At the MSNBC website there is an important article, George Zimmerman: Prelude to the shooting of Trayvon Martin that likely gives us a preview of how the Zimmerman Defense will portray who Zimmerman is. Most of the information in the article was new to me. The article covers George Zimmerman before he killed Trayvon Martin. If you have any interest in the case of George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin, you should read this article in full. This article is not written by MSNBC but by Reuters. I don't know what important information the article leaves out or if any of what is presented will later be shown to be incorrect. I don't know to what extent Zimmerman's defense team helped or guided the reporter.
In particular, the article presents George Zimmerman's background that the defense will likely use to argue that Zimmerman is not a racist. This is a critical issue, in that the more the jury sees Zimmerman as a racist, the less likely they will accept his version of events and the more likely they will convict Zimmerman.
In this diary, I summarize some article highlights, not my views, not my analysis nor what other articles have presented. I expect to see what this article presents to become distributed and expanded upon by other media sources in the weeks ahead as well as at trial, so it is helpful for this community to get a preview and avoid getting blindsided.
At the same time many here will hate this article at MSNBC.
Comment on the article, not my Diary below including reference to parts of the article I did not cover.
Below are all quotes from the article. I have not included all sections I consider important out of respect for copyrights. Again, I suggest reading the entire article at MSNBC George Zimmerman: Prelude to the shooting of Trayvon Martin
Next quote refers to George Zimmerman.
The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather - the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.
Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.
"Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm black, OK?" the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said. "That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin."
Gladys referenced below is George Zimmerman's mother.
Gladys came to lead a small but growing Catholic Hispanic enclave within the All Saints Catholic Church parish in the late 1970s, where she was involved in the church's outreach programs. Gladys would bring young George along with her on "home visits" to poor families, said a family friend, Teresa Post.
"It was part of their upbringing to know that there are people in need, people more in need than themselves," said Post, a Peruvian immigrant who lived with the Zimmermans for a time.
Zimmerman's maternal grandmother, Cristina, who had lived with the Zimmermans since 1978, worked as a babysitter for years during Zimmerman's childhood. For several years she cared for two African-American girls who ate their meals at the Zimmerman house and went back and forth to school each day with the Zimmerman children.
The quote below refers to George Zimmerman
In 2004, Zimmerman partnered with an African-American friend and opened up an Allstate insurance satellite office, Donnelly said.
Setting the stage
At least eight burglaries were reported within Twin Lakes in the 14 months prior to the Trayvon Martin shooting, according to the Sanford Police Department. Yet in a series of interviews, Twin Lakes residents said dozens of reports of attempted break-ins and would-be burglars casing homes had created an atmosphere of growing fear in the neighborhood.
In several of the incidents, witnesses identified the suspects to police as young black men. Twin Lakes is about 50 percent white, with an African-American and Hispanic population of about 20 percent each, roughly similar to the surrounding city of Sanford, according to U.S. Census data.
Police found Demeacis's laptop in the backpack of 18-year-old Emmanuel Burgess, police reports show, and charged him with dealing in stolen property. Burgess was the same man Zimmerman had spotted on Feb. 2.
The article goes into more details about Zimmerman's Neighborhood watch activities prior to his killing Trayvon.