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  To Dominick J. Di Maio, MD, and Violet Di Maio

  My father and mother

  Death is not an individual but a social event. When, with a barely noticeable sigh, the last gasp of air is exhaled, the blood stops pulsating through arteries and veins, and neurons cease activating the brain, the life of a human organism has ended. Death is not official, however, until the community takes notice.

  —STEFAN TIMMERMANS

  Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths

  Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  ‹ FOREWORD ›

  It’s All About the Puzzle

  By Dr. Jan Garavaglia

  People are fascinated by forensic pathology. Yes, some are primarily interested in the forensic details, but it is the stories of how and why the dead people ended up in the morgue that intrigue most.

  TV shows, movies, and novels with fictional portrayals of forensic pathologists are phenomenally popular, not because they are accurate about the art and science of forensic pathology, but because they piece together a puzzle. But every day, real-life forensic pathologists pull back the curtain to shine the light of truth on what really happened, and explore the true, hidden dramas of the human condition, too.

  Many think the forensic pathologist’s time is spent on murder and crime, but in fact murders take up less than 20 percent of a medical examiner’s caseload. We care just as much about the mystery of a decomposing unidentified corpse found in a pond as we do about why an infant died suddenly in his mother’s arms. Our autopsies and scene investigations might have public health or safety implications, such as identifying an emerging epidemic of drugs or disease. We might determine a woman died prematurely from a genetic abnormality, which could have profound implications for future generations of a family. We scientifically identify the burned, injured, and decomposed beyond recognition, if for no other reason than giving dignity to the dead.

  Then comes murder. We determine whether a death was caused by the actions of another human, which has huge implications if you are a suspect. Even when the cause of death is obvious, the body is meticulously examined for trace evidence, subtle injuries, angles and trajectory of wounds, even natural disease … anything that might shed light on what happened.

  Alas, in spite of the crucial need for more forensic pathologists, it remains the medical specialty with the fewest new doctors. That’s partly the perceived negatives of the job. On a daily basis, we deal with gruesome injuries, decomposing flesh, hideous smells, horrific violence, feces and gastric contents that must be meticulously examined (or at least handled). Then we must confront grieving families and (occasionally) obnoxious lawyers.

  Despite these unpleasantries, those of us in the field consider it a calling. We love the challenge of piecing together the puzzles to find the truth. We can’t imagine doing anything else.

  That describes Dr. Vincent Di Maio, my mentor and friend. I worked under him for ten years in San Antonio and never tired of his keen insight, his wealth of knowledge, and his seemingly limitless collection of great stories. Now in this fascinating and well-written book, readers and forensic buffs, too, are privileged to hear one of the most respected forensic pathologists in America share some of his most intriguing and provocative forensic cases of a long career.

  And you will see that it isn’t just about the forensics. It’s about the puzzles, too.

  —Dr. Jan Garavaglia

  Dr. Jan Garavaglia—better known as Discovery Channel’s “Dr. G”—is the chief medical examiner for Orlando, Florida, and its surrounding counties. A graduate of the St. Louis University School of Medicine, she completed her fellowship in forensic pathology at the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office in Miami, and later worked for Dr. Vincent Di Maio at the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office in San Antonio, Texas.

  Her hit cable TV show, Dr. G: Medical Examiner, is broadcast around the world and has made her one of the most recognizable faces of forensic medicine. She has appeared on CNN, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Rachael Ray Show, The Doctors, and the Dr. Oz Show. She has also testified in some highly charged criminal cases, such as the Casey Anthony murder trial in 2011, and written a book, How Not to Die (2008, Crown).

  ‹ ONE ›

  A Death In Black and White

  I don’t know what’s in a human heart.

  I have seen more than my share of hearts, held them in my hands. Some were young and strong; some were worn-out, shabby, choked. Many had leaked away an entire life through neat little holes caused by bullets or knives. Some had been stopped by poison or fright. A few had exploded into a thousand tiny bits or were shredded in some grotesque trauma. All of them were dead.

  But I never truly knew what was inside these hearts, and never will. By the time I see them, whatever dreams, hopes, fears, ghosts or gods, shame, regrets, anger, and love they might have contained are long gone. The life—the soul—has all seeped out.

  What’s left is just evidence. That’s where I usually come in.

  SANFORD, FLORIDA. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2012.

  Tracy Martin dialed his teenage son’s cell number and it went straight to voice mail.

  It was late, well past ten, on a dark, wet Sunday night. Tracy and his girlfriend Brandy Green had been out most of the weekend, leaving seventeen-year-old Trayvon and Brandy’s fourteen-year-old son Chad alone at her townhouse in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated neighborhood in the relatively sedate Orlando suburb of Sanford, Florida. Tracy and Brandy had been dating for two years, and it wasn’t unusual for Tracy and Trayvon to drive up from Miami, four hours each way, for an overnight or a weekend.

  It wasn’t just the romance. Tracy desperately wanted Trayvon to wise up, to get away from thug life in Miami, and those long trips were his chance to talk some sense into the kid.

  Trayvon didn’t seem to be listening. In some ways, he was a typical teenager, obsessed with girls, video games, sports, and the pounding of rap music in his earbuds. He loved Chuck E. Cheese and watching TV sitcoms. Someday, he thought he’d like to fly or fix airplanes. Family was important, too, even though some of their relatives were black sheep. He often hand-fed his quadriplegic uncle, baked cookies with his young cousins, and had begun wearing a button memorializing another cousin who’d died mysteriously after a drug arrest in 2008.

  But Trayvon was no Boy Scout. At nearly six feet tall, he could be intimidating, and he knew it. He flirted with thug life, smoking pot and playing a badass on Facebook. In the past year, his Miami high school had suspended him three times, for tardiness, tagging, and having a bag of pot in his backpack. Tracy, a truck driver who’d been divorced from Trayvon’s mother since 1999, began to hector the boy about his friends, his behavior, and his grades.

  He dialed Trayvon’s number again, and again it went straight
to voice mail. Brandy’s son Chad told them Trayvon had left around six p.m. to walk to a convenience store less than a mile away. They thought they might catch the NBA All-Star game on TV at seven thirty. Before he left, he’d asked Chad if there was anything he wanted. “Skittles,” Chad said as he went back to his video games. Trayvon tugged on his hoodie and left. He never came back.

  Maybe the kid had gone to the movies with a cousin nearby, the father thought, or maybe got sidetracked by a girl along the way. He did stuff like that.

  Tracy called the cousin, but got no answer, so he shrugged it off and went to bed. Trayvon was still finding his way and got easily distracted. He was always testing his limits, and sometimes he went too far. He’d just turned seventeen, for god’s sake. He’d turn up.

  The next morning, Tracy got up early and dialed Trayvon’s number again. The phone was still switched off, still dumping him directly into voice mail. He called the cousin over and over again until he finally answered—but he hadn’t seen Trayvon at all.

  Tracy started to worry. Around eight thirty, he called the sheriff’s dispatcher to report his son missing. He described Trayvon: seventeen, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, light red tennis shoes, and probably slacks. He told her that he and Trayvon were from Miami but staying at his girlfriend’s house in Sanford. In a few minutes, another dispatcher called him back with more specific questions, and she told him that police officers were on the way to the townhouse. He felt some relief that he’d soon have some help finding Trayvon.

  Three police cars pulled up outside. A somber detective introduced himself and asked Tracy for a recent picture of his son. Tracy flipped through the camera roll on his phone and found one.

  The detective gritted his teeth. He told Tracy he had a photo to show him and he wanted to know if it was Trayvon. From a manila envelope, he pulled a full-color image of a young black man. He was dead.

  It was Trayvon.

  At that moment, Tracy’s boy was lying in a tray in the morgue, ashen and cold, shot once in the chest.

  That instant blurred for Tracy Martin. And his sudden shock would soon evolve into a long, painful moment of profound anxiety across America.

  * * *

  The rain fell sullen and persistent as Trayvon left the townhouse. It was one of those ambivalent February nights in Florida, not quite cold and not quite warm, hovering in the mid-fifties. He pulled up his hood and walked through the Retreat, past the front gate, to the 7-Eleven convenience store on Rinehart Road, almost a mile away.

  Inside the store, Martin grabbed a tall can of AriZona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail from the cooler and a small package of Skittles from some shelves near the cash register. He fumbled in the pockets of his tan slacks and put a couple of bucks and some coins on the counter to pay for the snacks, then left. A store surveillance camera watched him leave at 6:24 p.m.

  On the way back to the townhouse, the rain picked up. Trayvon took shelter beneath an awning over the community mailboxes and called Chad at the townhouse to say he was on his way home. He also called his friend DeeDee, a girl he’d met back in Miami, and with whom he talked and texted endlessly. In fact, they’d already spent about six hours on the phone that day. This time they talked for about eighteen minutes, but he got serious toward the end of the call.

  Some guy, “a creepy-ass cracka” in a funky silver truck, was watching him, Trayvon told DeeDee. He sounded scared. He thought about running out the back of the little mailbox area and losing the white guy in the maze of townhouses, but DeeDee told him to run back home as fast as he could.

  No, he wouldn’t run, he said. The townhouse wasn’t far. He yanked up his hoodie and started walking right past the truck, glancing at the guy as he kept walking.

  But while they continued to talk on the phone, Trayvon started to run. DeeDee could hear his heavy breathing and the wind rushing across the tiny microphone of his earbuds.

  After less than a minute of running, he told DeeDee he’d lost the guy, and he slowed to a walk again. DeeDee thought she heard fear in his voice, and she was scared for him, too. She told him to keep running.

  But the white guy appeared again, persistent. DeeDee begged Trayvon to run, but he was still breathing hard and couldn’t. After a few seconds, he told her the white guy was closer now.

  Suddenly Trayvon wasn’t talking to DeeDee anymore. She heard his voice talking to somebody else nearby.

  “Why you following me for?”

  Another voice, not far. “What are you doing around here?”

  “Trayvon! Trayvon!” DeeDee yelled into the phone.

  She heard a thump and a rustling of grass. She heard somebody yell, “Get off! Get off!” She called out again and again to her boyfriend, but the phone went dead.

  Frantic, she called Trayvon’s phone back, but nobody answered.

  * * *

  A little after seven p.m., George Zimmerman left his townhouse in the Retreat in his silver 2008 Honda Ridgeline pickup for his weekly grocery shopping at Target. Sunday nights weren’t usually crowded, and tonight the rain would keep even more shoppers away. Perfect.

  Between some houses, though, he saw a teenager in a dark gray hoodie, just standing in the shadows out of the rain. He didn’t recognize the kid, who was just milling around. Zimmerman had an uncomfortable feeling about him. A month before, George had seen a kid at that same spot trying to break into a house, but he got away.

  So his suspicion wasn’t without reason. The Retreat at Twin Lakes had been rattled when the housing bubble burst. Home values plummeted and underwater residents bailed. Investors snapped up a lot of foreclosed townhouses and started renting them out. The neighborhood changed. Strangers came and went. Low-end people from the wrong side of the gates drifted through. Gangsta boys in low-slung, baggy pants and cockeyed ball caps started hanging around. Then the burglaries and home invasions started. Overnight, those gates didn’t seem as secure.

  After three break-ins in August 2011, Zimmerman proposed a neighborhood watch. The idea appealed to the anxious members of the homeowners association, so he invited a Sanford police official to explain how it’d work: Unarmed volunteers would keep an eye on the neighborhood and call the cops if they saw anything suspicious.

  Vigilance without violence. Sounded easy enough. The board quickly appointed the pudgy, serious, twenty-eight-year-old George Zimmerman, who’d lived in the Retreat for three years, to coordinate the program.

  This son of a former Virginia magistrate and his Peruvian wife was perfect for the job nobody else really wanted to do. A part-time college student who dreamed of being a judge someday, and a financial-fraud auditor at a private company in nearby Maitland, he took his unpaid job seriously. His own temper had flared in the past, getting the former altar boy in modest trouble, but his neighbors now knew him as a friendly, helpful, earnest guy.

  He considered himself a kind of protector. Even before he became the watch “captain,” he’d helped capture a shoplifter who filched some electronics from a local supermarket, and now duly “deputized,” he was constantly calling the police dispatchers to report stray dogs, speeders, potholes, graffiti, family fights, and suspicious loiterers. He was even known to knock on doors to let residents know their garage doors were open. To some he was a godsend; to others, a badge-heavy doofus.

  So on this gray, damp night, this unfamiliar black kid in a hoodie naturally caught his eye. Zimmerman parked his truck and called the cops on his cellphone.

  “Sanford Police Department,” the dispatcher answered.

  “Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood,” Zimmerman replied, “and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, [near] Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”

  “Okay, and this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?”

  “He looks black.”

  “Did you se
e what he was wearing?”

  “Yeah,” Zimmerman said. “A dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie, and either jeans or sweatpants and white tennis shoes … he was just staring…”

  “Okay, he’s just walking around the area,” the dispatcher said. It wasn’t really question.

  “Looking at all the houses,” Zimmerman seemed to finish her sentence. “Now he’s just staring at me.”

  About then the teenager started walking toward Zimmerman’s truck, and Zimmerman kept up his play-by-play with the dispatcher.

  “How old would you say he looks?” she asked.

  Zimmerman squinted into the dim, drizzling darkness.

  “He’s got a button on his shirt. Late teens.”

  “Late teens, okay.”

  Zimmerman was getting a little nervous. “Something’s wrong with him. Yup, he’s coming to check me out. He’s got something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is.”

  “Just let me know if he does anything, okay?”

  “How long until you get an officer over here?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got someone on the way,” she reassured him. “Just let me know if this guy does anything else.”

  Adrenaline was flowing in Zimmerman’s veins. “These assholes, they always get away,” he said.

  He had started to give directions to his location when the kid broke into a run.

  “Shit, he’s running,” the watchman said.

  “Which way is he running?”

  “Down toward the other entrance to the neighborhood … the back entrance.” Zimmerman cursed under his breath as he shoved his truck into gear and tried to pursue the kid.

  “Are you following him?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, we don’t need you to do that.”

  Zimmerman copied, but his chase was already over. The kid had vanished between two buildings. Zimmerman got out of his truck to look for a street sign so he could tell the dispatcher his location, and he scanned the shadows for the dark-clad figure. But the kid was gone.