Trayvon Martin, RIP

The fatal shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida named George Zimmerman is a reminder that way too many people get shot in America for screwed-up reasons or for no particular reason other than adrenaline and testosterone. I don't know what happened in this particular case, but it reminds me of a local case I made myself familiar with that featured a lot of instant decisionmaking that turned out bad. 

A few years ago, I noticed a single paragraph in the local news blotter about a fatal shooting of a teenager in a local parking lot by a multi-departmental law enforcement task force of plain clothes officers who were "debriefing" after a drug raid at 9:30 on a Thursday evening. The police spokesman implied that the parking lot was a notorious drug trade area, and asserted that the dead young man had tried to run over the plainclothesmen while they were brawling with another man they had accosted for peering into parked cars. 

Wait a minute, I thought, that's dubious-sounding. First, I was peeved at the cop spokesman for demeaning local property values by claiming that everybody knows this parking lot is a drug mart. No, it's a nice parking lot with excellent lighting, a private security guard driving around in a golf cart, a constant flow of cars and respectable pedestrians at all hours, especially on a Thursday evening because the lot serves some fairly fashionable restaurants and bars. I've walked through that parking lot maybe a thousand times in my life. I've never seen any criminal activity there, whether drug dealing or breaking into cars, just bad driving. I had never once felt in any danger in that lot from criminals, but I've almost been run over more than a few times there by drivers zooming for the rare open parking space. Fortunately, when that happened, I wasn't packing any serious heat, so none of the bad drivers wound up dead. 

The more I looked into the official story, the less plausible it sounded. The victim / mad dog would-be vehicular murderer was a kid who had just graduated from high school, where he played in the string section in the school orchestra. His friends set up a Facebook page in memoriam and it was full of testimonies to his gentleness of his character from his many friends in orchestra and band, plus his friends' parents, and his teachers. There were zero gang-type testimonials saluting a fallen comrade, as you'll so often read in the comments to the LA Times homicide database.

My wife and I started playing amateur detective, both on the Internet and in person. I emailed the lawyer that the mother had hired to tell him that as a long time resident the official story sounded fishy to me, and gave him leads to look into. I didn't like the idea that I or my family might get shot by cops in the local parking lot with no open investigation or discussion in the press.

Exactly a week after the killing, my wife and I walked down to the parking lot to see what it looked like on a Thursday at 9:30 pm: what I recalled or what the police spokesman said. It looked like a place that cops would choose to debrief after getting pumped up in a drug raid, not because they could be looking for more criminals while they debrief, but because there are a few nice-looking would-be starlets around at that hour to ogle. (In this neighborhood, however, most of them are married.)

While my wife and I were standing in the parking lot, we noticed another middle-aged couple standing in the middle of the parking lot looking around in bewilderment and grief. "Those are the parents, I bet." And they were. They had come to talk to people who worked there at that hour, in hopes of finding out more about what had happened to their child. There were no video cameras recording the parking lot, in part because it's such a low crime area that there is little need for surveillance video. The police had not yet let the parents' lawyer talk to the one certain eyewitness, the man whom the out-of-uniform cops had attacked for looking into car windows.

The poor mother told us the cops hadn't notified her of her son's death for 12 hours. (That would have given them lots of time to get their stories straight, sober up, or whatever.) A week later, nobody had yet released the names of the shooters to her. We did our best to console the parents, and to tell them that as local residents who didn't have a dog in this fight, just a sense that some kind of injustice was going down, we thought they should press their investigation and seriously consider a lawsuit. 

Over time, more facts turned up that I won't go into here, including the only eyewitness, whose story made the cops look bad, but he had some credibility problems of his own. I don't know exactly what happened during the last few seconds of the kid's life, but it sounds like there was a good chance that various kinds of cops closed ranks for a whitewash.

A long time later, the D.A. issued a report exonerating the shooters, and then the mother filed a $10,000,000 wrongful death lawsuit, which hasn't yet been resolved. A year ago, my wife and son marched in a memorial demonstration to remember the kid and to call for a fair civil trial.

I'm keeping this story vague for a variety of reasons, such as not wanting to be tied to annoying about five different law-enforcement agencies. At one point I spent about a half-hour on the phone with an LAPD detective because neither of the shooters was LAPD. I pointed out that as a taxpayer for the LAPD, I wasn't crazy about other agencies "debriefing" on LAPD turf. But he didn't buy my rather blatant attempt at driving a wedge into the general cop fraternity, and got a little hot under the collar. Also, I don't want my quite peripheral participation to be a distraction in the upcoming civil trial of the mom's wrongful death suit. So, just a warning: if you uncover the name of the victim, I won't approve a comment linking to it. I don't mind you looking, but I want to keep the story anonymous for now.

Let's get back to Trayvon Martin for a moment and the question of race. Kevin Drum asserts in Mother Jones that it's a story of a ""black kid in Florida who got shot by a white..." and complains Fox News isn't giving this case wall to wall coverage, unlike less racist networks, because it was "black kid in Florida who got shot by a white..."

Now, in the case I investigated, I wasn't particularly sure from the unusual last name and his picture whether the victim was Anglo (in the L.A. sense of non-Hispanic white) or Hispanic. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed kid who could have been Anglo white or light-skinned Hispanic. After meeting the mother, I figure he was Anglo. I only today found out the names of the two officers who shot him (the law enforcement agencies kept that covered up for a long time, perhaps in fear that the other members of the victim's string section in the orchestra might try to extract revenge upon them by, I don't know, playing out of tune under their windows). I'm guessing both shooters are whites.

Compared to Trayvon Martin, this shooting got very little initial coverage in the local press and zip in the national press. On the other hand, the kid's classmates from his mostly middle-class high school organized online in a variety of fairly effective ways and kept the story alive so it has kept popping up in the press, although never with a big splash. Online commenters kept prodding the L.A. Times and L.A. Weekly to look into the case more, which they've done in bits and pieces as events unfolded, but never making a big story out of it. You can follow the unfolding of the story with Google but you likely would never have noticed it if you were just a casual reader of the local news. I've never heard of any controversy over the case making the local TV news.

Basically, news organizations are quite dependent upon the criminal justice system to feed them the facts of crime stories, and when the cops want a story to get underplayed, they just keep the flow of facts to the bare minimum.

There has been no national interest in my local story whatsoever, and no outside organizations have taken an interest, presumably because of the lack of a racial angle.

On the other hand, the amount of self-organizing citizen activism has been above average. One black commenter on the web said something like this to the victims' friends, neighbors, and teachers, "Wow, you white people just won't let this go when one of your own gets shot by the cops. If this had happened in the 'hood, it would have been forgotten by now."

White people don't have anybody to stand up for them qua white people, but they are also pretty good at standing up for themselves.

The Trayvon Martin case sounds a lot like this fiasco, although the shooter, being an amateur neighborhood watch pseudo-cop has actually appeared to have gotten less protection in some ways than the professional cops in my local case, whose very names we couldn't learn for a long, long time.

The dead youth in Florida being black, the story fits the eternal hunt for Tom Wolfe's Great White Defendant, at least until you get a look at the shooter. The shooter's father calls his son Hispanic, and, indeed, he looks a little like the guy who don't need no steenking badges in the Treasure of Sierra Madre. 

Moreover, in Florida, there's a long tradition of Latinos in positions of authority shooting African-Americans in dubious circumstances -- that set off two or three major black riots in Miami in the 1980s. I don't think anybody remembers these riots anymore.

As Bonfire of the Vanities pointed out in 1987, most day to day routines of the criminal justice system consist of dealing with minority screw-ups brutalizing other minorities. It's boring and depressing work. So, there is a deep hunger for the occasional man-bites-dog story of a white brutalizing a black, which leads to people like Kevin screwing up and getting the race of the shooter wrong. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer