If Diamond managed to spend the three weeks after the shooting in limbo, she would not be allowed to remain there much longer. Despite her constant need for attention, she knew enough not to seek the kind of attention that her phone witness to Trayvon’s final minutes would surely bring.
Saturday, March 17
Perhaps thinking Crump’s Friday press conference had taken the pressure off her to come forward, Diamond returned to her main phone on Saturday afternoon and resumed her normal pattern of calling and texting. She did, however, abstain from tweeting for a veritable lifetime. For Diamond, this abstinence was worth noting, “Damn, it’s been six hours since tweeted,” she observed in a 8:34 p.m. tweet.
At 9:50 p.m. Diamond tweeted that she was at the movie theater with Jeff and his parents. This was almost assuredly her way of disguising the fact that she had gone clubbing again. Three minutes later she tweeted, “This is the packest I ever seen this shit.” She was not referring to the movie theater.
After speaking with Felicia for about fifteen minutes, Diamond got a call at 10:25 p.m. Although the call lasted only 2.2 minutes, it had to rock Diamond’s world. The call came from Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin. Felicia likely served as go-between. She knew Trayvon. In fact, GPS coordinates show that Trayvon was at Felicia’s house on the afternoon of Sept 29, 2011.
Sunday, March 18
Diamond’s friend with whom she went clubbing, Ariana, began texting Diamond at 10:33 a.m. and continued with thirty text exchanges in the next hour or so. She may have been the newest girlfriend recruited to help prod Diamond into action since Felicia had not succeeded. Felicia got back into the act at 2:50 p.m., followed by another one-minute-plus phone call from Tracy Martin at 3:14 p.m. Tracy was likely asking nicely, and letting the peer pressure do the rest. Steve-O took up the cause immediately after Tracy and then tagged teamed phone calls to Diamond with Mario, calling her again and again into the evening until Diamond appears to have turned off her phone.
Given the unwanted pressure, this would have been the perfect time for Diamond to finally let Tracy and Trayvon’s friends know she was not the one who spoke with Trayvon for hours upon hours, that his real heartthrob was the plus-sized Rachel Jeantel. It would have been the perfect time, that is, if any of that scenario were true. None of it was. Instead, Diamond finally yielded to the pressure and agreed to report to Sybrina's house the next day after school. The pressure must have been enormous and may have included threats to turn her name over to the police and to the public, and even inform her boyfriend, if she did not cooperate. If she did cooperate, if she talked to Crump, Team Trayvon promised to keep her identify secret based on her being a sixteen-year old and a minor, at least according to what Crump would soon report. He later told Court TV, “We pushed her making a statement.”
For the first time publicly, Diamond let on that she was under siege. “This Can’t Be Happening To Me :’(” she tweeted that Sunday evening. The symbol was for crying. She followed soon afterwards with, “Going For A Walk, Need To Ease My Mind.” An hour later, back from the walk, Diamond turned to her traditional form of relief in times of stress, junk food, in this case “Snicker Icecream >>>.”
Monday, March 19
After being dropped off after school at Sybrina Fulton’s house by Francine Serve at around 4 PM, Diamond seems to have spent some time at Sybrina’s house listening to a proposal from Benjamin Crump. The request was to have Diamond return that evening and tape an on-camera interview with Matt Gutman of ABC News. Sybrina later told authorities she then drove Diamond home and spoke to her mother who said she wanted Diamond’s identity kept secret. As mentioned in detail earlier, Diamond backed out of Crump’s plan, allowing only for an over-the-phone interview, which was recorded by Crump with ABC’s Gutman listening in. The call was over by 10:04 p.m. Minutes later, the ever resilient Diamond tweeted, “Watching Shrek,” and at 11:02 p.m. was “Falling Asleep To [Jeff’s] Voice.” That same evening, Al Sharpton dedicated the entire run of his show Politics Nation to the shooting. His half-hour of race-baiting was only marginally less reckless than what Matt Gutman had been doing on ABC. Meanwhile, Trayvon’s friend Steve-O tweeted, “My nigga tray worldwide. #RipTray we miss you dawg.”
Tuesday, March 20
On this day, Diamond’s voice went out over the national airwaves, courtesy of Benjamin Crump’s press conference and later ABC News. ABC’s Diane Sawyer introduced Matt Gutman’s piece by calling Zimmerman the “neighborhood watchdog.” The piece focused on the many failings of the Sanford PD and closed with a photo of a young Trayvon actually hugging a baby. The media pressure emanating from Crump’s press conference was hastening Zimmerman’s arrest.
At the time, no one in the major media asked why Diamond had failed to contact anyone for three weeks, including Trayvon’s parents, about him supposedly being chased down, beaten, and then shot by an unknown man while yelling for help. CNN’s legal analyst Sunny Hostin, like most reporters, had no interest in such questions. She just wanted to see Zimmerman arrested. Diamond’s phone testimony, Hostin claimed right after the press conference, “dispels the notion of self-defense.” The railroading of George Zimmerman and the exploitation of Trayvon Martin were well under way on the national level.
Wednesday, March 21
Sybrina was not too grief-stricken to file applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the phrases, “I Am Trayvon” −# 4,580,571 and “Justice for Trayvon”− #85575974. That same morning on the Today Show, referring to Diamond, Benjamin Crump told Matt Lauer, “She is a sixteen-year-old teenager who just lost a friend very special to her.” His partner Daryl Parks would later tell HLN’s Nancy Grace, “She’s a minor. So it’s a very delicate situation.”
Declining to text on her main phone, Diamond spoke non-stop with Felicia after school and into the evening. Felicia, recall, was Francine Serve’s younger sister. Diamond had to be concerned how this was all unfolding now that her voice was out on the airwaves and might be heard and recognized by her boyfriend Jeff. Her tweets, however, revealed little other than her obsession with food, her gripes about school, and her affection for Jeff “Going In The Shower And Might Take A Nap Until My Baby Come.”
Meanwhile Steve-O continued to mourn the friend he lost. “That man used to ride the bike all the way from krop to our side,” he tweeted, “just to chill.” By “chill” he meant smoke weed. Trayvon was such a pothead that Steve-O and other friends would pay tribute to him by smoking joints next to his grave for months to come.
Thursday, March 22
Indifferent to the fact that Zimmerman was Hispanic, La Raza president Janet Murguía sided with Team Trayvon and called for “a real investigation for this grievous failure of justice.” Whipped to a mindless frenzy by the media, students at Miami Carol City High School, which Trayvon had attended for two years, staged a seemingly impromptu walkout outside the Miami Gardens high school I had visited.
In Sanford, Al Sharpton led a large, angry crowd in a chant of “No justice, no peace.” On that same day, a shaken Bill Lee withdrew from his job as Sanford Police Chief after less than a year in that position. That day too, Seminole County State Attorney Norm Wolfinger took himself off the case. The potato was that hot, and the Zimmerman family was feeling the heat too. George’s parents would soon have to go into hiding when celebrity Rosanne Barr tweeted out their home address.
In Tallahassee, Governor Rick Scott appointed state attorney Angela Corey to take over the investigation. A Republican and an Arab-American, Corey was up for re-election in 2012. She promptly appointed assistant state attorney Bernie de la Rionda as lead prosecutor. The wheels of injustice were grinding forward like a hell-bound freight train.
Diamond again spent much of this day on the phone with Felicia. Mario called her as well. The stress was catching up with her. She could not have been sleeping well. “I’m Soooo Tired !!!!,” she tweeted in the morning and later, “I Was Knocked The Fuck Out In Class, I Needed That Lil Nap!”