A day after George Zimmerman's lawyers held a news conference to announce they were quitting as his legal counsel, special prosecutor Angela Corey charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder in the February 26 death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford.
Talk about timing.
His lawyers yesterday complained that Zimmerman had completely cut off communication with them, putting up a website for himself asking
for donations and reportedly calling Sean Hannity after the Fox News
host gave his dad softball questions about whether Zimmerman "mentored a
black teenager." Zimmerman lawyer Craig Sonner said yesterday he was
fed up.
Update: Zimmerman's new lawyer, Mark O'Mara, says he will ask a judge to let his client
Update: Zimmerman's new lawyer, Mark O'Mara, says he will ask a judge to let his client
out on bail, possibly as early as Thursday. O'Mara says Zimmerman will plead not guilty.
"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,'" Sonner said, according to the Miami Herald.
"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 Herald
also paraphrased concerns from his attorneys about Zimmerman's mental
health, writing that "the attorneys described a man who appears to be
unraveling from the stress, the bounty put on his head by extremists and
from more than 40 days hiding in a room."
The
lawyers said Zimmerman was hiding "far from Florida" but was still in
the U.S. The actual charges were not revealed Wednesday afternoon by the
official cited by the Post.
"As of the last couple of days, he has not returned phone calls, text messages, or emails," Sonner said, per the AP. "He's gone on his own."
Other coverage of George Zimmerman on the Pulp: