- April 28, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
Cassandra Stephenson displays a photo of Trayvon Martin in her home. It hung on her wall for more than a year after the teen was killed in March 2012, but one week ago, Stephenson took it down and placed it in a chair in her living room.
That was the day a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of second-degree murder charges related to Martin’s death.
“He’s my house guest,” Stephenson says. “I keep him where none of us can forget him.”
Every day for more than a year, Stephenson looked into the 17-year-old boy’s face and saw those of her own sons. She saw what her grandsons will one day look like. Just 65 miles away from the neighborhood where Martin was shot, Stephenson knows his death could have just as easily been another’s — one of her family members, even.
Saturday morning, Stephenson took the photo from its chair and joined more than 100 other Flagler County residents to march along Palm Coast Parkway in honor of Martin.
The marchers didn’t seek to overturn Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict, although they said the case was unjust. Instead, they sought a repeal of the laws from which that injustice sprung: Florida’s stand-your-ground law, which allows for the use of deadly force against threats, both perceived and actual.
Zimmerman said in court that he shot Martin in self-defense. He was acquitted of all charges, a court decision that prompted national debate about laws like those in Florida, which 22 states currently have in place.
What about Martin’s right to self-defense? marchers asked. Where does the line between actual threat and perceived threat lie?
The day before, President Barack Obama expressed similar concerns.
“If Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” Obama said during a press briefing on Friday.
The night he was shot, Martin was unarmed and walking to his father’s home within a gated community in Sanford. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, saw him and called police to report a suspicious person. A series of burglaries had plagued the neighborhood recently. Dispatchers told him that police were on their way and advised him to stay in his car.
Shortly afterward, neighbors reported hearing gunfire. Zimmerman admitted to approaching and then shooting the teenager, but he said it was done in self-defense after Martin attacked him.
Martin, who died on the scene, was on the phone with his 16-year-old girlfriend moments before he died. She told investigators that she heard Martin ask someone why he was following him. Then, she heard what may have been a scuffle before the call dropped.
Zimmerman’s defense said there was no way to know who threatened whom in the altercation. State statutes allow a person to use deadly force if “he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to him or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
Defense attorneys said prosecutors did not prove that Zimmerman acted with malice.
But critics of the law say it may increase violence because determining whether a person actually feels threatened is difficult. Others say that Martin never would have been targeted as a threat if he had been white.
“Can anybody now claim self defense?” Stephenson said. “This has gotten a lot of attention in the African American community, but really, it’s everybody — are we safe if anyone can shoot us because they perceive a threat?”
Obama on Friday called for an examination of laws like Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law.
“I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if (they) are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than defuse potential altercations,” Obama said.
Palm Coast’s march, which was coordinated by Valerie Ottley, a neighborhood watch coordinator herself, spanned about two miles. The marchers were mostly black, and they held their signs high, many of them dressed in hooded sweatshirts similar to the one Martin was wearing before he died.
Many of them had already warned their children about wearing those very sweatshirts — sometime before or after telling them how to behave when questioned by police (be respectful, make no sudden movements), a necessary caution black children must hear, they said.
As they walked, some passing drivers honked their horns or called out in support. Others slowed down, their hands out the windows, their middle fingers raised, yelling curse words and racial slurs.
But they kept walking. After two miles and a loop back to where they started, the group held hands in the Kohl’s parking lot and prayed for peace, for unity and for the Martin family.
Stephenson hugged her photo of Martin to her chest as the marchers dispersed. She was going straight home to put his picture back in the chair in the middle of her living room.
