This has bothered me since this all happened...its may not seem that important on the surface but it tells us that Zimm`s account of what happened cant be trusted .
The first day of
opening statements and formal testimony in the second-degree murder trial of George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, covered a lot of ground in eight hours on Monday. But the prosecution zeroed in on something that has fascinated me for one day shy of a year:
Trayvon’s hands. In his
powerful opening statement outlining the “tangled web of lies” in the case against Zimmerman, Florida Assistant State Attorney John Guy told the jury, “He said that after he shot Trayvon Martin, he got on top of Trayvon Martin. On his back. And he took his arms and he spread them out. That didn’t happen.”
Zimmerman told Sanford police officers that tidbit about Trayvon’s arms twice. The first time was when he was
interviewed by detectives the night of the shooting. The second time was
during a reenactment of the events the day after the killing, which I detailed last year.
Guy’s confidence in saying “that didn’t happen” about Zimmerman moving Trayvon’s arms rests on two pieces of evidence. One we’ve all known about. Another we didn’t — or at least I didn’t.
“I don’t know if I pushed him off me [or] he fell off me, either way I got on top of him and I pushed his arms apart,” Zimmerman said as he demonstrated how he spread Trayvon’s arms away from his body. He told the officer that he didn’t remember how he got on top of his victim and continued with his version of events. “But I got on his back and moved his arms apart because when he was repeatedly hitting me in the face and the head,” Zimmerman said, “I thought he had something in his hands. So, I moved his hands apart.” Trayvon, he said, was face down. Again, he says the neighbor with the flashlight came out, he asked that person to help him restrain Trayvon. The police arrived perhaps less than a minute later and he stood up, holstered his weapon and put his hands up.
“The first two officers to Trayvon Martin’s body found him exactly like the defendant left him — face down, his hands clutching his chest,” Guy told the jury. This is the evidence we’ve known from almost the very beginning. Sanford Police Officer Ricardo Ayala wrote in
his report of the scene that he “noticed that there was, what appeared to be a black male…laying face down on the ground. The black male had his hands underneath his body.”
Yesterday, Guy revealed that a neighbor took a cellphone photo of Trayvon’s body before the police arrived that rainy Feb. 26, 2012, night. Trayvon’s arms were underneath his body, Guy told the court.
