Except for the fact that both murders were senseless and tragic, and both crimes took down young men who should have had long and promising lives ahead of them, the circumstances around the murders diverge. Ryan was robbed, stabbed 20 times by a pair of crazed meth heads who left him to die on a dirt road near Wahneta. Trayvon was allegedly stalked inside the grounds of a gated community by an over-zealous and seemingly paranoiac community watch volunteer who shot him apparently during a struggle.
There are striking parallels, however. Both cases involved some sketchy police conduct, the murders both occurred in Central Florida and both victims were young and members of minority groups. Trayvon Martin was 17 and African-American, and Ryan Skipper was 25 and gay.
It took a month or so for the Martin case to gain attention, and now it has become a firestorm. In the Skipper case, the shock was immediate, but because of the way Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd characterized the case in his first news conference, interest in it in the national media fizzled over night.
At a news conference with local reporters and an AP stringer a few hours after the suspects in the case had been arrested, Sheriff Judd wasted no time in smearing the victim. “What we do know,” Judd said “is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”
Judd told the reporters that said that Ryan after picking up this “wrong person,” Ryan had taken him back home, where — and this is key, they did not have sex — but rather smoked pot and discussed a scheme for forging checks using Ryan’s laptop.
In other words, Judd seemed to be saying, Ryan was out looking for trouble and found it, and so got what he deserved.
It was this unsavory — and inaccurate — version of the crime that went out on the wires. The national media made a collective assessment that this was not another Mathew Shephard case, not another instance of the martyrdom of a young gay man — and they moved on, never to return. To this day.
What was immediately striking about Judd’s statement was that because there were no witnesses other than the killers themselves, the only source for Judd’s assertions had to have been his murderers — who, despite being pathetic losers, knew enough to spin what happened that night in a way that made their victim look bad in the eyes of future jurors.
As the case developed, it came to light that Ryan was not out cruising for rough trade, as Judd had claimed. Nor did he discuss forging checks with one of his killers.
Grady Judd, who told a newspaper reporter just days after Ryan was murdered that “God is number one in my life, and I make no big decisions for this organization without first praying about it,” later apologized for accusing Ryan of conspiring to forge checks. But he has never apologized for his smears against Ryan at the same time that Ryan’s family and friends were absorbing the shock of his death.
The core similarity in the Martin and Skipper murders is that, in both cases, the only witnesses to the crime were the killers, and that, in both instances, police appear to have been only too eager to accept the killers’ versions of events on face value.
Justice was served in Ryan Skipper’s case. In 2009, both of his killers were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
As things stand now in the Martin murder case, it is still unclear why Sanford police did not arrest his alleged killer, George Zimmerman. Initial reports had it that Zimmerman claimed self-defense, that he had received a broken nose and a laceration on the back of his head before shooting Trayvon. But newly released video taken the night of the crime shows Zimmerman arriving at the police station with no sign of a broken nose or a fresh wound on his head.
Let’s hope justice is finally done in the Trayvon Martin case, as it was in Ryan Skipper’s. The national attention the Martin case has received makes this outcome more likely than it was just a few weeks ago. But let’s also hope that, if it is proved that the police mishandled the Trayvon Martin case, there will be the sort of accountability in Sanford that is still sorely lacking in Polk County five years on.
This is ridiculous! The guy was attacked by this idiot and he defended himself. Florida says you can do that. We have an eye-witness that says he saw Trayvan Martin attacking Zimmerman. He has a broken nose and a bleeding neck. The masses jumped the gun and now they just look stupid. Sharpton is doing the same as always.