MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — People called him Mouse, because he was so quiet that you hardly noticed he was there. You know the kid, right?
The one who was always giggling at the neighborhood swimming pool, where the park director used to playfully chase him around then call him “her baby” while helping him do his homework?
His name is Trayvon. Trayvon Martin. You remember him, don’t you? The 17-year-old who, three years ago, had been visiting the home of his father’s girlfriend on a rainy Sunday night and had gone out to a local convenience store to get Skittles and iced tea.
You know, the one who ended up shot dead because a neighborhood watch captain — who refused to listen to a 911 dispatcher’s order to stand down — decided he was a burglar. Because he was wearing a hoodie. Because “they always get away with it.” Because he was black.
Oh, yeah. THAT one. He was a thug, wasn’t he? Smoked pot and loved guns? Got what was coming to him, no?
Yeah. You’re remembering correctly. Except you’re completely wrong.
He was the one who grew up on these corners of Miami Gardens, not the easiest of streets to navigate. Some friends called him Tray, others Tay-Tay. He was learning how to cook and would make meals for them.
He’s the one who got his first haircut, when he was a baby, from a guy named Steve Bass, who has the picture on his phone to prove it. He’s the one who mowed lawns to make extra money. He’s the one who loved to go roller skating at Galaxy Skateway with his friend Aiyanna Fleming. They went all the time, she says.
He was the one who was a jokester, a prankster. He’s the one who was interested in aviation and dreamed of becoming a pilot someday. And he’s the one who was going to college, that’s for sure, says his mother. There’s no doubt in her mind. Florida A&M was going to be the school, says Fleming. They talked about going together.
He’s also the one you’ll find buried in a crypt behind an inch-thick slab of granite at Dade Memorial Park on Opa-Locka Blvd. His final address: MDCU 10 South Row A Crypt 9.
His name is etched with an oval picture resting above; he’s smiling, wearing a red Hollister T-shirt. You must have seen it. Pretty much everyone has by now. Below it reads FEBRUARY 5, 1995 and FEBRUARY 26, 2012, the two dates separated by hands clasped in prayer, wrapped by a rosary. And beneath that:
REST MY SON
JOB WELL DONE
A palm tree just off to the right provides some shade but little comfort.
This is the final resting place of Trayvon Benjamin Martin, son of Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton.
After the news trucks and national curiosity have evaporated like a passing shower, this is the reality of what remains. A 17-year-old kid, armed with only a bag of candy and a drink, dead behind a speckled slab.
The South Florida skies are gray this day and it’s not long before they open and a light drizzle turns into a full-on downpour.
It’s the morning of Feb. 5, Trayvon’s birthday. He would have turned 20.
You remember him, don’t you?
‘Pray the truth comes out one day’
“I’m his grandmother,” says Marion Spotford-Evans in a soft voice.
It’s just after noon at Dade Memorial, the rain having stopped hours ago as Grandma Marion approaches. She is a sweet woman wearing a bright blue blouse. She takes a spot opposite Trayvon, resting her back against the granite, her hand pressed about her lips.
She comes here all the time, she says, keeping the flowers fresh. She tells you about the people lying next to Trayvon, a cousin, Cory Johnson, to the left; his great-grandmother, Nettie Tim-Spotford, on his right.
She shakes her head; it’s still all so hard to believe.
“I just hope and pray the truth comes out one day,” she says. “The truth . . . the truth.”
The words ring with pain and frustration. What happened that night, how George Zimmerman says it happened — Trayvon being the aggressor, telling Zimmerman he was “going to die tonight,” the neighborhood watchman merely standing his ground — just doesn’t fit the grandson she knew, she says.
She remembers a thoughtful boy who helped with the groceries without having to be told. “He’d just go ahead and do it,” she says. She tells you how Sybrina, Trayvon’s mother, thought the rain was her son’s way of telling everyone to stay home today. It didn’t work, especially not on his birthday.
“He had a sense of humor, too,” she says, laughing.
A sweetheart, she goes on, a sharp kid who preferred finding his own path over reading the directions, a boy with an adventurous soul and a talent for fixing things.
“You know, you have to be so careful how you say things, because if I say he was adventurous they’ll say he was a daredevil,” she says, tired of words getting twisted in the ether. “You can say it for good, but it could mean something else.”
She tells of his taking aviation classes, his prowess on the football field.
“He’d call you on the weekend and want to know if I needed my car washed.” she says. “I know he was not a thug.”
“I think he would have been in college,” she adds.
Her two oldest grandchildren both graduated recently followed by Trayvon’s older brother, Jahvaris Fulton, who finished up at Florida International University last year.
She knows things are changing, the awareness of stories like her grandson’s are opening eyes to injustices. “I don’t think it’s going to take another 50 years,” she says.
She’s not naive, though, knowing that deep-rooted racism is still thick in the ugliest of places.
“That mentality would have to die out,” she says. “Shameful to say it.”
‘Trayvon represents so many other young men’
Sybrina Fulton just doesn’t have time for this. She has a speaking engagement at Carol City Middle School in less than an hour, and she’d better be on her way. She has a mountain of work ahead with the anniversary of her son’s death fast approaching. In just over a week she’ll host the “I am Trayvon — Day of Remembrance Peace Walk” followed by the third annual Remembrance Dinner. She’s in constant motion, and the idea of stopping is agonizing.
“I’m going to kill you,” she says, when asked for a few more photos, candids this time, shots of her working.
She’s kidding of course; at least you hope she is.
She says it again for added emphasis, as a sly smile creeps across her face. She gives in and opens her office, settling in behind her desk at the Trayvon Martin Foundation, an organization she co-founded with Trayvon’s father just days after their son’s death. Their mission is to raise public awareness of profiling, the impact of crime, senseless violence on the families of the victims and the impact on our communities.
When she’s not talking about her son in front of a packed room of kids or making an appearance on MSNBC as she did recently, you might find her here at the foundation’s office at Florida Memorial University on the third floor of the school’s library.
Her office is equal parts workplace and shrine, as stacks of books, papers and purple Post-It notes share space with photos of her son. Her desk sits next to a large window that looks over the campus. A large painting of Trayvon sits to the right of the window. Trayvon is looking straight out into the room beneath a gray hoodie, mouth closed, eyes soft.
“Originally we thought (the foundation) was about Trayvon Martin, and it was, we got into this because of Trayvon Martin,” she says. “But Trayvon Martin represents so many other young men and women that are victims of senseless gun violence, and so we have been selected to be the voices of the voiceless, all the people that you don’t hear about and all the stories that are not on the news.”
Sybrina Fulton’s life changed in every way imaginable on Feb. 26, 2012. She is an activist now, traveling the country, speaking to whoever wants to listen, bringing her message of proper conflict resolution, the horrors of gun violence and the dangers of racial profiling. She’s on top of it all on this day, making sure everything is just as it should be. There is no question who is in charge. Her voice fills each room. Her brother Mark, Uncle Mark to everyone now, carries out her orders.
You get the feeling that keeping busy holds her thoughts at bay. You are wrong, at least on this day.
“A lot of people think that because his birthday was yesterday, that we just think about him during February, because of his birthday on Feb. 5 and Feb. 26 because of his death, but what people don’t understand is we think about him 365 days a year,” she says. “It still feels so fresh . . . it feels like it just happened. It doesn’t feel like it happened three years ago, it feels like it happened three months ago.
“The wound is still open.”
Especially today. Facebook has been deluged with as many posts condemning his life as there are ones celebrating it. A post wishing Trayvon a happy birthday with images of him in youthful, happier times brings out the best and worst. Some issue their condolences while others ask to see those pictures with the gun and the middle finger extended, or say that Trayvon messed with the wrong guy and got exactly what he deserved.
“A lot of time people send (hateful) stuff directly to me in emails, or maybe it be messages and I don’t respond to them because I don’t give them my time, I don’t allow them to have my time,” Fulton says. “Because had it been their child, they’d be thinking a lot differently. Had it been their child or somebody in their family, they would be thinking a lot differently.”
‘We knew the real Tray’
James Thomas sits in a dimly lit back room of the Betty T. Ferguson Rec Center, just down the road from Sun Life Stadium where the Miami Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes play football.
The longtime friend of Trayvon’s says the two go so far back that asking him when they met is tantamount to asking when he started walking. He cannot recall life without either.
“They took a person that was very important to everybody,” he says. “He had a role in everybody’s life.”
He comes this afternoon bringing five other friends of Trayvon’s, a group always together.
They’re typical kids. They hang out on the weekends playing video games; they go to the movies, they crack jokes. The last time they hung out with Trayvon was just before he left for Sanford, in 2012, to go stay with his father. They went to the movies to see “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.”
“He was funny,” says Juwon Smith. “That’s why I liked him. No matter what the situation, no matter how hard the situation, he’d be funny, he’d tell a joke to make you laugh. He could always make you laugh.”
Smith still keeps Trayvon’s number in his phone, always will, he says. Won’t delete it. He called it repeatedly when he got the news of his death. Every call went to voicemail. He refused to believe his friend was gone.
The Trayvon they describe is levelheaded and reserved. “You never knew what he was thinking,” says Jaylin Thomas. “He was always a calm person, you never see him get angry.”
“We knew the real Tray,” they say, nearly in unison.
They have a hard time believing Trayvon exploded on Zimmerman that night three years ago. They can’t imagine him saying the things that Zimmerman claimed. They can only recall him losing his cool once, when he was about 11, over a video game joystick. Everyone laughs.
“Once we heard the story (of his death), we already knew it wasn’t true,” says Jaylin Thomas. “I couldn’t see him doing that at all. They’re saying he attacked him first. I couldn’t see that at all.”
The discussion is spirited; it’s back and forth. It’s a perfect afternoon, but here they all sit. No one really wants to be in this room, they feel they need to talk about their friend, need to talk about how his killing has changed them.
“There ain’t no real story if Tray don’t have something to say about it,” says Damion Barry noting how only the shooter gets to tell his story in a Stand Your Ground fatality. “You only got one side. Zimmerman’s side. Tray can’t say nothing about it.”
They’re afraid now. They now know they can be in the right place and it can still be the wrong time. They fear they can be walking home and be gunned down without consequences, and that their killers are not only going to sleep in their own bed that night, they’re given their guns back, too. They fear the world thinks the worst of them, thinks they’re up to no good, thinks they fit a description, thinks they’re suspicious, thinks they had it coming. They fear Stand Your Ground laws don’t apply to them, and they have no right to defend themselves.
They ask: Where’s Trayvon’s right to stand his ground? Where’s his right to defend himself?
“We can do everything right,” says Jaylin Thomas. “And still be wrong.
“It’s still an everyday problem we have to face, ’cause how society is our lives really don’t matter.”
It’s simple, they say: If you show respect you get it back. “We’re human,” says Jaylin Thomas.
“Just because I look a certain way, doesn’t give you the right to assume,” says James Thomas. “It doesn’t give you the right to go after (Trayvon).”
Ernest Pereira says he has been stopped often by cops because of his dreadlocks.
“When you go into a white area, you have to present yourself like you’re one of them,” he says. “Or they’re going to look at you different.”
Adds James Thomas, “You have to feel uncomfortable for them to feel comfortable.”
They never travel alone anymore. No matter what.
“If one person goes to the bathroom, we all go to the bathroom,” says Barry. “Just stand behind and watch.”
No one laughs. It’s not a joke.
“For real. I’m going to make sure there’s nothing going on,” says Smith. “You used to walk across town to your friend’s house. Now you gotta drive because you ain’t safe walking. You don’t know what could happen while you’re walking.”
They visit Trayvon often. They talk to him. They ask him to watch over them. “Tell him how the world is,” says Barry.
“You can’t call him on the phone and he can’t come to your house so you might as well go over to the grave and talk to him let him know we’re still here,” says Smith.
A lot of people say Rest in Peace, he was my friend and all that, but half of them don’t even go to the gravesite. They don’t know where it’s at.”
“They don’t even remember he died,” says Myles Johnson. “Some people don’t even know his name no more.”
They all plan to go to college. Trayvon’s death has become a wakeup call.
“It makes you want to be successful,” says Barry. “Prove everybody wrong.”
James Thomas has his eyes on Howard, Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman and the University of Florida. He wants to major in criminology and minor in screenwriting. He hopes to write Trayvon’s story.
“How it affected black people,” he says. “That’s my dream. I’m going to make sure this story gets heard. And make people see how they f— with us.”
Jaylin Thomas wants to learn about cars, inside and out.
“At the end of the day, they took a person,” he says. “They took a life, they took one of our friends.”
He never made it home
George Zimmerman was acquitted of second degree murder in July of 2013, but he already had a criminal record on that night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. He was arrested in July of 2005, after scuffling with police. The charges were dropped after he agreed to enter an alcohol education program.
Since that rainy night in Sanford, he’s had a series of run-ins with the law and been arrested twice. He was arrested and accused of domestic violence by a girlfriend in November 2013, though she later dropped the charges. He allegedly pointed a shotgun at his then-wife and punched her father in September 2013, though she reportedly declined to press charges. More recently, in January he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault after he allegedly threw a wine bottle at a girlfriend.
Last September in Lake Mary, Fla., a man named Matthew Apperson alleged that Zimmerman threatened to shoot him “dead” during a road rage incident, and told police two days later that when he showed up at work, Zimmerman was waiting for him. He declined to press charges.
“People in court swore that (Zimmerman) wouldn’t hurt a fly,” says Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin.
During and after the murder trial, images of Trayvon with a gun in his hand, and flipping off the camera with smoke billowing from his mouth, wormed their way across the Internet, painting him as a thug, implying he was a drug user, a gangster, putting his life on trial as much as Zimmerman’s.
“I still don’t understand why people would say Trayvon was being that bad,” said Steve Bass, the barber, who still remembers seeing Trayvon helping out his dad in the park, working in the concession stand after he stopped playing football. “Even though you find that he did this, he did that, that still don’t add up to that type of person,” he said. “Everybody’s (done) something.”
Zimmerman now lives just one town over from Sanford, in Lake Mary, Fla., about a 20-minute drive from the scene of the shooting, a black Kia Sportage parked in the driveway. He doesn’t answer his door today, as he didn’t when the police were here last month. He never comes out, says one of his neighbors.
Much of what happened that night three years ago is well known. Martin, who was suspended from Miami’s Michael Krop Senior High School at the time for having marijuana residue in his school bag, was staying in Sanford, at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. His father wanted to get his son away from his troubles back home.
Martin went out just after dark to a strip mall just off Reinhardt Road, right around the bend from Twin Lakes. He purchased a tall can of Arizona watermelon flavored Iced Tea and a packet of Skittles at a 7-Eleven on the corner of the outdoor mall and headed back to the housing complex. He was wearing blue jeans, red and white sneakers and a gray sweatshirt with a hoodie pulled over his head as he made his way back.
He never made it.
Zimmerman, who was watching the area after a recent spate of robberies, spotted Martin from his car, and thinking he looked suspicious and “was on drugs,” called the police. The police dispatcher sent a patrol car to the scene and instructed Zimmerman, who had a nine millimeter semi-automatic handgun in his possession at the time and was getting out of his car to chase Martin, who had begun running away, to hold off until the police arrived. He didn’t listen.
What happened next was an altercation between the two, in a back alley of the complex, that left Zimmerman with a busted nose and cuts to the back of his head and Martin dead, a single gunshot to the chest.
Trayvon Martin, unarmed, was on the phone just prior to the altercation, relaying to a friend that he was being followed.
“Anyone who knew him would say that he wasn’t an aggressive person,” says Aiyanna Fleming. “He was very affectionate.”
Zimmerman was brought to the police station, questioned and released that night. No arrest was made as the police stated there was no reason to believe his actions were prompted by anything other than self defense, citing Florida’s Stand Your Ground law which allows the use of deadly force as opposed to retreat.
It wasn’t until social media got the story out, and a group that calls itself the Dream Defenders made national news by marching from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona to Sanford, six of its members blocking the Sanford Police Department’s front door with their bodies, that an arrest was made on April 11.
“You don’t turn bad overnight,” Tracy Martin says. “God is watching.”
‘There’s no respect for a young black male’
At the corner of NW 195th St. and NW 14th Ave. in Miami Gardens, a group of kids, eight or so, holds court. They call themselves HotBoyz and Hitterz; it means “friends” they say. They’re kids, ages 14 and 15. They’re playful. They tease one another, as young boys do. One is called an Oreo, black on the outside, white on the inside. Everyone laughs. He does, too.
They talk about their lives after Trayvon and they talk about the fear they feel. They always travel in groups now, they say, just as Trayvon’s friends do.
“I’m scared to walk by myself,” says one.
“Anyone can say they’re a victim of something and you ain’t done nothing.
“There’s no respect for a young black male,” he says, the spectre of all the other high-profile killings of black males in the years since Trayvon’s, unspoken but palpable. “Feel we’re not as equal as Caucasians.”
They nod in agreement. It’s their reality. The fear increases the further they are from these streets, the closer they are to white neighborhoods.
They pose for a picture, and things change in an instant; they’re suddenly gangsters, some covering their faces with their shirts or the collars of their jackets, flipping off the camera, aiming guns that aren’t there.
They aren’t kids anymore. They’re menacing. They’re your worst nightmare.
You think of Trayvon, and all those pictures that spawned the thug narrative, pictures that said, to many, that he got what he deserved, that he wasn’t an innocent kid, images that don’t match the Trayvon his friends talk about, the considerate kid his family remembers.
The photos are snapped and the boys gather around to see them. And just like that, they’re kids once more, laughing at each other, wanting to see how they look, craning their bodies to find themselves, each wanting a copy.
“Can you tweet it to #trayvonhotboyz?,” asks another. “Do you have Instagram? Or can you post it on Facebook?”
You think of the story that would be told if something happened to one of these kids and these photos got out. You think about the thug narrative that will tilt their lives.
Trayvon’s friends now know how images like that can skew their lives.
“We don’t do that anymore,” says Damion Barry.
‘It’s a tough day. Just missing him’
‘He’s gone, but he’s definitely not forgotten’
Tracy Martin arrives at Dade Memorial at about 2:30 in the afternoon. Wearing a black Atlanta Braves hat and black T-shirt, he steps out of a large black Cadillac Escalade and makes his way to his son.
He brings with him fresh flowers and a balloon that says “Happy Birthday.”
He kneels down and replaces the old flowers. He ties the balloon to the carafe so that it dances in the breeze.
Still kneeling, his eyes are red and glistening as he begins to talk.
“It’s tough to come out here,” he says. “We had a lot of good times, a lot of good memories about him. It’s a tough day. Just missing him.”
Trayvon was like his best friend, Martin says, a good kid who loved his family and friends and respected adults. The words REST MY SON JOB WELL DONE were his idea.
“As a son, he did all that he needed to do,” he says.
He owns the two plots just above Trayvon’s. They’ll be there for him in time.
He thinks of Trayvon now, and what he would have become.
“He would have turned 20 today, a young man that had a bright future,” Martin says. “I know he would have been doing something positive with his life.”
He sees his son now more as a martyr, Trayvon’s death bringing awareness to injustice, the circumstances of his son’s killing not polarizing, but bringing the country together.
“Even though he’s gone I know for a fact that he’s looking down on us and smiling because of the work that we continue to do in his name and his honor,” Martin says, referring to the foundation and upcoming Peace Walk.
“And it’s just days like this that it hurts not to have him here. It’s difficult, but at the same time, my pain, my grief, you just want to go out and push more to enlighten everybody of the injustices in our communities.
“He’s gone, but he’s definitely not forgotten.”
Follow me on Twitter: @ericbarrow
ebarrow@nydailynews.com
