I have a real-life analogy to this event. Forgive the length of this post, but I'd like to lay it out to explain the difference between the Trayvon killing and what happened to my own son.
One night, early in the evening but after the sun went down, my son (16 years old) was walking through our neighborhood. We'd lived in the neighborhood for 13 years at this point in time. My son is white. He was wearing jeans, t-shirt and high-top sneakers. He was about 5'11" and weighed about 105-110 lbs. His hair was about 18" long and curly (he was, and is today, a 'metal head'.)
He walked out the door of our home and starting walking up the street, on the sidewalk that runs in front of our house and through the neighborhood. At about the same time, a car pulled onto our street from a street that divides our neighborhood from the neighborhood to our north. As the car was moving up the street it started to slow down when it got to where my son was walking. The car continued to move slowly, at the pace my son was walking until they both reached a cross street. My son turned right and the car turned right and continued keeping pace with my son's walking speed. It was a short street he'd turned onto and at the next corner my son turned right again and the car turned left, pulled into a driveway and the driver got out. It was his house.
The man is about 6'1", 230 lbs. He works as a city firefighter, trains in MMA style fighting (as a hobby), and is extremely fit. He's a huge mountain of muscle. He's dressed in cargo shorts, sandals and a sleeveless t-shirt.
As my son was walking he heard footsteps behind him and turned and saw that the man was following him. This alarmed him because he knew who he was. My son kept walking down this long street and kept hearing footsteps behind him. My son became increasingly alarmed from this. He turned right. The man turned right and continued to follow behind him. My son crossed the street on a diagonal because at this point he was really getting scared, and the man started to cross the street on the diagonal and continued following my son on the other side of the street. My son spun around and shouted, "Why are you following me?!" and stood facing him from about 20 feet away. The man stopped and looked at him. Then he started bending and stretching and said aloud to apparently no one in particular "looks like a good night for a run" and turned around and started to jog in the opposite direction back to his house.
There was zero reason for this man to follow my son. The man personally knew him and knew where he lived. There had been no criminal activity in the neighborhood where witnesses described the perpetrators to be skinny, white teenage males with long curly hair. But he knew my son because he knew me, because I had an order of protection against him upheld by a local justice court. The only purpose of his actions was to intimidate my teenage son, and indirectly intimidate me. He did it out of hatred, spite and malice. He intended to frighten my son and indirectly, me.
Two days later, when I was telling the police officer familiar with our saga, the events that happened a few nights prior, he informed me that this lunatic didn't do anything legally wrong. It was his neighborhood and he didn't touch my son. He didn't even speak to my son. Despite the OOP, this could happen every day for the duration of the OOP and there was nothing I could do about it.
My son has a short fuse, and he is not afraid to defend himself when threatened or attacked. I thank God that my son did not physically confront this psycho because this man would have hurt him. This SOB knows the law and knows that he could beat my son to his heart's content if my son threw the first punch, but my son didn't (Thank God) and therefore the situation was diffused because my son didn't react with violence.
HAD my son done so, and HAD this man killed my son (with or without a gun) he could be charged with Murder 2 because all those adjectives many in this forum use to describe Zimmerman's actions (inaccurately) were actually the motives of this crazy SOB. He WAS stalking my son, he WAS trying to intimidate my son, he WAS looking for an altercation with my son. He did it with hatred, malice and spite. But unlike Trayvon, my son was known to the man who was following him. Unlike Trayvon, my son didn't share the physical characteristics of criminals at large who'd committed crimes in the neighborhood. And unlike Trayvon, my son did not confront with violence.
I see NO evidence of murder in the 2nd degree of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, especially when I contrast his actions with the actions of someone in real life who pursued a teenager through his neighborhood with depravity, hatred and spite.
IMO