Trayvon Martin’s parents will never forget the night they learned their 17-year-old son had been shot dead as he walked home — carrying just a bag of Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea.
“I had gone out for dinner,” dad Tracy Martin told People magazine. “And when I got home, Trayvon wasn’t there. I tried calling his cellphone several times, and it went straight to voice mail.
“I figured that they had gone to the movies,” he said of Trayvon and his nephew. “So I laid down, thinking they would show up later.”
But Trayvon never did. The next morning, Tracy “started getting worried” when the nephew said he hadn’t seen Trayvon.
He called the Sheriff’s Department to file a missing-person report, and police asked Tracy to identify a photo of his son.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; it just didn’t seem real,” mother Sybrina Fulton told the magazine. “And finally I said, ‘I need you to go and actually identify his body.’ I needed to know if that was my baby, dead.
“It’s that call that’s every parent’s nightmare. I just started to cry and cry. People tell me I’m strong; I’m not strong. I’m a mother. I still have trouble believing that he’s gone. I look at every door and think, he’s just going to walk through it any minute. I just want to see him again, but I can’t. He’s in heaven, looking down at me.”