The neighborhood watch volunteer who sparked a national uproar by shooting an unarmed teenager to death has wept with remorse over the killing and now fears for his own life, a friend of the gunman said on Sunday.
Supporters of the boy and his family staged more protest rallies and prayer vigils across the country, many dressed in “hoodies,” or hooded sweatshirts, like the one Trayvon Martin, 17, was wearing when he was gunned down last month.
His admitted assailant, George Zimmerman, 28, remained in seclusion after receiving death threats and learning of a US$10,000 bounty offered by a group called the New Black Panther Party, said lawyer Craig Sonner, who added that he would represent Zimmerman if charges were filed.
Photo: EPA
Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, has said he acted in self-defense when he shot Martin, who was black, in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, near Orlando, despite an apparent lack of evidence the teenager posed any threat.
The boy’s Feb. 26 death, which drew little attention at first, has grown into a rallying cry for -African-Americans pointing to his shooting and the decision by authorities not to prosecute Zimmerman as a blatant case of racial injustice.
The shooting also has provoked a heated debate over “Stand Your Ground” laws enacted in Florida and other states and cited by Sanford police as the reason Zimmerman has not been arrested. Florida’s law allows people to use deadly force in self-defense.
Late on Sunday afternoon in Sanford, about 100 people held a prayer vigil at the gate to the subdivision where the shooting occurred, quietly singing the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome.
Carolyn Skene, 52, a Canadian artist who has been renting a home in the neighborhood where Martin was shot and who attended the vigil, said someone like Zimmerman would have been arrested in her country.
“We just can’t believe your laws,” she said.
Civil rights leader and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson was expected to attend a larger rally planned for yesterday in Sanford, before the city commission was scheduled to meet to discuss the case.
Earlier on Sunday at Middle Collegiate Church in New York, the minister and members of the congregation wore hoodies, pulling their hoods over their heads during prayers at a crowded service that made repeated reference to the shooting as a symptom of the discrimination felt by young black Americans.
Jacqui Lewis, the church’s senior minister, gave a sermon in which she said people were “fed up with centuries of race-related hatred and fear in this country.”
She asked congregants to mail packets of Skittles candy to the Sanford Police Department and post pictures of themselves on the Internet wearing their hoodies and holding signs saying: “I am not dangerous. Racism is.”
Martin was carrying a bag of Skittles and an iced tea when he was confronted by Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain who later told police he believed the youth looked suspicious.
US Senator Charles Schumer called on Sunday for a US Department of Justice investigation into “Stand Your Ground” laws, adopted first by Florida in 2005 and by at least 16 other states since, to determine if they had led to a rise in gun violence or had hindered prosecutions.
“They’re all new. They’ve been passed very, very quickly and I think the states who passed them, if they find out the real facts, they may decide to repeal them,” Schumer said on CBS’ Face the Nation.
Meanwhile, the White House has hit back at accusations that US President Barack Obama was playing politics with Martin’s death.
Obama said on Friday: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” and his parents were “right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we’re going to get to the bottom of what happened.”
The remarks were condemned as “disgraceful” by former US House speaker Newt Gingrich, a would-be Republican presidential candidate.
“Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified, no matter what the ethnic background,” Gingrich said.
“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who’d been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense,” he said. “Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong.”
On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, a White House senior adviser, David Plouffe, described Gingrich’s comments as “irresponsible” and “reckless.”
“Speaker Gingrich is clearly in the last throes of his political career,” he said.
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