Update April 5, 2012: CNN Audio Engineer Confirms My Analysis of “What George Zimmerman Really Said”!

There are millions of loud voices discussing the incident of Sanford, Florida Neighborhood Watch Captain George Zimmerman’s shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on a chill and raining evening on February 26, 2012.

The incident has become a genuine Bonfire of the Vanities as Rev. Louis Farrakhan, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Rev. Jesse Jackson (so many revs it sounds like an engine starting!) are campaigning for “Justice for Trayvon.”

Millions have signed a petition demanding that Zimmerman be arrested.

The New Black Panther Party has issued a “dead or alive” fatwa on George Zimmerman — a Latino with a surname more common among Jews.

President Obama has said that Trayvon Martin looks like the son he would have had.

In Florida a Special Prosecutor and Grand Jury are both in the process of re-investigating the Sanford Police Department’s conclusion that Zimmerman legally shot Martin in self-defense, while Congressional and Department of Justice investigations are already making this a federal case.

And the question supercharging this shooting of a 6’3″ African-American teenager by a 5’9″ Latino-American man in his 20’s is a 911 recording in which George Zimmerman is widely reported to have muttered under his breath, “Fucking coons.”

If George Zimmerman said that, the shooting could be classified as a hate crime under federal law.

There is controversy about what George Zimmerman can be heard saying on that 911 tape. The sound quality is marginal. Some hear “Fucking coons.” Some hear, “Fucking tools.” Some hear, “Fucking punks.”

They’re all wrong.

I downloaded the 911 recording off the web, isolated the phrase, and enhanced it with Roxio.

What George Zimmerman said in rainy 63 degree February weather in Sanford Florida was, “It’s fucking cold.”

The remark is not out of context. A minute or so earlier on the 911 tape George Zimmerman tells the 911 dispatcher, “It’s raining.”

Click on the mugshot of George Zimmerman to listen to my enhanced recording.

George Zimmerman

Now can we all just get along?

Author’s Note March 28, 2012:

Rich Lowry has blogged this article on National Review Online.

A lively discussion follows so I added my own comment:

I wrote the article that Rich Lowry linked to.

My enhancement of the recording was increasing the volume of the upper frequencies — nothing else.

As Rich Lowry notes, the word “It’s” is in both versions, and the phrase, “It’s f***ing coons” is therefore a nonsensical interpretation.” The racist interpretation suggesting a hate crime is therefore not present on the record.

According to Weather Underground, which keeps an hour by hour record of weather on file for numerous locations (I link to its page for Sanford, FL on February 26, 2012 — the evening in question) the temperature was 63 degrees Fahrenheit and we hear George Zimmerman in the beginning of the 911 call telling the dispatcher that it’s raining — confirmed by Weather Underground.

Is 63 degrees and raining “f***king cold”? When I lived in Southern California I used to refer to 60 degrees Fahrenheit as a “bone chilling twenty below eighty.” I’m told Floridians are just as much infants about weather as I was.

J. Neil Schulman

This article is Copyright © 2012 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.