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| George Zimmerman, right, stands up at the defense table with his attorneys, Mark O'Mara, left, and Don West, center, as he is identified by state witness Doris Singleton, a Sanford police officer, during her testimony in Zimmerman's trial in Seminole circuit court, in Sanford, Fla., Monday, July 1, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin |
SANFORD, Fla.
(AP) -- Jurors in the George Zimmerman trial on Monday listened to a
series of police interviews with detectives growing more pointed in
their questioning of the neighborhood watch volunteer's account of how
he came to fatally shoot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Prosecutors
played audio and video tapes of the interviews that Zimmerman had with
Sanford Police investigators Doris Singleton and Chris Serino in the
hours and days after he fatally shot the Miami teen.
In
an early interview, just hours after the Feb. 26, 2012, shooting,
Singleton recounted that Zimmerman noticed a cross she was wearing and
said: "In Catholic religion, it's always wrong to kill someone."
Singleton
said she responded, "If what you're telling me is true, I don't think
that what God meant was that you couldn't save your own life."
But
in an interview several days later, Singleton and Serino suggest
Zimmerman was running after Martin before the confrontation. They also
ask the neighborhood watch volunteer why he didn't explain to Martin why
he was following him. The officers insinuate that Martin may have been
"creeped out" by being followed.
"Do you think he was scared?" Singleton asked Zimmerman in one video interview.
Under
cross-examination, though, Serino said Zimmerman seemed straightforward
in his answers and didn't show any anger when talking about Martin.
Serino said the increasingly pointed questioning was a tactic known as a
"challenge interview" where detectives try to break someone's story to
make sure they're telling the truth.
Zimmerman
has said he fatally shot the teen in self-defense because the
Miami-area black teenager was banging his head into the concrete
sidewalk behind the townhomes in a gated community.
Zimmerman,
29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder. The
state argued during its opening statement that Zimmerman profiled and
followed Martin in his truck and called a police dispatch number before
he and the teen got into a fight. He has denied the confrontation had
anything to do with race, as Martin's family and their supporters have
claimed.
In his first interview at the police
station, Zimmerman said he saw Martin walking through his neighborhood
on a dark, rainy night while Zimmerman was driving to the grocery store.
He told Singleton that he didn't recognize Martin and that there had
been recent break-ins at his townhome complex.
"These
guys always get away," Zimmerman told Singleton, a statement similar to
one that prosecutors have used previously to try to show that Zimmerman
was increasingly frustrated with the burglaries and his encounter with
Martin was a breaking point.
Zimmerman told
the police officer that he lost track of Martin and got out of his truck
to look for a street name he could relay to police dispatcher. When the
dispatcher suggested Zimmerman didn't need to follow Martin, Zimmerman
started to head back to his vehicle. At that point, Zimmerman said
Martin jumped out of some bushes, punched him and he fell to the ground.
Zimmerman
said that Martin began hitting his head against the sidewalk as
Zimmerman yelled for help and that Martin told him, "You're going to die
tonight."
With Zimmerman's shirt and jacket
pushed up during the struggle and his holstered gun now visible, he
thought Martin was reaching for his firearm holstered around his waist.
Zimmerman told the officer that he shot Martin and the teen said, "You
got me."
In a written statement, Singleton
read in court, Zimmerman refers to Martin as "the suspect." Singleton
said it didn't appear that Zimmerman showed any anger when talking about
the teen. Prosecutors must show that Zimmerman acted with ill will or a
depraved mind in order to get a second-degree murder conviction.
Zimmerman also acted surprised when Singleton told him Martin was dead.
"He's dead?!" Singleton recalled Zimmerman saying, before he lowered his head toward the table in the interrogation room.
Earlier
Monday, prosecutors called FBI audio expert Hirotaka Nakasone to focus
on the issue of who was screaming for help on 911 calls during the
confrontation. Jurors were played the 911 calls several times last week.
The
recordings are crucial pieces of evidence because they could determine
who the aggressor was in the confrontation. Martin's family contends it
was the teen screaming, while Zimmerman's father has said it was his
son.
Even though he was a pre-trial witness
for the defense, prosecutors called Nakasone to set up later testimony
from either the teen's mother or father that they believe it was their
son yelling for help.
During his pre-trial
testimony, Nakasone testified that there wasn't enough clear sound to
determine whether Zimmerman or Martin was screaming on the best 911
sample, an assertion he repeated Monday.
The
FBI expert said that it's easier for a person with a familiarity of a
voice to identify it than someone who has never heard it previously.
That is especially true if the recording is of a subject screaming and
the person trying to identify the voice has heard the subject under
similarly stressful circumstances previously, Nakasone said.
