Update: Special prosecutor Angela Corey has announced that Zimmerman with murder in the second degree. She has indicated that Zimmerman is in custody inside the state of Florida. (The full press conference video is now embedded below.)
Update: NBC News is now reporting that Trayvon Martin’s confessed killer, George Zimmerman, has been taken into custody. (Seems he wasn’t that “far from Florida” after all.)
Live video of Corey’s 6:00pm ET press conference announcing the charges will be available in the embedded video below. Our earlier post, written before Zimmerman’s arrest, is below the jump. We will post more updates as they come.
Angela Corey, the special prosecutor appointed by Governor Rick Scott to investigate the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, announced earlier in the week that she’d forego the previously scheduled grand jury hearing — leaving the decision whether or not to file criminal charges against Trayvon’s killer, George Zimmerman, purely up to her. A law enforcement official tells NBC News that Corey has made up her mind: Zimmerman will be charged, but the specific charges are not yet known.
(Corey will stage a presser at 6pm ET, which we’ll carry live on msnbc and on this blog.)
This is odd timing, considering that Zimmerman’s legal counsel deserted him yesterday. They claim he’d stopped communicating with them, despite their begging.
“I’d have to count how many text messages I sent saying: ‘Please call me. Please call me collect. Please text me. Please email me. Please, so we can go forward,’” one of Zimmerman’s lawyers, Craig Sonner, said about his former client. “After I started getting calls from different people saying that he was giving statements to the media, calling the prosecutor’s office and not calling me, that’s when it started dawning on me that I wasn’t the attorney of record anymore.”
The now ex-attorneys/legal advisors admitted during the presser that Zimmerman is “far from Florida,” and “well-hidden.” They reiterated that in their interview this morning on NBC’s “Today” (above). Does Fox News host Sean Hannity know?
Yesterday’s presser also revealed that while Zimmerman hadn’t been in touch with his attorneys lately, he’d called Hannity — who has now “set the record straight” by not revealing much at all:
…yesterday, I was contacted by an individual that we in fact believe was George Zimmerman. He reached out to me, we spoke on the phone about his case and I agreed not to report on the contents of that conversation. That’s it. I know nothing about his relationship with his now former attorneys.
So, Hannity may or may not know his whereabouts; his attorneys definitely do, but he’s just not that into them anymore. Does Corey herself know? The attorneys indicated that Zimmerman, contrary to their advice, had been in touch with her, too. And previously, those same attorneys said he’d turn himself in if he’s charged. We’ll see how true that is in short order.
Maybe then, we’ll be talking less about websites and PayPal accounts and Sean Hannity, and return to what truly matters in this case.
Jamil Smith