Among the piece’s revelations, George Zimmerman was not a self-appointed neighborhood crime watcher. As crime incidents and break-ins increased in his Sanford, FL neighborhood, he came to be known as someone who cared and was willing to step up.
The Retreat at Twin Lakes e-newsletter for February 2012 noted: “The Sanford PD has announced an increased patrol within our neighborhood … during peak crime hours.
“If you’ve been a victim of a crime in the community, after calling police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman.”
“Our captain.” So much for the lone wolf vigilante meme that has dominated this story. And so much for the racism angle:
The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.
But here’s the money quote:
A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.
Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.
“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”
It’s a great piece worth reading and sharing, but it’s tragic that Reuters didn’t conduct this investigation before NBC, the NYT, ABC and CNN had all run with various takes on “this guy is a dangerous nutcase and stand your ground laws imperil us all!!!”
To recap: Not a self-appointed vigilante. Not a racist. Did not utter a racist slur and was not suspicious of Martin because of his skin color. Stand your ground laws probably don’t apply to his case.
Other than that, the MSM has done a bang-up job on this story.
h/t Instapundit
“This time, Zimmerman was not so patient, andThis time, Zimmerman was not so patient, and he disregarded police advice against pursuing Martin..”
is it really known that zimmerman “disregarded police advice against pursuing Martin.”?
newrouter – While the Reuters piece is better than I expected, it still gets very wrong crucial details. One in particular is the part about disregarding the police’s advice to Zimmerman against pursuing Martin. 1) There was no such advice given directly to Zimmerman. The police dispatcher said to Zimmerman, ‘you don’t have to do that,’ meaning you don’t have to pursue Martin. That is very different from saying:Don’t do that. 2) Zimmerman pursued Martin for a bit after being told, ‘you don’t have to do that,’ but then either because he lost sight of Martin or interpreted the dispatcher’s statment to mean, don’t pursue Martin, he did stop the pursuit and lost sight of Martin.
I can go on, but you get my point. Even when the LSM appears to be walking back a story, it really isn’t, especially Reutuers. (I’m particularly down on Reuters because of its fake pictures from 2006 Israeli/Lebanon/Hezabollah war.)
A lot of people have noticed that the dispatcher’s instruction is not really an instruction. (It’s almost certainly a CYA, part of the dispatcher’s script, something he is trained to say so the caller won’t be able to say that anything he does should be laid at the door of the SPD.) Less noticed is that in accepting GZ’s request that the arriving officers call him rather then that GZ meet them at the truck or mailboxes the dispatcher is implicitly signing off on GZ doing something else. What something else? Why, seeing if he can locate the suspicious figure he saw before the latter slips out the rear entrance. What else could the dispatcher have thought GZ intended to do in the few minutes before the officers arrived? The (implied, only because the sentences are inexcusably unclear) assertion in the Affadavit of Probable Cause that GM was disobeying an insruction to meet the officers is very close to an outright lie.
Gandydancer – Excellent points.
– volunteer. No good deed goes unpunished.
Reuters has a sudden attack of honesty and professionalism. Now that IS news. I’m not holding my breath waiting for the rest of the media lynch-mob to rediscover professional ethics.
Greetings:
Yeah, but that “deeply Catholic background” is even more troubling than the rest of the miscreant’s litany, or have you forgotten the Crusades ???
Really? Have you forgotten that the armies of the Ummayad Caliphate invaded Spain 385 years before the First Crusade? Muslims invented the “crusade.”
You mean the ‘counter-Crusades’ that were an order of magnitude smaller in terms of time and space compared to the silence that descended wherever morons roamed from 632 to 1050?
Can you tell us who Charles Martel fought in France at the Battle of Tours in 732 ….hint …..it wasn’t the Amish
I suspect that the reference to the Crusades was intended as a joke.
Greetings, Gringo:
And thanks. Once again, my brevity has proven to be the soul of my half-wit. As the beneficiary of 13 years of Catholic education, and earning the Most Detentions award in my junior year in high school, I was trying to convey the peculiarity of the religion reportage. There may have been many psycho-social dynamics in operation on that unfortunate evening in Florida, but I don’t think Catholicism was of much import.
And, of course, young Trayvon Martin’s background seems to have included no deeply-s at all.
Yes, they’re coming to the truth grudgingly and late.
However, the overall MSM is still MIA when it comes to the REAL Hate Crimes being committed around the country in the name of “Justice for Trayvon.”
Where are Jessie and Al calling for an end to the Violence agains individuals for no other reason than their skin color???
>Crickets Chirping<
They’re not walking back, not at all. It might look like that to you at first sight because they portray Zimmerman in a better light than before, but think what the conclusion the reader is supposed to draw in the end. What this article tries to do is supposedly give you a more detailed and three-dimensional, almost humane, explanation to how a good Catholic boy, though with an anger-management problem, becomes a murderer. See, the neighborhood had seen a series of burglaries by black youth. Zimmerman was afraid for his wife and cared about the people of the neighborhood. The last time he saw someone suspicious (also a black youth, “18-year-old Emmanuel Burgess”) and called the police the suspect fled before the police got there, and a couple of days later he burglarized a house in the neighborhood. Now this is how the article describes the Martin shooting:
What is the reader supposed to conclude? At best that Zimmerman just followed Martin because he thought the police were useless, and there was a confrontation we know nothing about that ended in the shooting. At worst that Zimmerman, who we are told had an anger-management problem, was angry that “these assholes… always get away” and shot Martin in cold blood. The only thing they went back on is the claim it was a racist murder.
Unfortunately it’s too late for those who have already been victims of retaliatory attacks.
This is getting confusing. So Zimmerman is now a “black white Hispanic”?
Does he have any Asian blood? I’d just like to see all the bases covered.
What if they threw a race war and nobody came? Oh, wait – that’s exactly what happened!
Not all liberals are joining Jesse and Al’s Zimmerman lynching party. Professor Alan Dershowitz is taking a good look at the prosecution’s case and finding it full of holes. “This affidavit submitted by the prosecutor in the Florida case is a crime,” Dershowitz said. “This prosecutor not only may have suborned perjury, she may be responsible, if there are going to be riots here, for raising expectations to unreasonable levels.” Dershowitz said it is quite possible Zimmerman was guilty of a lesser charge, but the affidavit does not support a second-degree murder charge.
My own view is that the police had it right in the first place, and Zimmerman should never have been charged based on his unrefuted claim of self-defense. But with politics are at work, the prosecutor was under pressure to bring charges. She probably thought her actions avoided riots but she may have just postponed them.
I believe the bottom line in the case will be: Did Zimmerman act in self-defense after being attacked by Martin? If the answer to that question is “yes” then the case is over; not 2nd degree and not manslaughter. The prequel question is: Did Martin, after Zimmerman apparently broke-off pursuit, decided to come back and confront Zimmerman?
spineoneone: Your question is the $64 question: Did Martin come back?
There are two possibilities: Zimmerman ended of pursuit, and then Martin came back and attacked Zimmerman, or Zimmerman resumed is pursuit of Martin after spotting him again.
My problem with the second possibility is that when Zimmerman lost sight of Martin (ending his pursuit of him) Martin was not far from his father’s girlfriend’s townhouse. It would not have been difficult for Martin to just run into the townhouse. Also, there are spaces between some of the townhouses, so if Martin got confused by all the look-alike townhomes, he could have ducked into that space and remain hidden until Zimmerman went back to his SUV. (Remember, it was night time, so it is relatively easy to hide in the shadows.) Why didn’t Marting do that? Also, supposing Zimmerman did spot Martin again and resumed his pursuit of him, one wonders how Zimmerman could have caught up to him. Martin was 17, 6’4″ and a football player; I think he could have easily outrun Zimmerman.
Of course, if there was a second pursuit, Martin could have just stopped, waited for Zimmerman to catch up, at which point they had words; Martin then would have knocked him down with a punch to the nose and then start to beat his head on the ground. Suppose it is this scenario that is correct, who then is aggressor? It’s hard to tell.
Two final thoughts: 1) I am inclined to think the first possibility is the more likely. 2) The purported phone conversation between Martin and his girlfriend could have occurred when Zimmerman first began his pursuit of Martin.
We will not be able to know if Martin stalked Zimmerman or if the two just bumped into one another after Zimmerman had broken off pursuit. We might have been able to find evidence to draw inference from the night of the incident with tracking dogs but at this late date we can only speculate on how the two came together after the pursuit was ended.
There are answers we DO need to get that I fear are even further beyond our reach. Who began the false meme that Zimmerman kept up pursuit after being told not to? Was it an invention of the press or something a lazy reporter jotted down from a “community organizer”? Why did initial reports NOT include the evidence of Zimmerman’s injuries and the dampness on the back of his shirt, evidence that he had been on his back, unable to retreat and under attack? That evidence is in the police record, open to any of the “real journalists” who never bothered to look for it.
We here can do nothing about the trial of George Zimmerman, aside from personal contributions to his legal defense fund. What we can, and should, do is demand to know who polluted this story from the start and why they are still holding a job as a “real journalist”. We should also demand that their editor who let this sloppy propaganda through be fired.
More unemployed “real journalists” should be the goal. Some time asking “do you want fries with that” will encourage them to seek truth, not agenda-driven lies.
Chris – Unfortunately, the fish stinks from the head. The ‘journalists’ of the LSM are just doing what their bosses want them to do: All the news they can skew to fit their view. To this day, we don’t know if anyone got fired at NBC for the egregious misrepresentation of the conversation between Zimmerman and the dispatcher. Don’t expect these lackeys, posing as journalists, to be fired anytime soon. What may happen is that a large enough chunk of the population will stop reading the Leftists propaganda parading around as news, and the whole kit and kaboodle will come tumbling down into Chapter 11 or 13, but that may be a long time coming.