Memorable witness from George Zimmerman's trial puts in extra effort, proves people wrong

In a Miami auditorium less than three miles from where slain teen Trayvon Martin is buried, his friend Rachel Jeantel on Friday was presented her high school diploma, fulfilling the promise she said she made him.

The moment was even more poignant with Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, looking on.

“Her coming is like having Trayvon there saying, ‘You did it. You proved people wrong,’” Jeantel told Yahoo News.

Jeantel was talking on the phone with Martin, 17, in the last moments of his life on Feb. 26, 2012. The unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, then 28, as the two fought on a dark neighborhood sidewalk in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. The case roused a national conversation about racial profiling, self-defense, gun control, vigilantism, civil rights and more.

Zimmerman, the community’s volunteer crime watchman, maintained he shot in self-defense and was found not guilty during a nationally televised trial last July.

Jeantel was a key prosecution witness, but her demeanor and speech on the stand often detracted from her testimony. Then 19, she used terms such as “creepy" and “cracker” to describe Zimmerman, whom she said was aggressively following Trayvon before their phone call was silenced during the scuffle.

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman (Family handout, AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Gary W. Green, Pool)

The child of immigrant parents, Jeantel speaks Haitian Creole, Spanish and English, but at times the court reporter and jurors struggled to decipher her dialect and street slang.

Contentious exchanges between the sometimes-testy teen and persnickety defense attorney Don West turned into cultural theater.

“Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?” the gray-haired West asked Jeantel.

She paused and gave him a stare.

“I don't understand you. I do understand English,” Jeantel replied.

Then when Jeantel was forced to admit she couldn’t read a letter written in cursive, the court of public opinion was cruel. Her spoken English and mannerisms were mocked on social media and elsewhere.

“They called her everything except the child of God,” said Rod Vereen, a Miami defense and civil rights attorney. “Of course she was frustrated. It was like stepping into an arena, and you don’t know the rules.”

Vereen and Jeantel connected shortly before the trial, when a member of her church asked if he would volunteer to represent her. Vereen said he tried to prepare Jeantel as best he could without knowing the government’s strategy, and in the end, he believes prosecutors missed an opportunity.

“I don’t think they understood the importance of how Rachel was going to fit in,” said Vereen, a former prosecutor. “She was the person that brings out the character of Trayvon Martin.”

Rod Vereen and Rachel Jeantel (Courtesy photo)

It was widely misreported that Jeantel and Martin were dating. She says he was just a close friend whom she first met in second grade — a friend who didn’t judge her plus-size frame or the way she spoke.

“He cared about you,” Jeantel said. “That’s a good human.” The friends had been talking about their future moments before Martin was killed, she said.

The irony tugged at Vereen’s heartstrings. The trial was over in mid-July, but he couldn’t let go. “Rachel was in need, and the whole world was watching,” said Vereen, 52. With the financial backing of the Tom Joyner Foundation, Vereen assembled a team of three tutors, a psychologist and other mentors to shepherd Jeantel. She was entering her senior year but still reading and doing math at an elementary-school level, Vereen said. For nine months, Jeantel received after-school tutoring three hours a day five to six days a week.

“When they say it takes a village to raise a child, this is what has happened here,” he said. “Getting her down that aisle has not been an easy task. Rachel is just like any other teenager. They want to buck the system sometimes, and you just can’t let them buck the system.”

One of her tutors, Alix Desulme, didn’t know Jeantel before working with her, but he remembers reading hateful comments about her during the trial.

“The performance was not polished ... her grammar,” Desulme said. “She has made great improvements from then to now.”

Her voice resounds with confidence.

“I did it,” Jeantel said. “The witness who didn’t know how to speak English knows how to speak English through the 12th grade now. I never quit.”

She also earned her driver’s license a few months ago and is looking for a job. The plan is for Jeantel to continue working with tutors on precollege curriculum before enrolling at a university. Becoming a clothing designer could be in her future.

Crossing the stage on Friday “is just the beginning of my life,” Jeantel said.

“When people see Rachel Jeantel now, I want them to say, ‘Wow, there was something good that came out of something so tragic,’” Vereen said.

Follow Jason Sickles on Twitter (@jasonsickles).

Longtime friend honors promise to Trayvon Martin

Rachel Jeantel has come a long way since she was ridiculed as a star witness during the Zimmerman trial.
'I did it. ... I never quit'

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said Saturday that it sentenced a South Korean Baptist missionary to hard labor for life for allegedly trying to set up underground churches and spying, the latest in a string of missionaries to run into trouble in the North.

North Korean state media said the missionary — called Kim Jong Uk in the North but previously called Kim Jung Wook in the South — was tried Friday and admitted to anti-North Korea religious acts and "malignantly hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the" North.

North Korea said in a dispatch dated Friday that Kim had defense counsel but the details of the trial could not be independently confirmed.

The unidentified attorney said that Kim "sincerely repented of his crimes and apologized for them" and requested that the court commute the death sentence demanded by prosecutors.

North Korea's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but in practice only sanctioned services are tolerated by the government. Defectors from the country have said that the distribution of Bibles and secret prayer services can mean banishment to a labor camp or execution.

North Korea said the man was arrested last October after crossing into the country from China. Kim appeared on North Korean TV in February and said he received assistance from South Korea's intelligence agency and apologized for committing "anti-state" crimes.

South Korea has denied any spy links to Kim. In the past, North Korean authorities have held staged news conferences where detainees are presented before the media to make statements that they later recant.

Last year, North Korea sentenced American tour operator Kenneth Bae to 15 years of hard labor for committing "hostile acts" against the country.

Tensions are running high between the rival Koreas. North Korea has conducted a string of recent missile and artillery tests and unleashed hostile rhetoric insulting the leaders of the U.S. and South Korea.

Based largely in Dandong since 2007, Kim helped North Korean defectors get to South Korea via Thailand, Laos and other countries, according to a friend in Seoul, Joo Dongsik, who has shipped shoes, clothing and other items to Kim.

Recently, Kim had turned more to providing food and shelter to North Koreans who had received permission to go to China to look for jobs, often unsuccessfully, leaving them with no income and nowhere to go, said Joo, also a Baptist.

Over the past three or four years, Kim had told Joo numerous times that he wanted to sneak into North Korea to see how serious the food shortage there was, although Joo tried to dissuade him.

In August 2012, a group of 12 North Korean women were caught by Chinese authorities while they were at Kim's shelter and sent back to North Korea. His desire to find out what had happened to them and learn about the North's food shortage led him to enter the country last October, Joo said.

Kim was born in 1964, Joo said, making him 49 or 50.

Earlier this year, an Australian, John Short, was arrested in Pyongyang for allegedly trying to distribute Christian materials. He was later released.

Pyongyang claims South Korean Baptist minister Kim Jung Wook hurt the "dignity of the supreme leadership."
Helped defectors

Grieving father takes center stage in gun debate

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Richard Martinez says he never set out to be a face of the gun-control movement and has no interest in taking deer rifles and shotguns from the hands of hunters. After all, he used to be one.

But Martinez plans to do whatever he can to keep guns out of the hands of people who use them for mass killings, the latest of which took the life of his 20-year-old son and five other students at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Martinez, a 60-year-old criminal defense lawyer, took center stage in the gun debate when he showed up uninvited before a sheriff's news conference a day after the May 23 killings, stepped before a bank of microphones and in a voice filled with rage and grief blamed the death of Christopher Michaels-Martinez on "craven, irresponsible politicians" who won't pass stricter gun-control laws.

"They talk about gun rights. What about Chris' right to live?" he wailed. "When will this insanity stop?"

On Thursday, an exhausted Martinez said he had hardly slept since that day, his hours filled with planning his only child's funeral while fielding calls from all over the world. News organizations from Canada, Great Britain and Australia want to interview him. Other people just want to say they're sorry.

"I tell them, 'Look, I don't need your sympathy. What I need is for you to DO something,'" Martinez said during a lengthy, late-night phone interview with The Associated Press.

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This undated image provided by Richard Martinez shows Christopher Michaels-Martinez, one of six peop …

That something, he said, would be urging the nation's leaders to engage in a serious discussion about restricting the availability of powerful, semi-automatic weapons such as the ones a lonely, troubled young man used to randomly shoot Michaels-Martinez and two other students near campus after stabbing three people to death at the apartment the killer shared with at least two of those victims.

Police believe 22-year-old Elliot Rodger shot and killed himself after crashing his car as officers moved in.

Nearly overnight, Martinez has become a recognizable figure in hotels, restaurants and on the streets near the Santa Barbara campus. It's a strange new situation for a man who until now has pretty much lived his life anonymously along the Central California coast where he was born and raised.

"I didn't choose this," Martinez said, adding that he believes responsible people have a right to keep guns for hunting, target shooting and their own safety.

"I grew up on a farm and I had guns," he said. "I hunted when I was a kid. I understand the appeal of hunting."

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Richard Martinez talks about his son Christopher Michael-Martineza during a memorial service for the …

After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Army and served two years as a military policeman in Germany. He said he had to draw his weapon once to put an end to a domestic dispute.

"I was prepared to use it if I had to," he said.

Martinez, however, said he just can't fathom the proliferation of high-powered, semi-automatic weapons in American society.

"How," he asked of Rodger's weapons cache, "does a troubled kid who clearly had problems wind up with 400 rounds of ammunition and three semi-automatic handguns?"

A single father, Martinez said he was incredibly close to his son. They called each other and texted several times a week. Two years ago, they traveled to the East Coast together when Michaels-Martinez was trying to decide which college to attend.

Martinez said his son expected to graduate from UCSB in 2015 after just three years and planned to follow his father's path as a lawyer.

Less than an hour before he died, the son was on the phone excitedly telling his father that his new girlfriend planned to introduce him to her parents the following week. Martinez later met the parents at a memorial service for victims of the rampage.

Martinez said his job as a defense lawyer had sometimes brought him into contact with people charged with gun crimes. It also led him to represent the parents of troubled young people who ran up against a public mental health system that Martinez said didn't provide the necessary care for their children.

That's why he said he won't blame the parents of his son's killer. It's also why he'll keep demanding reasonable gun control.

"I'm not going to write a book, I'm not going to sue anybody," he said, explaining that such actions would only cheapen the memory of his son.

"I just want to try to make it possible so that other people don't have to go through this."

Calif. victim's dad becomes new face of gun debate

Richard Martinez says he has fielded calls from all over the world since the day his son was killed.
Not asking for sympathy

A student signs on a remembrance wall in the Isla Vista neighborhood of Santa Barbara, California May 27, 2014. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

(Reuters) - Authorities did not know that Elliot Rodger, whose shooting rampage left six dead and more than a dozen injured in a California college town, owned firearms despite three interactions with the police within the year, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Rodger had legally purchased three firearms leading up to the shooting spree, a fact that authorities could have discovered by searching law enforcement databases, the Times reported on Friday.

"The issue of weapons did not come up," sheriff's spokeswoman Kelly Hoover told the Times. "We had no information that he had weapons or reason to believe he had weapons."

The news comes a day after the sheriff's office revealed new details about a welfare check the police conducted on the night of April 30 on Roger outside his apartment, following a concerned call from a county mental health worker.

That night, just weeks before the killings in Isla Vista, California, a half dozen officers responded to the call and asked Rodger about disturbing videos he had posted online. Police described Rodger as shy, timid and polite, and following the 10 minute meeting, did not consider him a threat to himself or others.

"They did not view the videos or conduct a weapons check on Rodger," a statement from the sheriff's office said.

Rodger later wrote in a 137-page manifesto that he sent to his parents, therapist and several others just minutes before launching his shooting spree that he feared the police would foil his plot during that encounter.

"I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it," Rodger wrote in the document published in part by The Los Angeles Times.

"If that was the case, the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, along with my writings about what I plan to do with them."

The sheriff's office has maintained that the responding officers acted professionally and within state law and the department policies.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner; Editing by Matt Driskill)

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