Trayvon Martin is dead, and now the media is determined to kill off his character too. The 17-year-old Miami Gardens high school student was gunned down by a racist neighborhood watch vigilante on Feb. 26 in the town of Sanford, Florida.
His killer, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, claims self defense as the reason he pulled the trigger, ending Trayvon's young life that cold, rainy night.
it doesn't matter that Trayvon doesn't have a criminal record -- or that Zimmerman does.
What matters to the national media are a boy's fascination with gold teeth, and the fact that he was suspended from school for 10 days for having marijuana residue in his book bag.
In its own inimitable way, the media has rushed to uncover the evidence to confirm Zimmerman's stereotyped portrayal of the boy as a thug who deserved to be shot to death for swinging on him.
"Oh how little we have learned," writes a conservative blogger who compares Trayvon's story with the 2006 Duke LaCrosse case.
"The media is getting the Trayvon Martin story wrong," Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote on BusinessInsider.com.
Here's what we have learned so far: Zimmerman called the police 46 times in less than a year to report teenagers walking through his gated community. In all instances, it turned out that the teenagers did nothing to arouse Zimmerman's suspicion other than to be black.
Trayvon, who was visiting his father whose fiancee lived in Zimmerman's community, had the misfortune of also being a black teenager walking.
We know from the 911 tapes that Zimmerman pursued the teen -- against the 911 dispatcher's advice. And when Trayvon was confronted by Zimmerman, in the dark, behind the residences, Trayvon instantly lost his rights as an American citizen who was where he was supposed to be.
Zimmerman had a 9mm handgun, Trayvon had only his fists to protect himself. Both men had the shield of the Stand Your Ground law. But apparently, the law only applies to Zimmerman.
The shockingly biased Orlando Sentinel newspaper is asking us to believe that the 140 pound Trayvon "decked" the 200 pound gun-wielding Zimmerman "with one punch" and "climbed on top of [Zimmerman] and repeatedly slammed his head into the sidewalk -- all while Zimmerman had a gun.
The Sentinel also reports that Zimmerman was left "bloody and battered" by Trayvon. Yet the first responding officer on the scene did not note any injuries on Zimmerman in his police report. Additionally, the witnesses who saw Zimmerman that night did not see any blood or injuries on him either.
You would think that if Zimmerman was a bloody mess, his injuries would have been among the first things the officer made note of in his report?
But none of that matters to a race-baiting media that is more concerned with selling newspapers and boosting TV ratings than seeking justice for a kid who was walking home with a bag of Skittles while minding his own business.