“So what you had here was a bureaucracy that was intent on making itself look good, and they were playing games with numbers.
“So real crimes would be committed by students, not just Trayvon, and rather than being categorized as such they were just pushed over here into another column on the spreadsheet that said ‘disciplinary actions.’ . . .
“The upshot is that criminal activity wasn’t punished.
“And so the perpetrators were never held to account, nor did they ever have to come to grips with the severity of their actions.”
— Rush Limbaugh, “The Left Throws a Temper Tantrum Over the Zimmerman Verdict”
When I heard that Rush Limbaugh had read my American Spectator article — “How a Miami School Crime Cover-Up Policy Led to Trayvon Martin’s Death” — on his radio show today, obviously credit was due to many others. It was Pamela Geller who called my attention to it Sunday and, in doing so, she mentioned that Andrea Shea King and Pat Dollard had been calling attention to it before. But the yeoman’s work in exposing this cover-up was done months ago by The Last Refuge blog.
What did I do? Well, I immediately recognized it as newsworthy. And, rather than just blogging it here, I realized The American Spectator would be ideal because everybody knows Rush Limbaugh reads The American Spectator. Could I have written the same article here, or at ViralRead? Yes, but I put it where I hoped Rush would see it.
So, I recognized it as legitimate news, and decided to write it where it would have the best chance of attracting high-profile attention, and then I wrote it as clearly as I could: “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Part of the reason it was difficult to get that story across was that it wasn’t easy to explain. It’s a complex story and boiling it down to less than 700 words took me several hours, because I had to sort through a lot of stuff and double-check basic background facts. And here is the most important fact of the whole story:
TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD
The liberal media keep leaving that out, don’t they? And why do you think that is? Because if they told you he was from Miami Gardens, more than 240 miles from Sanford, then the media would have to explain why Trayvon was in Sanford the night of Feb. 26, 2012.
Sometimes, if you pull one thread of a story, the whole narrative unravels and this question — “Why was Trayvon in Sanford?” — is one that the liberal media don’t want to talk about.
This is how you know it’s probably the most important question of all.
Strange as it may seem (or not), the liberal media broke this story before George Zimmerman was ever arrested but never followed up. Frances Robles of the Miami Herald reported it on March 26, 2012: “Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of Trayvon Martin.”
And then . . . nothing. Even while Robles’ story triggered an internal investigation within the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department (MDSPD) that helped eventually to bring about the resignation of MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley, nobody else in the mainstream media thought Trayvon Martin’s school record relevant to the story.
Because they are a disgusting pack of cowardly liars, that’s why. Some of them were down for the left-wing agenda, and some just let themselves be mau-maued by the thug mob that was demanding George Zimmerman’s prosecution. In fact, the Miami Herald actually quoted leaders of the thug mob in its March 26, 2012, article:
“It’s completely irrelevant to what happened Feb. 26,” said attorney Benjamin Crump. “They never heard this, and don’t believe it’s true. If it were true, why wouldn’t they call the parents? Why wasn’t he arrested?”
Trayvon, who was a junior at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School, had never been arrested, police and the family have said.
“We think everybody is trying to demonize him,” Crump said. . . .
Trayvon’s parents viewed the new reports as an orchestrated campaign to demonize their son as a “junkie and thief,” a routine occurrence in such cases, the Rev. Al Sharpton said at an afternoon press conference. Zimmerman, Sharpton said, had no way of knowing about Trayvon’s school record — “because he didn’t interview him before he shot him.”
“The only thing that’s relevant is what Zimmerman knew,” Sharpton said. “Let’s not play this double standard of trying to damage who is dead and sanitize who is the cause of the death.”
Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said her son never had any problems with gangs or the police. In fact, she said, when she transferred him out of Carol City High School to be closer to home, the school wanted him to stay at Carol City because they liked him and he was a good student.
“They killed my son, and now they are trying to kill his reputation,” Fulton said.
Let’s leave aside for now this accusation that the only reason anyone would care about Trayvon Martin’s school disciplinary records was because they wanted to “demonize” the dead teenager and “kill his reputation.” Instead, let me call your attention to this: Sybrina Fulton says “she transferred him out of Carol City High School to be closer to home,” but Sybrina Fulton lived near Ben Franklin Park, and it doesn’t take a genius to check Google Maps: Carol City High School is at 3301 Miami Gardens Dr, Miami Gardens, FL — 7.4 miles from Ben Franklin Park — while Krop High School is at 1410 County Line Rd, Ives Estates, FL, 8.1 miles from Ben Franklin Park.
Whatever reason Trayvon transferred from Carol City High to Krop High, being “closer to home” doesn’t really seem to explain it. Maybe there’s some other explanation that I don’t understand, but we know that Trayvon was suspended three times from Krop High. It might be interesting to know more about Trayvon’s years at Carol City High, besides his mother’s claim that “the school wanted him to stay at Carol City because they liked him and he was a good student.”
I’m just sayin’ . . .
You never know the answer to a question you never ask, and after this one story by Frances Robles in the Miami Herald, it seems that the media stopped asking questions about Trayvon. But that one article by Frances Robles pulled the thread that unraveled an important story, and for a long time, the only people who kept digging on that story were the bloggers at The Last Refuge.
MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley was suppressing the truth about the crime problem within the Miami-Dade school system, and this was why Trayvon Martin never got arrested for his crimes. Instead, he got suspended from school, and I repeat:
TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD
The reason Trayvon was in Sanford, Florida, more than 240 miles north of his home in Miami-Dade County, was that he had been suspended from school, and was staying in a townhouse community known as The Retreat at Twin Lakes. Trayvon was staying there with Brandy Green, who was dating Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin, which brings us to another story the media doesn’t want to report.
Trayvon Martin comes from what used to be called “a broken home,” back in the days when most Americans got married and stayed married, so that kids had a Mom and a Dad and brothers and sisters — y’know, what we used to call a “family” once upon a time — instead of a kaleidoscopic arrangement of stepparents and half-siblings, Baby Daddies and Mama’s New Boyfriend and so forth. Call me old-fashioned, if you will, but I tend to think it might be relevant when we learn that a Troubled Youth comes from a Broken Home.
Well, let’s not be judgmental. And while we’re not being judgmental, say the mainstream media, let’s just not even mention these facts, because we don’t want to demonize anyone, see?
Start asking questions about Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin and Brandy Green — hater! — and you have no idea what you might find because, quite frankly, nobody in the national media seems to have asked any questions about these people. This is why, for example, you may not know that there was a stepmother, Alicia Stanley, who says she practically raised Trayvon Martin for 14 years before she got shoved aside for Tracy Martin’s new girlfriend, Brandy Green.
How many other wives or girlfriends has Trayvon’s father had? How many brothers and sisters and half-brothers and half-sisters and step-brothers and step-sisters did Trayvon have?
Damned if I know the answer to those questions, because it seems like nobody covering this story ever asked any questions like that. This kind of explains why I didn’t know until Sunday:
TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD
Because if the media had made a point of mentioning that, people might wonder why a kid from Miami-Dade County got shot dead in Sanford, more than 240 miles away. And the weird thing about it is, before this turned into the Murder Trial of the Century, there were people who actually reported some of these facts:
The night his son was killed, [Tracy] Martin, 45, was out to dinner with his fiancée, Brandy Green. Martin, who was divorced from Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, in 1999, is a truck driver from Miami who has a long-distance relationship with Green, a resident of the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision in Sanford where Zimmerman also lived.
Martin would visit Green on weekends, making the four-hour drive to the Orlando suburb of Sanford. In late February he was able to bring his son because Trayvon, a junior, was serving a 10-day suspension from Miami’s Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School. He’d been caught with a plastic baggie that contained traces of marijuana.
That article by Reuters reporter Daniel Trotta was published April 3, 2012, and it included important facts that subsequently disappeared from The Narrative of this story, which is what tends to happen to facts that don’t fit The Narrative. Once the liberal media decide to turn what had been strictly a local crime story into a politicized Morality Tale, some facts are more equal than others.
So “a truck driver from Miami” was in “a long-distance relationship” with “his fiancée, Brandy Green,” and there was this 17-year-old son whose mother had been divorced by the truck driver 13 years earlier. While the two lovebirds Tracy and Brandy were out to dinner, Trayvon walked to the store for Skittles and Arizona Tea, and got shot to death by Zimmerman, who was the captain of the neighborhood watch that had been formed in this community a year earlier in response to a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood.
And in October 2011, six months before he was killed, Trayvon had been caught at school in Miami-Dade County with jewelry coincidentally matching the description of items stolen in the burglary of a house about a half block from school. But this wasn’t treated as a crime, because MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley wanted to reduce the number of reported crimes in the school system, see? This evidence was therefore listed as “found items” and the Miami police investigating the burglary didn’t even know this evidence existed, because nobody charged Trayvon Martin with a crime. Instead, it was just a disciplinary infraction and he was suspended from school not for suspicion of theft, but for the act of vandalism (“mischief”) that had led the school police officer to search Travvon’s backpack.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along . . .
Sometime in the past year, the media decided to join this cover-up, evidently agreeing with Al Sharpton that Trayvon Martin’s background was irrelevant to The Narrative, in the same way it was irrelevant that Trayvon was three or four inches taller than George Zimmerman, who said he shot Trayvon in self-defense.
Never mind that, and never mind that George Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian. Never mind those who knew Zimmerman and said he wasn’t a racist — none of that fits The Narrative, and if you so much as mention any of these irrelevant facts . . . RAAAAACIST!
This explains why I never knew until Sunday that Trayvon Martin was not from Sanford, and why people who have been following this story for months had never heard of MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley. So they can be excused for not realizing that when Chief Hurley started an internal affairs investigation, trying to find out who leaked the facts to the Miami Herald, a series of dominoes began to topple, leading eventually to Chief Hurley’s resignation in February.
No, you never knew about that, even though The Last Refuge had been trying to call attention to it, because the media decided that this is a story about civil rights and racism: Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black, and a half-Peruvian neighborhood watch captain was a fitting symbol of White Racism and Social Injustice, and facts that did not support The Narrative were irrelevant.
Meanwhile — more facts nobody is supposed to mention — President Obama last August signed an executive order that would, in effect, “mandate racial discipline quotas,” so that the methods employed by Chief Hurley are now likely to become nationwide policy.
What could possibly go wrong?
Trayvon’s father divorced Trayvon’s mother when Trayvon was 4. The Miami-Dade schools didn’t want to report Trayvon’s crimes as crimes. So instead Trayvon was suspended from school at age 17, which was why he was in Sanford on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, while Trayvon’s father went out to dinner with Brandy Green.
What could possibly go wrong?
But never mind any of that. Some facts are more equal than others, and Our Moral Superiors in charge of The Narrative know what’s best.
Thanks for the shout-out, Rush. There are some people who need to demonized, and they’re called “liberals.”
