Judge weighs letting jurors hear Zimmerman’s five calls to police
SANFORD, Fla. — Several times in six months, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman called police to report suspicious characters in the gated townhouse community where he lived. Each time, when asked, he reported that the suspects were black males.
On Tuesday, the judge at Zimmerman’s murder trial in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin listened to those five calls and weighed whether to let the jury hear them, too.
Prosecutors want to use them to bolster their argument that Zimmerman was frustrated with repeated burglaries and had reached a breaking point the night he shot the unarmed teenager.
The recordings show Zimmerman’s “ill will,” prosecutor Richard Mantei told Judge Debra Nelson. “It shows the context in which the defendant sought out his encounter with Trayvon Martin.”
Defense attorney Mark O’Mara argued that the calls were irrelevant and that nothing matters but the seven or eight minutes before Zimmerman fired the deadly shot into Martin’s chest.
The prosecution is “going to ask the jury to make a leap from a good, responsible, citizen behavior to seething behavior,” O’Mara said.
The judge did not rule on whether to admit the recordings.
Prosecutors played the calls with the jurors out of the courtroom at the start of a day in which a former Zimmerman neighbor testified about what she saw of the confrontation.
Selene Bahadoor described the sound of movement from left to right outside her townhouse and said she heard some- one saying, “No” or “Uh.” She looked out a window and saw arms flailing. She left to turn off a stove and then heard a gunshot. The next time she looked out, she saw a body on the ground, she testified.
Zimmerman has said he lost track of Martin and was returning to his car when he was attacked. But Bahadoor’s testimony appeared to suggest Zimmerman was moving away from his vehicle.
Prosecutors also presented photos of Martin’s body, a police officer described trying to revive Martin as bubbling sounds came from his chest, and a police manager described how she helped Zimmerman set up the neighborhood watch.
In the calls, Zimmerman identified himself as a neighborhood watch volunteer and recounted that his neighborhood had a rash of break-ins.
In one call, Zimmerman asked that officers respond quickly because the suspects “typically get away quickly.”
In another, he described suspicious black men hanging around a garage and mentioned his neighborhood had a recent garage break-in.
Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder for gunning down Martin as the teenager walked from a convenience store. Zimmerman followed him in his truck and called a police dispatch number before he and the teen got into a fight.
Zimmerman has claimed self-defense, saying he opened fire after the teenager jumped him and began slamming his head against the concrete sidewalk.
Zimmerman, whose father is white and whose mother is Hispanic, has denied the confrontation with the black teenager had anything to do with race, as Martin’s family and its supporters have charged.