A teenage boy in a gray hooded sweatshirt leaves a 7-Eleven’s neon brightness with his purchase of some candy and an iced tea, and heads back into the wet Sunday evening of Feb. 26, back to a residential complex with a forbidding gate and a comforting name.
Trayvon Martin was more than welcome there; he was expected.
With his hood up as the rain came down, Trayvon made his way to one gated community among many, the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Past a dozen storefronts, four of them vacant. Past signs and billboards shouting “Now Leasing!” and “Rent Specials!” His was a tour of a post-bust stretch of Sanford.
For more than two years now, Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin, a truck driver from Miami, had been dating Brandy Green, a juvenile detention officer in Orlando. She lived at the Retreat with her 14-year-old son, Chad, and it was not uncommon for the Martins to drive up from Miami for overnight visits.
...Trayvon was interested in girls, computer games, sports and the beat of the rap and hip-hop emanating from the ear buds of his smartphone. Sleeping in Miami Dolphins bedsheets, he was all teenage boy, and more.
He called himself “Slimm” on Twitter, and used a handle, @no_limit_nigga, that echoed a song by the rappers Kane & Abel. On Facebook, he expressed interest in airplanes and “South Park”; Bob Marley and LeBron James. On MySpace, he posted snapshots of his young life: admiring an airplane; fishing with his father; displaying a cake decorated with the words “Happy Birthday Tray.”
Easygoing, with a default mood set at “chillin’,” as one schoolmate, Suzannah Charles, put it. The kind of kid who made tiny cakes in an Easy-Bake Oven with his 7-year-old cousin; who spoon-fed a close uncle, Ronald Fulton, who is quadriplegic, when his nurse was unavailable; who was an integral part of a close-knit family — raised properly, family members say, by Mr. Martin and his ex-wife, Sybrina Fulton, who works for Miami-Dade County’s housing agency.
Ms. Green described him as the kind of kid who did not bring attitude into a house, and who knew how to behave respectfully in the homes of others. “He was smooth, quiet,” she said. “He took care of his appearance. He had swag.”
But Trayvon was a teenager, not an angel. In his last year at his high school in north Miami-Dade County, he had received three suspensions — for tardiness, for graffiti and, most recently, for having a baggie with a trace of marijuana in his backpack.
This last suspension, for 10 days, was enough for Trayvon’s father, who stayed on top of him about his whereabouts and middling grades; after all, he wanted to go to college, just like his quiet older brother, Jahvaris Fulton, 21, a student at Florida International University.
Mr. Martin said that he had taken Trayvon with him to Sanford to keep him from hanging around Miami, doing nothing, and to talk some sense into him.
These recent problems, all nonviolent, hardly reflected the essence of Trayvon Martin, his family and friends say. He was kindhearted, even-tempered and very thoughtful. That night, for example, while his father and Ms. Green were out having dinner in Orlando, Trayvon asked Chad, Ms. Green’s son, if he wanted anything from the store.
Skittles, the younger boy said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-prompts-a-review-of-ideals.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
