The defense team for George Zimmerman, the shooter in Trayvon Martin murder case, released a video on its website Wednesday, which shows Zimmerman giving the police a walkthrough of the incident at the scene of the alleged crime. Recorded just a day after Martin was shot and killed in February, Zimmerman claims that Martin saw his gun and reached for it as the two fought on the ground outside the apartment complex. It was then that Zimmerman pulled the gun and shot Martin, whose last words were “You got me.”
The release of the video is part of the defense’s effort to sway public opinion in Zimmerman’s favor—particularly after the release of phone calls between Zimmerman and his wife Shellie in which he jokes about wearing a hoodie after he gets out on bail and them planning on having a “great life” with all the money Zimmerman is collecting from people sending him cash after he killed an unarmed 17-year-old boy.
During the video, Zimmerman appears with a pair of bandages on the back of his head, and went on to describe the scuffle between himself and Martin that night. He claimed that Martin kept “slamming and slamming” his head against the concrete. “It felt like my head was going to explode,” he said. On that night, February 26th, Zimmerman had been told by a 911 dispatcher not to follow Martin in the rain. He did not oblige. Early on in the video the self-appointed neighborhood watchman complains to the officers that every time he calls in a suspicious person, “these guys always get away.”
The video is the first recording of any kind released to the public in which Zimmerman directly recounts what happened on that night. After re-enacting the fight between himself and Martin, Zimmerman sat for a longer interview with a police official, who used voice-analyzing software to determine the veracity of Zimmerman’s statements. Before the longer interview, Zimmerman tried to make small talk with a female officer.
“Have you ever had to shoot anybody?” Zimmerman asked.
“No,” she said. After some discussion about their families, Zimmerman asked the officer about the difficulty of her job, and how well she slept.
“I sleep fine,” she said. “Now if I were you, I wouldn’t.”
