On the stand she was difficult and surly, rolling her eyes and telling the defense attorney that she did not want to return the following day. Many talking heads have excused her behavior as that of a teenager, 19 and still in the 12th grade, even Nancy Grace! And of course she was the last person to speak to Trayvon before he died.
What she related was as riveting as it was hard to understand. She said that George Zimmerman was the aggressor, that Trayvon Martin said “Why you following me for?” and she heard "get off, get off." But she also said she heard the sound of wet grass. Rachel Jeantel's lack of facility with the English language required the court stenographer to stop her more than once to get the testimony recorded correctly. She later explained she is of Haitian descent and grew up speaking Creole and Spanish.
Maybe her lack of grammar and poor communication skills come from reducing every utterance to a tweet. MsRachel_94, apparently didn't have anything to say after today's experience, but according to the Smoking Gun, she deleted 14 tweets and 13 Twitpics. She has tweeted about the case.
It's up to the jury to decide if through it all, what she said matters more than how she said it. The problem is that her testimony has changed. She admitted today to defense attorney Don West being "rushed" in her interview with Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump saying she was distraught and "it didn't mean nothing to me." Despite her reluctance to continue her testimony, Judge Debra S. Nelson has requested Jeantel to be in court Thursday at 9am. Attoney West would do better to elicit just yes and no answers from Ms. Jeantel. If her testimony is Trayvon's side of the story we need to hear it clearly.
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