On Apr 2, 2:38 pm, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Race, Tragedy and Outrage Collide After a Shot in Florida
>
> Mario Tama/Getty Images
> Trayvon Martin's body was found in this part of the Retreat at Twin
> Lakes in Sanford, Fla., where his father's girlfriend lives.
>
> By DAN BARRY, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and LIZETTE ALVAREZ
>
> SANFORD, Fla. — Once again, a river of
> protest raged through Sanford this weekend to demand justice in the
> name of an unarmed black teenager shot dead. It gathered strength in
> front of the historic Crooms Academy, the first high school for black
> students in Seminole County; surged through the streets; and formed a
> flood of grief and outrage just outside the Sanford Police Department.
>
> Once again, thousands chanted the name of Trayvon Martin, 17, the
> youth killed with one bullet while returning to a home in a gated
> community where he was a guest. Once again, they cried for the arrest
> of George Zimmerman, 28, the neighborhood watch coordinator who has
> claimed self-defense under a Florida law with the assertive name Stand
> Your Ground.
>
> With five weeks' passage, the fateful encounter between a black youth
> who wanted to go to college and a Hispanic man who wanted to be a
> judge has polarized the nation.
>
> And, now this modest central Florida community finds its name being
> mentioned with Selma and Birmingham on a civil rights list held sacred
> in black American culture, while across the country, the parsing of
> the case has become cacophonic and political, punctuated by pleas for
> tolerance, words of hatred, and spins from the left and right.
>
> The racial divide that once partly defined Sanford, with U.S. 17-92
> serving as the inviolable line separating black and white, has faded
> over the decades, leaving a casually integrated downtown. Yet the
> sense remains among residents of both races that the Police Department
> has not come as far as the city as a whole.
>
> Velma Williams, its sole black city commissioner, calls Sanford "a
> small, friendly, good city." But she said that a string of unsolved
> cases had raised questions over whether the police had a "cavalier
> attitude" whenever "a black male is murdered." Nonsense, countered its
> acting police chief, Darren Scott, who is also black. "Everyone here
> in the city gets fair and equal treatment."
>
> That assertion of justice for all — in Sanford and throughout the
> United States — has been challenged, though, by a progression of
> events that began so innocently, so ordinarily: A teenage boy in a
> gray hooded sweatshirt leaves a 7-Eleven's neon brightness with his
> purchase of some candy and an iced tea, and heads back into the wet
> Sunday evening of Feb. 26, back to a residential complex with a
> forbidding gate and a comforting name.
>
> Trayvon Martin was more than welcome there; he was expected.
>
> With his hood up as the rain came down, Trayvon made his way to one
> gated community among many, the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Past a dozen
> storefronts, four of them vacant. Past signs and billboards shouting
> "Now Leasing!" and "Rent Specials!" His was a tour of a post-bust
> stretch of Sanford.
>
> For more than two years now, Trayvon's father, Tracy Martin, a truck
> driver from Miami, had been dating Brandy Green, a juvenile detention
> officer in Orlando. She lived at the Retreat with her 14-year-old son,
> Chad, and it was not uncommon for the Martins to drive up from Miami
> for overnight visits.
>
> Over six feet tall and lanky, Trayvon was interested in girls,
> computer games, sports and the beat of the rap and hip-hop emanating
> from the ear buds of his smartphone. Sleeping in Miami Dolphins
> bedsheets, he was all teenage boy, and more.
>
> He called himself "Slimm" on Twitter, and used a handle,
> @no_limit_nigga, that echoed a song by the rappers Kane & Abel. On
> Facebook, he expressed interest in airplanes and "South Park"; Bob
> Marley and LeBron James. On MySpace, he posted snapshots of his young
> life: admiring an airplane; fishing with his father; displaying a cake
> decorated with the words "Happy Birthday Tray."
>
> Easygoing, with a default mood set at "chillin'," as one schoolmate,
> Suzannah Charles, put it. The kind of kid who made tiny cakes in an
> Easy-Bake Oven with his 7-year-old cousin; who spoon-fed a close
> uncle, Ronald Fulton, who is quadriplegic, when his nurse was
> unavailable; who was an integral part of a close-knit family — raised
> properly, family members say, by Mr. Martin and his ex-wife, Sybrina
> Fulton, who works for Miami-Dade County's housing agency.
>
> More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-prompts-...
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
--
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