Jurors today heard George Zimmerman’s account in his own words of his fatal confrontation with Trayvon Martin as prosecutors played a dramatic audio tape of Zimmerman being questioned by police shortly after the shooting.
Zimmerman is heard telling a police officer how he saw Martin walking through his Sanford, Fla. neighborhood on a dark, rainy Feb. 2012 night. As a neighborhood watchman he tried to follow him in his car because there had been a series of break-ins in the gated community.
Zimmerman said he lost sight of Martin, got out of his car to call police and was walking back to his vehicle when the 17-year-old attacked him.
“He jumped out of the bushes and he said ‘What the f..k is your problem, homie?’” Zimmerman said on the tape.
“And I got my cell phone out to call 911 this time, and I said ‘I don’t have a problem.’ And he goes, ‘No, now you have a problem,’ and he punched me in the nose.”
In court, jurors listened closely to the tape, while Zimmerman showed no emotion and Martin’s father closed his eyes from time to time.
Zimmerman told police he fell down to the ground after being punched repeatedly. “I tried to defend myself. He just started punching me in the face, and I started screaming for help. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.”
“He puts his hand on my nose and mouth, and he says ‘You are going to die tonight.’
He said “the suspect” was “mounted on top of me” and began to bang his head onto the ground.
“As he banged my head again, I just pulled out my firearm and shot him,” Zimmerman said.
He said Martin fell backward. “And he’s like ‘Alright, you got me, you got me.’”
Under questioning, Officer Doris Singleton, who conducted the audio interview, said Zimmerman appeared shocked when he learned Martin’s wound was fatal.
“He’s dead!?” she quoted him as saying.
“I thought you knew that,” she said she replied.
Zimmerman “kinda slung his head and shook it,” she said.
Jurors were also shown a second interview, this one videotaped by police a day after the slaying. In this version, Zimmerman re-enacted the confrontation and added that he pulled out his gun “after he hit my head against the concrete several times.”
The prosecution maintains that Martin, not Zimmerman, was the person that neighbors heard shouting for help that night.