“The FBI found no racial bias behind George Zimmerman’s shooting of Miami Gardens teen Trayvon Martin, according to dozens of documents related to the case released Thursday.” Wait, what? A white Hispanic shoots and kills an unarmed black male and race wasn’t the underlying cause? Imagine the frenzy in the NBC News editing booth as they wrestle with how to slice and dice that cognitively dissonant piece of info. But FBI investigators, after talking to just about everyone Zimmerman has known since birth, haven’t been able to come up with so much as an errant N-word, let alone a burning cross . . .
Instead, it seems the self-appointed neighborhood watchman may have just been a tad too gung-ho for his own good. As reported by nbcmiami.com,
“(Sanford investigating Police Officer Chris) SERINO believed that ZIMMERMAN’s actions were not based on MARTIN’s skin color rather based on his attire, the total circumstances of the encounter and the previous burglary suspects in the community,” the FBI wrote in the report. “Serino described ZIMMERMAN as overzealous and as having a ‘little hero complex’, but not as a racist.”
That seems to jibe with what one of Zimmerman’s friends, a Seminole County deputy, told the feds, too.
“[Redacted] described Zimmerman as a person of strong character but not very street wise. Redacted has never known Zimmerman to be in a fist fight,” the report said. “[Redacted] has never known Zimmerman to associate with anyone known to have any bias/prejudice against any individual or group based on race, religion, etc…”
The friend also said “Zimmerman never actively patrolled the neighborhood, but would just be very observant to what was going on while walking his dog around the neighborhood,” according to the report.
Even an ex against whom he has an injunction told them he apparently never attended any actual Klan meetings.
Zimmerman’s former fiancee, who was interviewed by the FBI, described their volatile relationship which began in 2001, according to the report. The woman, whose name was redacted, told the FBI that the couple began to argue a lot after their engagement and described a couple times where he became physically aggressive.
The engagement ended, and both Zimmerman and the woman later filed injunctions against each other, the report said. Despite her allegations, the woman told the FBI that Zimmerman had never exhibited any biases or prejudices against anyone and never used racial epithets of any kind. She added that he “was not the type of person to place himself in a physical confrontation” and he was the last person she would expect to be involved in a shooting.
But while the FBI hasn’t found racial bias as part of the Justice Department’s search for potential civil right violations, that investigation is still open. The inconvenience of the FBI’s findings certainly won’t help the racially-motivated execution narrative being pushed by Martin’s parents or opportunistic fly-in community organizers like Al Sharpton. Not that a few, you know, facts are likely to slow them down much.