hands and screwed up big time. Not identifying the victim as part of the community there was a suspicion that the victim might have been a "perp", so the police soft peddled the investigation to save the life of a kid that just screwed up.
The special prosecutor found enough evidence to blow the first defense lawyers defense clear out of the water, the same defense most people are not professing clears Zimmerman of guilt. So Zimmerman not wanting to ride a railroad to hell with these lawyers, dumped them and got a new lawyer. And the new focus of the defense? I Zimmerman did not know he was not armed.
Wait and see, and ask your self if it turns out to be true, who tried to manipulate you? And who tried to bring you the truth?
But what makes me almost laugh in this article is the statement right in the first paragraph that these cops were inexperienced because they "only" handle 3 or 4 murders per year. It begs the questions of how many murder investigations does it take to become professed, and 2) when will the US wake up to the appalling number of lives cut short due to a gun hugging mentality?
It would be interesting to know the demographics of those who have used Stand Your Ground to justify what hither-to-before, might have been considered 2nd degree murder.
But Mr. Zimmerman is definitely guilty of being a moron.
Thus, Zimmerman will spend the rest of his life trying to convince himself that he is not a moron and trying to convince everyone other than his family that he is not a moron.
Glad I will NEVER be in Florida, so hopefully I'll never run into this moron.
Either way, it seems a person obsessed with crime and potenital offenders, a self-appointed and armed neighbourhood watchman, is allowed to shoot anyone he thinks is a threat, as long as no-one sees the fight he alleges?
Martin was an innocent victim of American racism. Zimmerman was the aggressor. e should be sent to jail for a long time for the murder.
This is the problem with trying a case in the media.
Following someone, ignoring police advice, carrying a gun--that all figures into this case.
Forgetfulness is the Allie of propaganda.