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Los Angeles Times: Protests grow as new details emerge in black teen's killing
Civil rights leaders descend on the shaken town of Sanford, Fla., and new reports conflict about who was the aggressor before the shooting.
SANFORD, Fla. — The nation's leading civil rights advocates and outraged everyday people packed this laid-back lakeside community Monday to demand the arrest of the man who killed African American teenager Trayvon Martin, even as police sources portrayed the unarmed youth as the aggressor.
Beneath an incongruously cheerful Florida sun, the passionate but well-behaved crowd marched, chanting and shouting, toward the Sanford Civic Center. Inside, the City Commission ceded most of its regularly scheduled meeting to Martin's grieving parents, their lawyer and a roster of civil rights luminaries who criticized the city's leadership and its handling of a case that, to some, symbolizes lingering racism and a justice system that too often fails black victims of violence.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson compared city leaders to Pontius Pilate — who, he said, was just as guilty as "those who held the hammer and the nail" — for deciding not to arrest George Zimmerman, the man who says he shot Martin in self-defense after reporting him to police as a suspicious person. Zimmerman followed Martin after a police dispatcher warned him not to.