By Shanieka Perrier |Staff Writer|
What is so suspicious about iced tea and a bag of skittles? A 17-year-old boy holding only those items and wearing a “hoodie” was shot and killed ion Feb. 26 in Sanford, Florida. Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman after he saw the boy walking around in his neighborhood and found him “suspicious.”
I believe that Zimmerman brought this situation upon himself. According to the LA Times, he was instructed to go home and let the police handle the situation.
In my opinion he acted purely on suspicion and ignored the police, as though he was above the law. I have a problem with Zimmerman never initially being arrested. There was a dead body involved, so regardless of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, making it legal for citizens to shoot to kill if they feel threatened, he shouldn’t have shot Martin.
It wasn’t until media uproar and civil rights activist start to protest that the case developed and an arrest was made.
“They took too long to arrest him,” said student Riayn Guinan.
I think that charging Zimmerman with second degree murder is just. He claims that he shot Martin in self-defense, which I believe is a lie because he followed his target with a gun in his pocket.
There was no reason to shoot and kill Martin. He could have easily scared him off by simply saying that he was going to call the cops.
In Zimmerman’s defense, he was the self-appointed neighborhood watchman. Wasn’t he just doing his job looking out for his community?
“Zimmerman assumed he was a criminal and shot him…cops acted like nothing went wrong,” said student Marc Lussier.
“Without enough evidence it’s hard to decide if it’s racial profiling. Because of the yellow journalism, he is not going to get a fair trial…the trial has to move out of the county,” said student Lynn Wine.
People think that racial profiling is involved in this case because Martin was black and Zimmerman was white.
I believe that I have personally experienced racial profiling. A male Caucasian officer pulled me over and asked me whose car I was driving, where I was coming from and where I was headed to.
He ran my driver’s license, saw that I did not have a record and continued looking around the car with his flash light until finally instructing me to go home. Did he pull me over because I was a black girl driving a Mercedes Benz?
Trayvon Martin was unarmed the night he was shot to death. He was simply wearing a hoodie while carrying a bag of Skittles and an iced tea.
What was so threatening about that? Was it his skin color? Was it his sex? Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good enough reason to kill him.