Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Some Thoughts About the Trayvon Martin Case
by j. gabrielle
I live in southwest Virginia in an inner city, predominately African American quiet neighborhood.
Last Fall, on a grey drizzly morning, I stepped outside, out back in the driveway to let my dog walk about a bit and make a phone call. While on hold with a company, I observed a teen walking quickly down the alley carrying stereo equipment. He spied me and my dog and his pace quickened as he started dropping components and wires. I called 9-1-1. I told the dispatcher what I had observed and explained even then "hey, it COULD be an emergency transfer of stereo equipment".
The dispatcher said a squad car was on the way. The teen walked the long way one street over, met another hooded young man and stood on the porch of a house where neither lived. Eventually, the two got in a vehicle parked in that property's car port and loaded in the carried equipment.
Another neighbor came down my same alley in his vehicle asking if I had seen two kids. He had observed them kicking in his neighbor's door and entering her home. He also had called the police.
Having lived in this neighborhood for several years now, neither of us had to go and check any street signs to be sure where we lived. Just saying.
The two teens got out of the vehicle and walked out of sight in the rain.
Eventually officers did arrive. They talked to us, wrote down what we had seen and collected the components the young man dropped in the alley.
The court case relating to this incident is continuing even today and I don't know that it will ever be solved. Feeling violated from the incident and deeply saddened at the loss of a beloved grandfather's watch among other things, the woman's whose home was broken into has moved.
My neighbor and I who made the 9-1-1 calls see each other every couple of months at Juvenile Court for yet another "continuance".
It wasn't until this past weekend when the innocent verdict came in for George Zimmerman that I considered how my experience might have been different.
Suppose my neighbor or I carried a gun? Suppose either he or I approached either of the young men? Suppose we scuffled with the kid and the kid fought back and one of us shot him?
Breaking and entering is not a capital offense. And FOR SURE suspected breaking and entering isn't. AND ABSOLUTELY, walking down an alley in the rain with stereo equipment isn't punishable by death.
How in any court, on any day, for any reason would it have been excusable, acceptable, legal, righteous, or fair that anybody died that morning?
Thankfully, there is nothing in me that makes me want to be a vigilante. There is nothing in me that wants to do a lawman's job. There was nothing in my voice or my neighbor's voice that made the Dispatcher say "don't approach him......", for I wan't given that instruction.
What was it in Zimmerman's voice, or his history that made the dispatcher admonish him not to follow ?
On Friday morning, July 12th, the media announced that the court would allow evidence of trace amounts of marijuana in young Trayvon's body admissible. Waves of relief wafted through me. "There", I thought. Anybody with any sense knows ain't no stoned kid confronting ANYBODY unless trapped and cornered. I thought sure somebody would see that, would say that?
But, they didn't. The jurors say the law wouldn't allow for a conviction.
While I can understand those facts with my head, my heart just aches and aches for Martin's family, and for justice.
