Zimmerman rescues man from burning truck -- does it matter?

Would he have driven on by if they were black? OMG @ETpro? shaking my head

Do you think he’d have driven on by if they were black?

Let’s just be glad he didn’t feel threatened.

Does it matter? It does to the guy in the truck.

Not knowing him & all facts of either case, all I can say is it’s good karma to help. It doesn’t prove anything.

It doesn’t make me feel any different about what happened with Trayvon.

No, it doesn’t make me feel any differently about what happened with Trayvon Martin.

It makes me feel no different about the murder of Trayvon Martin. Good for Mr. Zimmerman and for the family he saved. Trayvon Martin is no less dead.

Potentially saving four lives does not make up for the one he ended.

I think he is going to have to be making amends like this his whole life if he has any hope for redemption.

I totally forgive him now for assaulting a police officer in an alcoholic rage. I am willing to consider hearing his side of the domestic violence restraining order. Saving a family buys some good will.

Of course it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fit the paradigm.

Just like it doesn’t matter that over 90% of murders of black men are committed by other black men. Nobody wants to look at that sad bit of bad news. It doesn’t fit the paradigm.

The paradigm is that blacks are permanent victims of white racism, and that George Zimmerman, the “not quite white guy, but certainly close enough ”, not the prosecution and jury, not blacks themselves, is a problem. Even the President of the United States, the Chief Executive, the Man of the People, won’t look at an increasingly depraved and self destructive element of the culture and give an objective comment.

So why would this story matter?

@josie I just want to be clear about your answer. Objectively, who do you think is a problem? Who is a depraved people and self destructive element of the culture?

@chyna is right. It matters to the people he saved.

Continuing to call him a racist, when you don’t even know the man, does no one any good. Sit at your computer and bitch about a man you don’t know. Keep adding fuel to the fire instead of caring about bigger problems in the world. We’ll see what good that does everyone.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought

Just so it is clear, I am talking about the black people who are responsible for over 90% of black murders. A black kid per day is killed in Chicago by another black kid. That is depravity and self destruction. Something is wrong there, and if anybody says anything at all about it, it is a speech about getting guns away from them.

@bkcunningham I’m going to stay out of other’s way in this thread as much as I can, but let me just explain that I listened to much of the trial, and if I had been on the jury, I’d have definitely voted not guilty just as the jurors did. I never saw how the facts proved that Zimmerman was guilty of anything more than defending himself from being beaten to a pulp and perhaps killed. I saw no facts proving that race had ANYTHING to do with what happened. It may have. It may not. But the facts presented at trial did not lead to the conclusion that it did.

I know that racism and profiling still exist, and they stink. I know reverse racism is real and stinks as well. I do think we need national consciousness raising on race, but I just feel that George Zimmerman is the wrong poster boy for that debate. Where were all the caring souls when a jury found Marissa Alexander guilty despite Florida’s Stand Your Ground law? She’s serving 20 years now for just firing a warning shot to scare of her abusive estranged husband who was trying to kick down her door. Want a case where race OBVIOUSLY was a factor, let’s campaign to free Marissa Alexander and not crucify a possibly innocent George Zimmerman.

He was already well known in the area for wanting to help people. This is verifiable. Some people are like that even in this jacked up world. Then they find themselves in a confrontation of a lifetime and all that is gone? It’s good to know all of that hasn’t made him withdrawn from caring. Racism will never go away because there is too much in it to lose from a certain group of instigators. The thing that screwed them up bad is that George Zimmerman isn’t white. Thats what they want badly. Zimmerman has nothing to apologize for even though he has. How many people kept on driving past the wreck because they were too busy?.I wonder.

Hitler was nice to his dog.

I never thought the man was 100% evil. He can do good things, obviously, and I’m glad he did. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do a bad thing, though.

Hitler stole his first dog from the British in the trenches of WWI, killed his last dog Blondi to test out the cyanide he was about to ingest in his cowards bunker.
Most likely had anal sex with his dogs too, yep…Hitler loved his dogs alright.

I heard the people in the crashed car got out and ran when they saw him coming.

He’s mirroring Superman when he went bad for a time in the third film, confused by the dark side then enlightened once again as the saviour of the masses.

Right. I’m sure we’re all prepared to argue for letting people get away with (what we consider to be) a crime just in case they end up doing something positive.~
I can’t see how this would change anyone’s mind – regardless of where they stand on the verdict.

As an aside – my father and I helped a family of four stuck in an overturned vehicle when I was about 11 or 12 years old. We were in the White Mountains and saw the vehicle overturn as it passed us. We turned around and found that there were kids in the back, but everyone had been wearing seatbelts. They were very confused and had problems getting themselves out of the belts while upside down. The parents were both bleeding from the head. Once everyone was out of the car, my father tried to find where the blood was coming from on the woman. She suddenly pulled off a wig to reveal a pretty big gash.
Anyway, this is unrelated. And we didn’t kill anyone before this event.

It doesn’t matter to me. Correctly or incorrectly, the jury found Zimmerman not guilty of murder and set him free. If civil suits come, my interest in his case will return. But in the meantime, I couldn’t care less about his daily life.

Um, y’all should listen to his 911 call, which was the extent of his “helping.” You can hear others in the background, doing the actual helping, and three times George refers to the “they” who are helping the family get out, as in “they have them out now.”

With George, it turns out that 911 calls tell us more about the actual person than his stories (or the stories of his attorney) do. Mark O’Mara said of the incident, “This is quintessential George.” Indeed it is. Always made out to be something other than what he actually is…

The man is a tool. He will always be a tool.
I don’t care how many families he saves, he destroyed one family. He can’t take it back, he can’t fix it, he’s nothing but an asshat.

@ETpro I believe Zim was wrong in his actions with T, and that ended in T’s death. That doesn’t mean Zim is a racist or a repeat stalker or something, maybe just a regular guy who made a bad decision and is paying for it via public opinion. Zim is a fallible human like all of us, so I won’t demonize him either.

@KNOWITALL I’d agree that he made a way wrong decision in getting out of his truck and following Martin on foot. He may well have made additional judgement errors, but the evidence isn’t there to show them.

One more family saved and he’s good to go!

Does nobody else find it creepy that he is likely roaming the highways with a police scanner? Of course he has to do something now that he can no longer roam the neighborhood reporting open garage doors…

@GoldieAV16 No. Not creepy. Police scanners are owned by lots of people as well as roadways are used by them. Total coincidence. Even if you try to string things together to make a story line. I can see how this event will make some Zim haters frustrated being what they want to see is him messing up now. Nothing to see here, move along.

@woodcutter the fact that he has the scanner is probably not @GoldieAV16‘s issue. The creepy part is potentially using it to race around the city seeking the opportunity to play hero.

@SuperMouse ”seeking the opportunity to play hero.?” I suppose there will always be people who care. I can see why this idea might seem suspicious to some who think help can only be administered by certain qualified people. Some here should try to dig up any copies of the accident report to see if the first responders felt he was being a hindrance. Zimmerman’s history in his area has lots of instances of helping others. Thats not something an introvert would do. But since he was involved in a tragedy where many did not agree with the outcome there will be those who will just flat out to refuse to take yes for an answer.

Did he respond to the accident because he heard it on a police scanner? I thought he was the one who reported the accident?

@woodcutter yes and Mr. Zimmerman has proven how much he cares, what with the assault charge and the restraining order and the murder of an unarmed young man. Give me a break.

He likes playing the hero. Luckily, this time it didn’t involve shooting an innocent boy trying to defend himself.

@bkcunningham Simple, stupid things like facts should never be allowed to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

@josie Why is it relevant how many murders of black men are committed by other black men? The reason this case became national news had nothing to do with race (even if race issues eventually got attached to it). It became news because Florida police weren’t going to even try making a case against Zimmerman despite the fact that he had followed someone not committing a crime and ended up shooting him. Even if you think Zimmerman was innocent, all shootings deserve an investigation.

@Patton After a thorough investigation, the police determined it was self defense and not prosecutable. And it did turn out at trial to be just that. Charges were only brought because race came into play. If it had been two white guys or two black guys, it would have been a minor local story at best. I wish it were not so, but that is the stone cold truth.

“After a thorough investigation…”

Hardly what I would call thorough. They bought Zimmerman’s version from the get go. They drug tested the victim and not the shooter. They mishandled evidence, they were so sure. They sat around for 44 days before even arresting Zim, which is when the true investigation started. A lot of evidence had grown cold in this time – including the memories of the neighbors who saw something.

This was anything but a a thorough investigation, imo. It was a case of pre-judging innocence or guilt, aka prejudice. Look at the way they handled Zim in the police station, letting him walk around without even a police escort, like he owned the place.

Turns out, he did.

@GoldieAV16 Read Helter Skelter. In such a high profile murder case, with multiple, brutal murders of important celebrities, the LAPD’s gross mishandling of evidence and the crime scene is beyond belief. It makes the tiny Sanford Police Department look like the best we might expect from the FBI or MI6.

I have read that book. LAPD has a pretty sordid history.

In other news on this case? The sheriff who responded to the overturned SUV and was listed on the incident report was an ardent GZ supporter on his FB page. Daily posts of support, and updates on the case. Not a mention of meeting his “hero” the day of the crash. And he posted about his work often, in fact some of his posts led to being reprimanded by the department. He has since taken down his FB account, but not before it was saved in screen shots.

Weird, huh?

I know that if I wrote about someone daily, I’d mention meeting them. I might even get a little excited about it. This story stunk to high heaven from day one.

@GoldieAV16 George Zimmerman….not really a big fan of the police read… http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/24/George-Zimmerman-Black-Homeless-Man-Sanford-Police

First, not being a fan of police brutality is not the same as not being a fan of police.

I do know that the GZ family made that claim.

But oddly enough, nobody from any of the churches where he supposedly handed out the fliers remembers anything of the kind. It was just two years before the Trayvon Martin killing. I would think that the the priests in these predominantly black churches would remember a white man organizing to get justice for a black man…

But to me there are so many oddities and inconsistencies in everything surrounding Zimmerman, past and present, in every aspect of his life involving the law, that I can only surmise something is amiss. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire.

Also, for what it is worth, Zimmerman’s best friend, and according to him his only close friend, and the man who taught him to shoot was Mark Osterman, a former Seminole County Sheriff Deputy, who was forced to resign and is now supposedly a federal air marshall.

Osterman was the first person GZ’s wife called and was at the scene with her. He also accompanied GZ to his police interviews and was with him on the walk through to re-create the scene.

The incident that led up to his resignation is pretty interesting.

@ETpro I think if you look at the timeline, you’re just wrong. Race came into play after it became a national story, but it became a national story because the police weren’t going to investigate (which is standard, even when a self-defense claim is plausible). Race sure helped the story rocket to the top of the headlines, but my point was that the original reason it became national news wasn’t race. The earliest articles on the issue didn’t even mention race. As for the charges, it’s really easy to get an acquittal when you overcharge. So I’m not really impressed by the trial results.

@Patton No, the police were not going to investigate further based on their initial findings, but prosecutor Angela drove across counties after hearing the news to push for chagres. I do think you are right, however, that the state deliberately overcharged in order to assure an acquittal. The whole thing had little to do with justice and lots to do with a carefully orchestrated media circus. Media grandstanding is what you get when slots in the criminal justice system are filled by elections.