George Zimmerman murder trial witness tells of call with a scared Trayvon Martin

Rachel Jeantel, the last person to talk with Trayvon Martin before he died at the hands of George Zimmerman, testified that she told the teenager to run after he said he was being followed.

Jeantel, now 19, took the stand Wednesday as one of the prosecution’s key witnesses as it tries to build its case that Zimmerman, who identifies himself as Latino, profiled and followed Martin, who was black, on Feb. 26, 2012, before shooting him to death in a gated community in Sanford, Fla. Charged with second-degree murder, Zimmerman, 29, maintains he acted in self-defense after Martin attacked him.

After Jeantel testified, the defense began a grueling cross-examination that focused on past misstatements. “I’m leaving today,” the exasperated witness said at one point, only to be told later that she had to return to the stand Thursday.

Jeantel is important in the case because she was the last person to talk with Martin and can discuss what he was saying in the crucial last moments of his life. On the night of Feb. 26, she was in Miami, talking on her cellphone with Martin, who was in Sanford visiting family. He told her he was going to the store to get some candy and a drink.

Then, she said, he became concerned.

“A man was watching him,” Jeantel said Martin told her, several times. “He said a man kept watching him.

“I asked him how the man looked like,” she said. Martin replied that he “looked like a creepy ... cracker,” she said, using a slang term for a white person.

Jeantel said she warned Martin the man might be a rapist, which he laughed off. They continued chatting, but Martin then said that the man was still trailing him and that he was going to try to lose him. At that point, Jeantel said, she told Martin to run.

The phone cut off, but she called him back and Martin answered and said he still was trying to lose the man following him.

“I said, ‘Oh, you better keep running,’” she said. She said Martin was breathing heavily. At one point he told her he had lost the man following him. Then Martin said, “Oh [expletive],” she said, and told her the man was behind him again.

What followed, Jeantel testified, was an apparent confrontation.

She said she heard Martin say: “What are you following me for?”

“And then I heard a hard-breathing man say, ‘What are you doing around here?’” she said.

She then heard a bump and assumed it was the sound of Martin’s earplugs falling to the ground. A second later, the call dropped.

Defense attorney Don West, seeking to undermine Jeantel’s credibility, focused on two lies she told to Martin’s mother and to a Martin family lawyer, Benjamin Crump. She initially said she was 16, though she was really 18. She said she shaved two years off of her age in the hope of keeping her life private by pretending to be a minor.

The other lie was saying that she had skipped Martin’s funeral because she was in the hospital. This time, asked by lead prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda why she did not go to her friend’s funeral, she replied: “I didn’t want to see the body.”

Jeantel went through about 90 minutes of tough questioning by West, who when court adjourned for the day indicated that he still had hours more to go. The cross-examination was wide-ranging and, at times, rambling, as West sought to get Jeantel to get specific and asked her to compare her statements on Wednesday with her past comments.

As she and West went back and forth, with West pressing her to explain her behavior, images broadcast from the courtroom showed Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, putting his head in his hands.

Earlier, two residents of the housing complex described the night of the shooting and set the stage for Jeantel’s testimony. Jayne Surdyka told the jury that she clearly heard two yells for help that night.

“I truly believed, especially the second yell — it was a yelp — I really felt it was the boy’s voice,” Surdyka said. After objections by the defense that were overruled, she went on to say: “It was like a boy’s voice,” adding that she then heard “pop, pop, pop.”

In cross-examination, the defense tried to undermine her identification of the voice crying for help as being a child’s. The defense also tried to undermine the value of Surdyka’s memory by concentrating on the number of shots she said she heard. Only one shot was found to have been fired.

Jeannee Manalo testified that she was in her living room with her family when she heard howling sounds outside. She said she saw two people on the ground, one on top, hitting the other. She said the bigger of the two was on top and that was Zimmerman, whom she identified based on pictures she saw later.

Under cross-examination, defense attorney Mark O’Mara asked why she had never mentioned her belief that Zimmerman was on top in previous police interviews. He also got her to concede that her perception of Martin’s size was based on 5-year-old photos she had seen of him on television that showed him when he was younger and smaller.

michael.muskal@latimes.com

tina.susman@latimes.com