ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 18: AFTERSHOCKS

There was no winner of the fight that dark, rainy night in Sanford. Only degrees of losing.

When the President and the galaxy of movie stars extended their condolences to the Martin family after the verdict, we heard from them no sympathy for the defendant and his family. George Zimmerman’s life has been horribly and irreparably changed. We learn that a divorce is in progress, something not uncommon after traumas like what he and his family were put through. His loved ones at various times have been in hiding, subjected to the same death threats as George Zimmerman. The guy gets a warning for speeding in Texas and a ticket for 15 MPH over in Florida, and each time it’s national news. When I heard of the latter on CNN radio, they thought it important enough to announce it ahead of the suicide of Ariel Castro, a genuine monster of our time, which occurred in the same news period.

Trayvon Martin’s family has suffered the loss of a seventeen-year-old, his life wasted twice over. He threw it away himself on that February night – dealing drugs, planning beatings, and negotiating to illegally buy guns according to his own digital records, his liver ravaged already at seventeen by his drug abuse according to the autopsy – when he suffered a sudden, acute, and fatal failure of his victim selection process.

His father had supposedly put an association with the Crips street gang behind him and was gainfully employed as a truck driver, and his mother was a government employee with a Masters degree. The dad loved him enough to take him in when the mom had enough tough love for him to kick him out, and the stepmother for most of his life (who was, for the most part, excluded from the media narrative) loved him too. Supervision and intervention did not come in time to save Trayvon Martin from his own violent tendencies.

The second waste of his life is being witnessed now. His mom is on the talk circuit calling for an end to Stand Your Ground laws, which any honest and competent legal analyst could tell her had nothing to do with her son’s death. It would do much more good, and perhaps save the lives of young men across the spectrum of the color lines, to hear this woman speak of the importance of seeing what’s in your son’s cell phone and on his Facebook page before homicide investigators have to do it.

Will there be a civil suit? Very probably. I would expect plaintiff’s counsel to wait to file it until there’s some money there. I predict substantial settlements of George Zimmerman’s lawsuits against the networks whose minions deliberately libeled him, whether or not he ever signs a lucrative book contract, but as soon as deep pockets are there I expect to see vultures circling. Perhaps a Florida Statute 776.032 hearing will ward that off, if it takes place in front of a judge with the courage to do the right thing. Time will tell.

The much bally-hooed Federal investigation under Eric Holder, to see if Zimmerman violated Martin’s civil rights? Inconveniently for both the media and the Administration, that has already been done by a horde of specially-assigned FBI agents, all of whom reported absolutely no indication of racism or malice on Zimmerman’s part. If you’ll forgive vernacular, “they got nothin’.” But of course, that was true of the case Angela Corey brought against him, and it didn’t stop that travesty from taking place.

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