George Zimmerman 'Got Away With Murder,' Says Juror B29
Juror B29, the only minority on the all-female jury that acquitted George Zimmerman of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin's death, says Zimmerman "got away with murder" and wants to apologize to the teen's parents.
The juror who revealed her face but only gave her first name, Maddy, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, is a 36-year-old mother of eight who had only moved from Chicago to Seminole County, Fla., just five months before she was selected as juror number 5.
"You can't put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty," Maddy told ABC. "But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence."
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Maddy, who is a nursing assistant, did not agree with the prosecution that the case was about race, but she agreed that Zimmerman shooting of Trayvon Martin was "murder."
"George Zimmerman got away with murder, but you can't get away from God. And at the end of the day, he's going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with," Maddy said. "[But] the law couldn't prove it."
She explained in the interview that she wanted to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder, but there just wasn't enough evidence to meet the standard for murder or manslaughter under Florida law.
"I was the juror that was going to give them the hung jury. I fought to the end," she said.
While Zimmerman admitted that he shot and killed Martin in Sanford on Feb. 26, 2012, he maintained that he did so in self-defense and that caused some trouble for Maddy.
"That's where I felt confused, where if a person kills someone, then you get charged for it," she said. "But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can't say he's guilty."
The woman known as juror B29 during Zimmerman's trial said the case should never have gone to trial and believes it was all a publicity stunt.
"I felt like this was a publicity stunt. This whole court service thing to me was publicity," she said.
Since Zimmerman's acquittal, she explained, she has been wrestling with whether or not she made the right decision, especially as a mother. Five of the six women on the jury were mothers and she feels like she owes Martin's parents an apology.
"It's hard for me to sleep, it's hard for me to eat, because I feel I was forcefully included in Trayvon Martin's death. And as I carry him on my back, I'm hurting as much [as] Trayvon Martin's mother, because there's no way that any mother should feel that pain," she said.
"I felt like I let a lot of people down, and I'm thinking to myself, 'Did I go the right way? Did I go the wrong way?'" she said.
"As much as we were trying to find this man guilty…they give you a booklet that basically tells you the truth, and the truth is that there was nothing that we could do about it," she said. "I feel the verdict was already told."
