![]() The documentary makes you wonder just how many racially motivated deaths and other barbaric abuses have slipped by the sleeping (or willfully ignorant) public prior to the age of Twitter. Martin’s death was a modern-day lynching that exposed the power of technology and the democratizing nature of social media…up to a point. (While we get some sense of who he was ? an ambitious aviator-in-training, an experimental teen ? I was reminded of Laura Palmer Syndrome, or the tendency for crime stories to become more obsessed with the gruesome act than the person who was robbed of his or her future.) “The life I had is absolutely gone,” murmurs Sybrina, a mother denied the privilege of long-simmering grief. The camera particularly concentrates on Martin’s weathered parents, Sybrina and Tracy, whose emotional journey nearly takes precedence over Trayvon’s horror. A number of 911 calls reveal he had complained about the newcomers’ presence many times before, even calling the police on children playing in the street. Unexpectedly, as it turns out, the forces that led to Martin and Zimmerman’s clash were a consequence of the housing crisis: The formerly-flush gated community Zimmerman was trawling had recently opened up some units to Section 8-qualifying folks prior to Martin’s murder. (Florida failed to rule Martin’s murder a crime, thanks to its vigilante-friendly Stand Your Ground law.) The best sequences of the series zoom into the darkest reaches of this case: the Kafkaesque trial that banned the words “racial profiling” and tried to paint Martin as a thug and his star witness as a stereotype Zimmerman’s alarming post-trial fate and his embrace of the act that made him famous (which allegedly includes carrying around Skittles bags to sign for his fans, according to witnesses). Rest in Power unapologetically sticks with Trayvon’s mom, who is sure these bloodcurdling sounds were her son’s last.Īs with the now-classic docuseries O.J.: Made in America, the filmmakers here take their time to dissect every inch of a racially incendiary crime that eventually led to a seismic acquittal. Zimmerman’s witnesses assure the jury they were his, terrified for his life. The fascinating fourth and fifth episodes, which cover Zimmerman’s trial, raise the question of whose screams were, in fact, recorded. ![]() Even more horrific is the audio of terrified screams in the background of neighbors’ emergency calls.
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