George Zimmerman at court hearing
Friday (Gary Green/Pool)
After first denying that the account was his, a family member says the MySpace account "datniggytb" actually was George Zimmerman's, but that this wasn't a racist reference.
“That was an old nickname his black friends gave him,” the Zimmerman family member said. “He didn’t have an issue with the profile name.”
The family member, according to a story in the right-wing
Daily Caller, also said "tb" did not refer to Trayvon Benjamin, the first and middle name of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager Zimmerman shot and killed Feb. 26. The initials stand for "Tugboat," another nickname the family member said friends gave Zimmerman because of his chunky build. The editor who wrote the story did not explain the rather strange reasoning behind asking if a years-old account presumably initiated before Zimmerman ever heard of Martin included the boy's initials.
At first, in two phone calls, the source denied that the MySpace account was Zimmerman's:
“All I can tell you is that it didn’t come from him. He doesn’t have a MySpace account. He never has. Anything personal online like that was shut down already … I just talked to George. It’s not him.”
In a third call, the tune was changed. Zimmerman, the source said, had forgotten about that account. But how does one forget about something so recently logged into? The last time the account was used was April 11, the day before Zimmerman was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. It has now been deleted.
Facebook page of Brian Beckmann (deleted)
Meanwhile, a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue captain, Brian Beckmann,
is under investigation for his racist remarks on a Facebook page. The entry has been deleted, but not before being screen-captured:
"Listening to Prosecutor Corey blow herself and her staff for five minutes before pre-passing judgment on George Zimmerman," it read.
"The state seeks reelection again, truth aside. I and my coworkers could rewrite the book on whether our urban youths are victims of racist profiling or products of their failed, shitbag, ignorant, pathetic, welfare dependent excuses for parents, but like Mrs. Corey, we speak only the truth. They're just misunderstood little church going angels and the ghetto hoodie look doesn't have anything to do with why people wonder if they're about to get jacked by a thug."
It's one thing to sit around discussing politics with your white nationalist buddies, quite another to post the resulting sewage on your Facebook page. Is this the kind of fellow we want responding to emergency calls made by folks like Trayvon's parents, who are about as close to this sleazebag's description as Newt Gingrich is to the presidency? What a pathetic representative of the forces that are meant to protect us.
A spokesman for the department said that Beckmann had worked there since 1997 and that the "post on his personal Facebook page is being investigated by Miami-Dade fire rescue."
Stories of Interest:
• George Zimmerman rendered in Skittles, a Denver artist makes his points (in candy pointillism) (Denver Post)
• Most Americans back gun lobby, right to use deadly force (Reuters/Ipsos on-line poll)
• Five Myths About Crime in Black America—and the Statistical Truths (Colorlines)
• Judge in Zimmerman trial may step down (Miami Herald)
• Trayvon Martin shooting: Shame on the NRA and its newest poster child, George Zimmerman (NY Daily News)
