Ever since a jury of six women acquitted George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin, everyone has had the same question on their mind: “What does Trayvon’s parents think about it?”
Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton — Trayvon’s mother and father — appeared in a series of interviews on Thursday, speaking out for the first time since a judge ruled that George Zimmerman did not “murder” their 17-year-old son last February.
“Trayvon was a fun-loving child. He was our child. We miss him dearly,” Tracy Martin said Thursday on “CBS This Morning.” “To have your child’s life taken away from you like that, it hurts. And it’s a process that will take a long time to start the recovery from.”
Martin’s parents attended much of the trial but were not in the court room for the verdict, and Fulton says she was “in a bit of shock” upon hearing of the not guilty verdict.
“I thought surely that he would be found guilty of second degree murder, manslaughter at the least. But I just knew that they would see that this was a teenager just trying to get home. This was no burglar. This was somebody’s son that was trying to get home.”
“I was stunned. Absolutely. I couldn’t believe it,” Fulton added.
Ms. Fulton said that the role of racial profiling in the death of her son was “obvious.”
“We didn’t know details about the case. We knew some of them but some of the details came out in the courtroom as far as previous 911 calls and I think it was obvious that it was a black person, a black young person that they were looking for. But Trayvon simply was not that person. Trayvon was not a burglar. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He simply went to the store and was headed back home. For somebody to look at him and to perceive him to be a burglar, that is the problem,” she said.
In response to Juror B(itch)37, who spoke out in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this week and claimed that Trayvon was to blame for his own death, Fulton had this to say:
“I don’t think she knows Trayvon. Trayvon is not a confrontational person. Instead of placing the blame on the teenager, we need to place the blame on the responsible adult. There were two people involved. We had an adult who was chasing a kid and we had a kid who I feel was afraid.”
The Martin family also appeared on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” and talked about how difficult it was listening to negative comments about their son:
“That wasn’t the Trayvon that we raised. That wasn’t the Trayvon that we knew, and that we love,” he said during a Thursday night interview on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”
Still, Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said that she felt the need to sit through every day of Zimmerman’s trial because her son was “not here to say anything for himself.”
She said that she wanted to “show a face” for her son.
