Trayvon Martin: 911 Tapes Released

Someone can be heard screaming before a shot is fired

As of Friday, Trayvon Martin’s shooter George Zimmerman still had not been arrested.

With the recent release of Zimmerman’s 911 calls to Sanford, Florida dispatchers, there's a possibility that the family will finally find justice.

Zimmerman is the neighborhood watch volunteer in the Central Florida town of Sanford who on Feb. 26 shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who while visiting his father at his Orlando-area home, was walking home from the store.

Zimmerman claimed the teen started an altercation, and in fear for his own life, Zimmerman pulled a gun from his waistband and shot the teen. Martin was unarmed.

The family of Martin had demanded that tapes from 911 calls made by neighbors be released to help piece together what happened before, during and after the incident. Zimmerman’s tape was released late Friday.

The Miami Herald reported:

The 911 tapes released by police Friday show neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman called in with a problem: there had been a few break-ins lately, and now there was another suspicious guy in his Retreats at Twin Lakes neighborhood.

He looked like he might be on drugs and “up to no good.”

“It’s raining. He’s just walking around, looking about,” Zimmerman told the dispatcher. “He’s just staring looking at all the houses.”

Later, he lamented: “These a**holes always get away.”

In an interview this week with the Miami Herald, Police Chief Bill Lee said the 911 calls would prove the incident was not a case of racial profiling, because when asked whether the suspect was white or black, Zimmerman did not know. However, the recording clearly shows that when asked, Zimmerman said, “He looks black.” And then a few moments later, “He’s a black male.”

“This is amazing,” family attorney Natalie Jackson told the newspaper. “The police have been covering up from the start. The most alarming thing was hearing a 17-year-old pleading for his life and someone still pulling the trigger.”

She said calls from other witnesses who heard or saw the incident from their window appeared to back up their claim that it was Zimmerman who had the upperhand throughout the altercation. “Racism doesn’t make you go get a gun and shoot someone,” Jackson said. “Racism makes you profile them. What made him shoot was that he was one of them; he felt he was a cop.