If you don’t support the teachers striking in Chicago, go pick up a history book, and flip to the pages about the working conditions at the US at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Here are the highlights: child labor, company scrip, insane working hours, unconscionably low wages, and unsafe working conditions. What’s that got to do with teachers striking today?  Everything.

This country desperately needs a new labor movement. In the battle of employers versus employees, employees have been getting trounced for more than 20 years. Between crippling debt, high unemployment, wide-spread underemployment, outsourcing, education costs and low wages, the middle class is in danger of extinction. The only cure is for workers to unite and forge a new deal with employers- a deal where wealth generated by the working class isn’t sent oversees, or stuffed into the pockets of the already insanely rich.

Do you ever wonder why most jobs give you weekends off; or why the 40-hour work week was the norm (until recently); or why your office building has safety precautions like fire escapes, railings where they’re needed, and sprinklers overhead? Do you ever wonder why there is a legal limit to how low an hourly wage can be? Do you ever wonder why children aren’t in the workforce in the US?

Did you assume that our modern and (relatively) humane working conditions were just something that spontaneously evolved as the US grew up?

Well, it didn’t happen that way.  Not at all.

All these things that we take for granted had to be fought for- and it was no short skirmish.  It took decades and the efforts of several generations of workers to turn an exploitative economic machine into a system where workers could share in the benefits of their labor, and where they didn’t have to choose between spending time with their children or feeding them.

And how exactly did the working class achieve all this?  Organized labor.  Unions.

One worker has no power against an employer.  Workers are replaceable and interchangeable.  It’s only when workers band together that they have any influence at all.  This is all as true today as it was a hundred years ago.

It was only when workers stood together and said, ‘Treat us fairly, or we’re shutting the whole system down,’  that employers stopped behaving barbarically, and that the government was forced to enact worker protections.

…but time passed, and the people who remembered what the world was like before unions have all died off.  And all that remain are the people who remember the end of the union era- when the unions were bloated and sometimes too powerful, and sometimes corrupt.

Corporate power grew, and grew, and launched relentless campaigns to crush unions.  With their biggest battles won, all attention was on the unions’ short-comings, and the problems they caused.   Two generations of happy, healthy workers let the unions die a slow and quiet death.

The anti-union mentality of corporations is as strong as ever.  Just google ‘walmart and unions’ for a perfect example of the tactics that corporate America are using today.  If what you read there doesn’t scare you, then keep reading.

That corporations are anti-union isn’t surprising.  That’s the way it’s always been.  What’s surprising is how much of the middle class (an economic class that wouldn’t even exist today without unions) is anti-union.

In the meantime, the 40-hour work week is fading away, replaced by the “silicon valley work ethic” which is the principle that if you are at home eating dinner with your family, you obviously don’t care about your job.  And even with longer hours, record high rates of worker productivity, and astounding corporate profit margins, our wages have pretty much stagnated over the past two decades.

You see, what people didn’t realize about unions was this:  The job of the unions is never done.  As long as corporations exist, they will be motivated to lower their labor costs, while maximizing their labor output.  This means that there will be constant pressure to erode workers rights and to lower wages.  To counteract this unceasing trend, we need a force pushing in the opposite direction.  The only force that can do that is organized labor.

The sad thing is that even as the need for worker protections is becoming obvious, Americans are turning to the government to help them, while happily vilifying unions. Had they any sense of history, Americans would realize that the government doesn’t protect labor unless labor movements can apply enough political force to outweigh corporate influence.

In 2005 during the New York City transit strike, New York’s BILLIONAIRE mayor accused the transit workers of being greedy for wanting a fair wage for working exhausting and dangerous jobs in one of the most expensive cities on the planet.  41% of New Yorkers thought that the union workers were responsible for the strike.

I was in New York during that strike, and among those who opposed the transit workers, the reasoning most commonly given was something like this: ‘The transit workers are greedy because *I* don’t make that much, and my job is harder.’  You see, when people calculate what wage they consider to be fair, they are comparing that wage to wages of other people in the community.

But what happens when EVERYONE’S wages are artificially low?  Is that not the case now, with 2 decades of increased economic growth, and 2 decades of essentially stagnant wages?  Everyone knows that workers are getting a smaller piece of a bigger pie that they helped to bake.  Few people in New York actually stopped to wonder if maybe a fair wage has nothing to do with an average wage.  This is what labor unions are good for- they can say to employers, ‘It doesn’t matter that everyone else in town is underpaid. We know our worth, and want our fair share.’

Unions are the only force in the US that can push back against exploitation of the working class, but right now they have only a fraction of the power and influence they once wielded.  THIS is the reason you should be supporting the Teachers Union in Chicago, and every other union brave enough to strike.  We should be supporting labor unions wherever and however we can.  Because we need them to be strong.  We need them to grow, and to multiply, and to rise up against relentless onslaught which threatens our quality of life, and our children’s future.

We need the Chicago Teachers Union to win their contract battle, and win the war for public support- not for the good of the teachers, the school system, or the children, but for the good of workers everywhere.

My apologies to Yelp.com!

This week, I accused them of sending fake complements to their users.   I made this accusation as after finding a compliment on one of my reviews, and googling the text of the compliment, only to find that it has appeared hundreds of thousands of times before.

Helpful wagist readers have pointed out that while compliment was indeed unoriginal, it wasn’t generated by Yelp itself, but rather by yelp users who used a generic compliment-giving system built into the Yelp site.

I’m the first to admit when I’m wrong.  I deleted my previous post as soon as the error was pointed out to me.

Sincerely,

Joshua Vogel
Editor in Chief
Wagist

Artist Michael D’Antuono released his take on the Trayvon Martin shooting this week, with a piece entitled, “A Tale of Two Hoodies.”

It portrays George Zimmerman as Caucasian, wearing a police uniform and a KKK hood, and pointing his firearm directly at Trayvon Martin’s head. It shows Trayvon Martin as being approximately four feet tall, ten years old, and offering the gun-brandishing Zimmerman a pack of Sweeties candy.

When I first saw the painting, it struck me as so absurd that I assumed it had to be some sort of satire, such as the following:

Amazingly enough, D’Antuono actually intended for his painting to be considered legitimate social commentary regarding the Trayvon Martin shooting and racial profiling in America, rather than a satire of the media’s handling of the case as one might assume at this late date.

Here’s how D’Antuono justifies the painting on his site:

Inspired by the Trayvon Martin case, this painting symbolizes the travesty of racially profiling innocent children and how present day prejudices affect policy.

This has been a recurring theme in the Trayvon Martin case. Some people are extremely desperate to make the case about race, primarily because it’s much easier to cry racist than it is do deal with the societal implications of a “typical teenager” like Trayvon deciding to play “the knockout game” on a neighborhood watch captain.

The most striking thing about the painting is that even though nearly every aspect of the portrayal is obviously flawed, skewed, or just outright made up, the artist still tries to justify it by calling it symbolism of a larger societal issue.

Again, it’s so extreme you would almost have to assume it’s self-parody, but D’Antuono is convinced that his artwork is not at all racist, but that any responses calling him out on the myriad of things wrong with it are.

Let’s look at a few things just to illustrate exactly how openly racist and bigoted D’Antuono’s work is:

1. D’Antuono pretends a Hispanic man is Caucasian in order to make the painting more provocative.
2. He compares a Hispanic performing ordinary neighborhood watch duties to him being a member of the KKK.
3. D’Antuono ignores the fact that a Hispanic man was brutally attacked in his own neighborhood and was severely injured before the shooting took place.
4. He directly changes the ethnicity of one of the two subjects in a painting that is specifically supposed to function as social commentary about racism, rendering any insightful analysis nearly impossible.
5. He changes the height and weight of Trayvon Martin in order to make him appear as a helpless victim, rather than a 6’3, 160lb high school athlete who just broke someone’s nose and was bashing their head into a concrete sidewalk.
6. D’Antuono stereotypes law enforcement officials as being fat, white, prejudiced murderers, even though there were no police involved in the shooting whatsoever.

Why is D’Antuono so racist towards Hispanics that he feels the need to paint them up as KKK members?

Is it a coincidence that there isn’t a single Hispanic featured in a positive light in any of D’Antuono’s other work?

Instead of owning up to the massive amount of misrepresentation and race-baiting in his painting, Michael D’Antuono instead responded to any and all criticism of the piece yesterday by writing a blog post entitled, “Are Conservatives More Racist?”

This shows how massively blinded D’Antuono is by sheer black-and-white thinking when discussing the Trayvon Martin shooting. He fully believes that anyone who disagrees with his fictitious, racist portrayal is not only mistaken, but that they must also be conservative politically, which is almost certainly a smear in his eyes.

To D’Antuono, it’s a political issue. Any humanization of Zimmerman would conflict with his negative ideas about conservatism; that simply can’t happen.

Even though the Trayvon Martin shooting case has very little to do with race and everything to do with self-defense, D’Antuono has changed nearly every fact associated with the shooting in order to make it appear as racially charged as possible, then has proceeded to name-call anyone who disagrees with his irresponsible portrayal.

More and more, it seems like accusations of racism in the Trayvon Martin case are actually a bizarre form of psychological projection. The accusers actively make up their own reality in order to make the shooting fit their worldview, even when it has been shown that race mattered very little, if at all, when the actual evidence is examined objectively.

D’Antuono’s painting has does much more to expose his own internalized prejudices and bigotry, and unfortunately offers very little of value to the arena of public discourse on the matter, beyond perhaps adding even more evidence of the continuing absurdity of how Zimmerman has been depicted.

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz made an appearance on on MSNBC’s Hardball to discuss the Zimmerman arrest affidavit, and had some incredibly harsh language for Angela Corey concerning her actions in the George Zimmerman prosecution.

Dershowitz is a well-known Democrat with a column on the Huffington Post, but seemed stunned by how poorly written the affidavit was, going so far as to call it “irresponsible and unethical,” as well as Corey’s actions politically motivated. He also said that if the prosecution didn’t have more evidence for the case than what we’ve seen, “a good judge would throw it out.”

Here’s the interview:

Smerconish: Joining me now, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Professor, I’ve really looked forward to this conversation. You’ve seen the affidavit of probable cause, what do you make of it?

Dershowitz: It won’t suffice. Most affidavits of probable cause are very thin; this is so thin that it won’t make it past a judge on a second degree murder charge. There’s simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder. The elements of the crime aren’t established.

Basically what’s in the affidavit is what’s in the public domain, with the exception of a few little things that were put forward by your previous commentator. But the fact that the mother identified the voice as that of her son, of course, we all knew that was going to happen. There’s nothing in there of course either about the stains on the back of Zimmerman’s shirt, the blood on the back of his head, the bloody nose, all of that.

It’s not only thin, it’s irresponsible. I think that what you have here is an elected public official who made a campaign speech last night for reelection when she gave her presentation, and over-charged, way over-charged. This case will not, if the evidence is no stronger that what appears in the probable-cause affidavit, this case will result in an acquittal.

Very strongly worded statements from Dershowitz, who basically stopped just short of directly claiming Corey engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by her actions.

See more crime scene maps here..

George Zimmerman had his first court appearance today at 1:30 EST, after being charged with second degree murder yesterday evening.

Judge Mark Herr confirmed that he found probable cause to move ahead with the case, and setup an arraignment for May 29 before Judge Jessica Recksiedler.

Here’s a video of Judge Recksiedler:

And here’s a brief profile of Judge Recksiedler from when she was a candidate:

I am the only candidate who is board certified. The Florida Bar recognizes me as a civil jury trial expert — with only 1 percent of Florida Bar members. I have handled all aspects of civil litigation, including: commercial, construction, insurance, personal injury, probate, guardianship and estate law. I was appointed by the Florida Bar to the Board Certification Civil Trial Committee, requiring proficiency in the rules of ethics, evidence, and procedure, as well as litigation skills. I am the only candidate who has fully tried a civil jury trial. I am a former assistant state attorney and have handled criminal cases since over the years. I am a named partner in a law firm. I have handled cases in courts all over Florida. As a mother of two, the safety of the community where I was born and raised is important to me.

After being endorsed by the Orlando Sentinel, she was elected to the position on November 2, 2010 to a 6 year term that ends on January 2, 2017.

Zimmerman’s trial will easily be her highest profile case in the year and a half she has held the position.

Here’s Zimmerman from his appearance today.

O’Mara said today that he will seek a bond hearing “in the next few weeks.” Zimmerman is expected to enter a not guilty plea.

Update: A bail hearing is set for April 20th.

Update 2: O’Mara files motion for Recksiedler to step aside.

Update 3: Judge Ken Lester has now been assigned to the case.

See more crime scene maps here..

By almost any standard, Zimmerman’s legal defense in the Trayvon Martin shooting case has been a sort of ongoing cautionary tale for exactly what not to do if you’re facing potentially serious criminal charges.

Almost immediately, within around thirty-seven minutes after the shooting, Zimmerman was already waiving his right to an attorney. He then proceeded to interview with the police for several hours without any legal representation present.

Then the next day, still without any attorney present or legal advice, Zimmerman took the police back to the scene of the shooting at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, and reenacted what happened on the evening of February 26th with them, step-by-step on video.

Had Zimmerman’s narrative and recounting of the details of that evening been any less than 100% consistent, that’s the moment when everything would have fallen apart for him — sometime right around February 27th. The police had every reason and opportunity to document and doggedly pursue any differences they saw between Zimmerman’s initial interview and his video re-enactment the following day.

Rather than finding anything they could follow up with, what happened instead? The Sanford Police Department was unable to obtain any evidence that would allow them to press even involuntary manslaughter charges against Zimmerman. And no new evidence changed that, even as days and weeks passed.

As anyone who follows criminal justice knows, under harsh conditions and during long, station-house interviews, many people will end up confessing to crimes they didn’t even commit.

Most people are conditioned from an early age to have a bias towards telling authority figures what they want to hear.

Police have been known to take skillful advantage of this psychological blind spot to extract confessions and other incriminating information from suspects during interrogations.

Watch The Confessions on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

In one infamous case, four innocent men confessed to committing the same brutal rape and murder after being interrogated without legal counsel.

Even when DNA evidence exonerated them, years later, they were still not immediately released, because of the sheer weight a recorded confession carries.

Zimmerman not only didn’t confess to any sort of impropriety in his police interviews, he seems to have been 100% consistent in his statements.

Which brings us to today’s debacle with Zimmerman’s attorneys.

Apparently, Zimmerman has not been in contact with his legal team since Sunday. He unilaterally contacted a member of the media himself, Sean Hannity, and there are reports that Zimmerman contacted the state prosecutor, Angela Corey, himself as well.

It’s unclear how much of the web site he setup was vetted by his legal team. In any case, the site initially included a photo of graffiti vandalism in Ohio that has since been removed from the “album” page.

All of this, of course, must have been pretty horrifying for Zimmerman’s attorneys, who seem to have been doing their best to rehabilitate Zimmerman’s public appearance. They called a press conference to announce that they are withdrawing from the case until such a time when Zimmerman is back in contact with them.

The Investigations

There was initially a pretty strong assumption by most people (mainly due to the incredibly biased media reporting of the incident) that the Sanford Police Department had somehow been complicit in not charging George Zimmerman.

But as time has gone on, it seems the investigation the department carried out was actually extremely by the book. Lately, people have changed tack; they don’t like the conclusions the investigation reached and feel state law must be to blame.

While the police spent weeks attempting to gather evidence and press charges against Zimmerman, the facts of the case simply didn’t materialize in a way that implicated Zimmerman as having committed manslaughter.

Then the case was blown up by the media, and more and more investigatory branches of the government became involved, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, but evidence against Zimmerman has still remained elusive. If there is any strong evidence against him, it hasn’t been released by the prosecutors thus far.

While some have said it was reckless for Zimmerman to leave his truck at all, the law simply does not codify that. Leaving one’s vehicle inside one’s own neighborhood cannot legally be considered “reckless” behavior, especially when Zimmerman was well-known as being the neighborhood watch captain for the community.

Of course, it makes sense that Zimmerman would leave his truck to investigate something he considered suspicious, especially when he was relaying information to a 911 dispatcher.

Many people have taken issue with the fact that Zimmerman was armed as well, but legally speaking, it is unlikely to matter.

Around 900k Florida residents have have concealed carry licenses. Carrying a weapon in one’s own neighborhood is not uncommon, nor does it have any special impact on this case. There is no evidence thus far that Zimmerman was brandishing his firearm or otherwise using it inappropriately.

It may be that Zimmerman simply doesn’t need his legal advisers as badly as most people assumed that he did. Presumably no inconsistencies were found in his statements on February 26th or February 27th. Had there been any serious discrepancies, the police would have already had plenty of rope to hang him with.

The crux of the case comes down to what was happening in the sixty seconds preceding the shooting. And those sixty seconds happen to be the part of the encounter we know the most about.

There is hard evidence of screams for help on 911 tapes. There is evidence showing Zimmerman’s injuries, including a broken nose, and there is an eye-witness account of Zimmerman being beaten and yelling for help.

Since that time period is going to be the main focus of any investigation, there may not be much Zimmerman’s legal advisers can do here beyond what essentially comes down to public relations.

Zimmerman’s transparency

While Zimmerman’s lawyers withdrawing from the case was certainly confusing and unexpected initially, it makes sense when one considers how transparent Zimmerman has been about what happened from day one.

If anything, hiding away and ceasing to make any public statements for the last several weeks seems to have been incredibly unnatural for Zimmerman.

This is, after all, a man who was going around town handing out flyers about the Sanford “homeless sucker punch” case last year, a case that didn’t involve him directly whatsoever.

Those flyers began with the same quote currently featured on each page of Zimmerman’s web site.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

- Edmund Burke

Zimmerman now seems to be downright intent on advocating for himself directly and increasing his public visibility. This has created a near-instant backlash against him from many who are still convinced he should immediately be arrested.

But that’s Zimmerman’s character in a nutshell; he’s nothing if not exceedingly independent and vocal.

Zimmerman went further than most would in volunteering to lead his neighborhood watch. He was, by all accounts, extremely thorough over the years in reporting anything suspicious in his neighborhood. He went against all reasonable legal advice when he allowed himself to be interrogated without an attorney present the night of Trayvon Martin’s shooting.

And now he no longer seems to be willing to back down from speaking with the state prosecutor directly, even against his legal team’s wishes. He also has expressed the urge to respond directly to those who are rallying for his arrest.

It’s difficult to tell what will happen with this more cavalier change in attitude. Sanford is, by many accounts, currently a tension-filled powder keg. Yesterday, the police station was briefly occupied by protesting students.

This morning, an empty police cruiser was shot at six times. Not the warmest response for a police department that, thus far, has not been shown to have done anything improper in the investigation.

Zimmerman speaking out will undoubtedly change the public’s perception of him, even if it doesn’t have much of a legal effect.

While he seems to think it will defuse the situation, he could be lighting the fuse for an even larger explosion when Angela Corey’s announcement is made later this week.

See more crime scene maps here..

The Sanford Police Department removed much of the content from the Trayvon Martin Investigation page today, per the request of the State Attorney, replacing it with the following note:

The office of the State Attorney, 4th Judicial Circuit, State Attorney Angela Corey has requested that the City of Sanford remove all reports, videos and audio pertaining to the Martin/Zimmerman case from the website. Their office has provided legal justification for the action and they believe further access to the information will have an adverse effect on their efforts to come to a resolution to this investigation.

It appears that the three main PDFs removed were these:

• Twin Lakes Shooting Initial Report
• George Zimmerman 911 Call History
• Burglary Reports

The Sanford police station intake videos are also now private on YouTube. Which isn’t a big loss because there isn’t much interesting in them beyond what we’ve already seen and discussed here.

Zimmerman’s emergency call and the other 911 calls are gone as well.

So here they are, rehosted on a different YouTube account and synced with the proper timestamps for each.

Zimmerman’s police call:

911 calls before the shot:

911 calls after the shot:

These videos are backed up as well.

In other news, a NBC producer has been let go after a scandal over the selective editing of George Zimmerman’s police call.

Inside NBC, there was shock that the segment had been broadcast. Citing an anonymous network executive, Reuters reported that “the ‘Today’ show’s editorial control policies — which include a script editor, senior producer oversight and in most cases legal and standards department reviews of material to be broadcast — missed the selective editing of the call.”

NBC appears to be backpedaling pretty quickly on their coverage. It seems like a lot of people had to “accidentally miss” such blatant changes to a police call; it doesn’t show much regard for depicting the events of the evening accurately.

Mother Jones has come to the conclusion that Zimmerman is “unlikely to ever be convicted.”

Reuters reports that police probably gave Zimmerman a “voice stress test” that evening, and the results may have contributed to his release.

And the city of Sanford is preparing for the special prosecutor’s decision.

“We’re planning for the ‘what-if’ case scenario and that would be to make sure all of our citizens get the protection they pay their taxes for,” the Mayor told reporters on Thursday.

See more crime scene maps here..

CNN has released an update today of what is said to be the clearest audio thus far of the George Zimmerman police call on February 26th.

It seems once the wind noise was isolated and removed, what was once thought to be a racial slur, “Fucking coons,” turned out to be actually much more benign.

According to CNN’s audio expert, it’s clear to him that George Zimmerman said it was “fucking cold” that evening.

Update 4/5:

CNN has released yet another enhanced sample of the recording.

According to Tom Owen and Zimmerman’s lawyers, Zimmerman said “fucking punks,” under his breath.

See more crime scene maps here..

Media outlets have been reporting on a “missing minute” in the Trayvon Martin case, between when George Zimmerman’s original phone call to police ends and when 911 calls from Zimmerman and Martin fighting start coming in.

There’s actually considerably more than a minute missing during that time.

This is due to widespread confusion about when Zimmerman placed his original call to police. Many write-ups claim his call began at 7:11, which is incorrect.

At 7:11 p.m., Zimmerman, who was in his truck, spotted Trayvon. There had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood attributed to young black men, and Zimmerman was wary of someone he did not recognize walking along the path that goes through the back of the townhouses, his father later told a local TV station.

7:11:12 is the time that the ticket notes were first saved at the dispatching center, but Zimmerman’s call connected at 7:09:34, two minutes earlier.

Here’s the connection time:

[Full-size version]

With a review of notes saved further down, we can confirm a 7:09 contact time for Zimmerman’s call to police.

At 7:11:59, the dispatcher writes an update that the subject is running away. This event wasn’t reported by Zimmerman until more than two minutes into his call. The dispatcher could not have saved that update after only forty-seven seconds.

Using the proper connection time for Zimmerman’s call, we see that note being saved two and a half minutes in, exactly when we would expect it to be there.

Timeline of events

Here’s Zimmerman’s call to police with proper timing synced.

And a map of the Retreat at Twin Lakes complex.

[Full-size version]

As I’ve written about previously, Trayvon Martin had plenty of time to make it back to his temporary residence, Brandy Green’s townhouse, if he had wanted to.

Position [F], where Martin’s shooting occurred, is only 35 yards from where Zimmerman’s truck was parked [C], and only 70 yards from Brandy Green’s townhouse [D]. It would only take Trayvon around 30 seconds to jog that distance, less if he actually ran.

Until now, it has been somewhat of a mystery why Martin never made it back to Brandy Green’s townhouse when he was so close, and how he and Zimmerman ended up at position [F], so close to Zimmerman’s truck.

Had Martin jogged straight to Brandy Green’s when George Zimmerman first reported him running at 7:11:42, he would have been there by 7:12:12. Considerably before Zimmerman could even finish giving police directions to the complex.

Here’s an estimate of Trayvon’s route back to Brandy Green’s townhouse:

This has baffled the police investigating the case as well. They couldn’t figure out why Trayvon didn’t simply go to Brandy Green’s if he felt threatened, especially when he was so close. All reports had indicated he was heading that direction.

7:12:30

At a safe distance from Zimmerman, near the rear entrance of the complex, Trayvon receives a call from his girlfriend DeeDee.

Most cellular providers round down the seconds at the start of a call. We see a phone call from DeeDee that began at 7:12pm, but it could have began anytime between 7:12:00 – 7:12:59.

Rather than simply going inside Brandy Green’s townhouse, talking to DeeDee seems to have given Trayvon some motivation to double back and confront George Zimmerman.

We’ve seen several pictures now of Trayvon on social media that would lead us to believe he wanted to look tough. It may not be much of a stretch to think he wanted to look tough for his girlfriend as well.

7:13:30

Zimmerman is wrapping up his suspicious person call and walking back towards his truck from position [E].

Trayvon is heading toward Zimmerman’s truck as well, from somewhere around position [D]. He’s still talking to DeeDee on the phone, walking quickly.

7:13:41

Zimmerman hangs up his call to police.

This marks the beginning of the “missing” two minutes and thirty seconds between the end of Zimmerman’s call to police, and the first 911 call at 7:16:11.

While we don’t know all the details of what happened during this time, we do have some information that we can reconstruct the major events with.

The first bit that helps us is from a Reuters article published yesterday.

Sanford police have stopped talking to reporters about the case, and Serino has never spoken publicly about his role in it, but here is how Martin recalls what Serino said: “He told me Zimmerman’s story was that Zimmerman was of course following him and that Trayvon approached his vehicle, walked up to the car and asked Zimmerman, ‘Why are your following me?’ Zimmerman then rolls his car windows down, tells Trayvon ‘I’m not following you.’ He rolls his car windows up.

At first take, this sounds like Martin and Zimmerman had a prior confrontation before Zimmerman’s call to police, while Zimmerman was still in his truck. But it’s pretty clear by listening to that call, Zimmerman had not yet spoken to Trayvon.

That implies Zimmerman and Martin didn’t just have one confrontation over the upcoming minutes, they had two. The first one occurring at Zimmerman’s truck at position [C]. The second one at position [F].

7:14:30

Zimmerman gets back to his SUV and is waiting for the police to arrive. Suddenly, there’s a knock at the window, it’s Trayvon.

“Why are you following me?”

“I’m not.”

Trayvon starts to walk away, then runs, between buildings. He heads towards position [F], in the backyards between the complexes, cutting south of Townhouse G to get there.

Zimmerman decides he wants to keep Martin in sight. He had already lost visual on him once. He leaves his vehicle once more and also heads towards [F], most likely via the sidewalk above [G].

Both Zimmerman’s and DeeDee’s statements seem to agree on that.

DeeDee’s account:

“Trayvon got nervous and he said he gonna run around from the back, so he ran from the back and said he had lost him,” said Dee Dee, but Martin said that, just a few seconds later, Zimmerman was behind him again.

Zimmerman’s account:

“Trayvon walks off. Zimmerman said he started running between the buildings. Zimmerman gets out of his car. He comes around the building.

7:15:30

Zimmerman and Martin run into each other at position [F].

From Zimmerman’s perspective, Trayvon is waiting for him. From Trayvon’s perspective, Zimmerman had just told Trayvon that he wasn’t following him and now here he is, doing it a second time. Trayvon is likely getting fed up with it.

DeeDee’s account:

“When he saw the man behind him again he said this man is going to do something to him. And then he said this man is still behind him and I said run.”

Zimmerman’s account:

Trayvon is hiding behind the building, waiting on him. Trayvon approaches him and says, ‘What’s your problem, homes?’ Zimmerman says ‘I don’t have a problem.’

7:15:40

Within ten seconds the fight has begun. DeeDee gets hung up on.

DeeDee’s account:

“Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the head set just fell. I called him again, and he didn’t answer the phone.”

Zimmerman’s account:

Zimmerman starts to reach into his pocket to get his cellphone, and at that point Trayvon attacked him. He says Trayvon hits him. He falls on the ground. Trayvon jumps on top of him, takes his left hand and covers Zimmerman’s mouth and tells him to “Shut the fuck up,” and continues to pound on him.

7:16:11

The first 911 call comes in. There’s loud screaming in the background.

7:16:56

One shot is fired, after approximately a minute and fifteen seconds of fighting and screaming.

Six additional neighbors call 911.

Conclusions

The possibility that there was not just one, but two confrontations does help explain several things.

For one, why DeeDee’s testimony has seemed so confusing at times — she’s not relaying just one interaction Martin had with Zimmerman like most of us assumed, she’s bringing up two separate encounters she listened to, spaced only around a minute apart.

This description of events seems to be exactly what Zimmerman has been telling police since the beginning, since it’s essentially how the police described the incident to Tracy Martin the next day.

Trayvon still seems to have doubled back towards Zimmerman after he first started running at 7:11, but he went on to initially confront Zimmerman at his truck, rather than point [F].

None of this can tell us for sure how the fight began or who initiated physical contact.

Since it seems like Zimmerman’s main goal was to stay in touch the with police throughout the evening, it still seems unlikely that he would intentionally start any physical altercation knowing that they were on their way.

That being said, Zimmerman definitely missed an opportunity to identify himself at his truck, which potentially could have helped to de-escalate the situation.

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Two experts in the field of forensic voice identification, Tom Owen and Ed Primeau, were hired by the Orlando Sentinel to review George Zimmerman’s call to police along with the 911 calls right before the shooting.

They both decided the voice screaming for help on the 911 calls was not George Zimmerman, and each expert arrived at that conclusion by independent methods.

Tom Owen is mentioned first in the article. He’s described as a forensic consultant for Owen Forensic Services, LLC.

Let’s take a closer look at the process he used.

After the Sentinel contacted Owen, he used software called Easy Voice Biometrics to compare Zimmerman’s voice to the 911 call screams.

“I took all of the screams and put those together, and cut out everything else,” Owen says.

The software compared that audio to Zimmerman’s voice. It returned a 48 percent match. Owen said to reach a positive match with audio of this quality, he’d expect higher than 90 percent.

“As a result of that, you can say with reasonable scientific certainty that it’s not Zimmerman,” Owen says, stressing that he cannot confirm the voice as Trayvon’s, because he didn’t have a sample of the teen’s voice to compare.

That raises some concerns. Tom Owen apparently compared Zimmerman’s normal speaking voice on a dispatch call, with high-pitched, terrified screaming that was recorded in the background of later 911 calls.

In our world, “that’s the home run,” Owen says.

I was pretty stunned that he could be so sure. After all, the computer program is looking for similarities in the vocal patterns. How many can it possibly find when pattern A is completely normal, laid back speech and pattern B is hysterical screaming?

I wanted to investigate this a bit further and looked into downloading the software Tom Owen used.

But this proved to be extremely difficult, a license for the software costs nearly $5,000.

That’s a pretty hefty price to pay to test this software out…

After a few more minutes of research, I found out that the Easy Voice Biometrics web domain is actually owned by Tom Owen himself.

So what Tom Owen is actually doing here, is using his own home-grown software to attempt to determine the similarities in speech markers between two radically different types of voice patterns and claiming that it is accurate “beyond scientific certainty.”

Beyond scientific certainty is a pretty strong statement.

There doesn’t seem to be any disclosure in the Orlando Sentinel article that Tom Owen owns EasyVoiceBiometrics.com, nor any that he was using his own software package to do the analysis.

I’m not sure whether the Orlando Sentinel author realizes it, but that could easily be construed as a conflict of interest, particularly when the software is currently being sold for $5,000 per license. There’s an extremely transparent profit motive for Tom Owen to promote his product in any way that he can, especially at that price.

Since Tom Owen has staked his reputation on this, and has said point-blank that this software is so accurate that he knows “with reasonable scientific certainty” that it’s not Zimmerman on the 911 calls, the software must at least be extremely thoroughly tested, right?

I emailed Mr. Owen to double-check.

Doesn’t sound reassuring, does it?

It also says, on Easy Voice Biometric’s own web site, that the software is less than a month old.

This is especially strange, because the Orlando Sentinel article says:

As recently as January, Owen used the same technology to identify accused murderer Sheila Davalloo in a 911 call made almost a decade ago.

How could Owen have been using the same technology in that case when the web site says the software was only released three weeks ago?

It lists a launch date of March 7th, 2012 on the news section of the site:

Since Owen referred me to TracerTek.com, I checked out that site as well.

TracerTek.com and EasyVoiceBiometrics.com appear to be using the same web site template, just with different information filled in.

It appears Jeff Klinedinst is involved with both. He is listed as the VP of Marketing on TracerTek and he did the YouTube demo videos for Easy Voice Biometrics.

Here’s a demo video Jeff put together for Easy Voice Biometrics.

The software appears to work fine if someone alters their voice slightly, or if there is light music playing in the background.

But there certainly isn’t anything in the demos about Easy Voice Biometrics offering “reasonable scientific certainty” when someone is screaming in panic on the background of a 911 call.

So where exactly is this “scientific certainty” coming from?

The second expert, Ed Primeau, doesn’t “believe” in Biometric Analysis, but doesn’t say why.

Not all experts rely on biometrics. Ed Primeau, a Michigan-based audio engineer and forensics expert, is not a believer in the technology’s use in courtroom settings.

Ed simply listened to the recordings. Then he decided the noises were Trayvon Martin because of the “tone of the voice” while reading Mother Jones.

“I believe that’s Trayvon Martin in the background, without a doubt,” Primeau says, stressing that the tone of the voice is a giveaway. “That’s a young man screaming.”

Nevermind that there was an eyewitness to the fight who clearly states it was George Zimmerman yelling out for help. Or that Zimmerman is cited in the original police report as saying he was yelling for help. Or that the yells much more accurately portray someone who is screaming during an assault, rather than someone begging for their life at gunpoint.

Both Primeau and Owen report that they are credentialed by the American College Forensic Examiners Institute.

Sadly, it turns out there is an entire suite of these “American Forensic Board” sites, on almost any topic you can think of, which all seem to be ran by the same person, a gentleman named Dr. O’Block who claims to have nearly a dozen degrees himself.

Once again, most of these sites use the same basic template and only change cursory details, making it difficult to gauge how legitimate the boards are, if at all.

Tom Owen also lists things like this:

Instructor “New York Institute for Forensic Audio” 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,2006, 2007

As prestigious as the “New York Institute for Forensic Audio” sounds, there is no such brick and mortar institute. It is actually a “division” of Owen Investigations, LLC. Tom Owen is basically claiming he was an instructor at his own unaccredited university.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the upcoming weeks, since both of these “experts” have sparked a lot of controversy with their statements and placed their reputations on the line.

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