"We did not come to this decision lightly," she said, declining to discuss specifics of the investigation. "We do not prosecute by pressure or petition ... We're law enforcement. We enforce the law."
Zimmerman turned himself in and is in police custody in Florida, Corey said, but would not disclose where he is being held.
According to CNN, Zimmerman left the state of Florida, but returned when he learned he would be charged. Zimmerman will now be transferred to the Seminole County Jail, Corey said.
The announcement comes a day after Zimmerman's attorneys said that they were dropping the case because their client had stopped communicating with them. (On Sunday, Zimmerman launched a website seeking donations for his legal and living expenses.) According to Corey, Zimmerman retained a new attorney "within the last hour."
That attorney, Mark O'Mara, said Zimmerman would plead not guilty, and hoped the judge would consider a bond.
"He is troubled by everything that has happened," O'Mara said. "Truly, it must be frightening to not be able to go into a 7-Eleven or a store. It would trouble any of us."
O'Mara said that because of the "high emotions" involved in the case, Zimmerman would likely be held in protective custody.
O'Mara was a TV analyst during the Casey Anthony trial. Sanford, Fla., is a gated community outside of Orlando. Zimmerman told police he was attacked by Martin and was acting in self-defense.
Earlier this week, Corey announced the case would not go to a grand jury.
"There's been an overwhelming amount of publicity," Corey said, expressing concern about damage to a potential jury pool. "It's regrettable that so many facts got released and misconstrued."
SANFORD -- SANFORD The 911 tapes released by police Friday show neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman called in with a problem: there had been a few break-ins lately, and now there was another suspicious guy in his Retreats at Twin Lakes neighborhood.
He looked like he might be on drugs and “up to no good.”
“It’s raining. He’s just walking around, looking about,” Zimmerman told the dispatcher. “He’s just staring looking at all the houses.”
Later, he lamented: “These a**holes always get away.”Zimmerman is the neighborhood watch volunteer in the Central Florida town of Sanford who on Feb. 26 shot and killed Miami Gardens teenager Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman claimed the teen started an altercation, and then -- in fear for his life -- Zimmerman pulled a weapon from his waistband and fired. He has not been charged.
Family members and attorneys believe the Sanford Police has bent over backward to protect Zimmerman out of a sense of kinship for a man who had devoted his spare time to law enforcement.
In an interview this week with the Miami Herald, Police Chief Bill Lee said the 911 calls would prove the incident was not a case of racial profiling, because when asked whether the suspect was white or black, Zimmerman did not know. However the recording clearly shows that when asked, Zimmerman said, “He looks black.” And then a few moments later, “He’s a black male.”
His family filed a lawsuit to force the Sanford Police Department to release the 911 tapes to clarify the murky circumstances. A hearing had been scheduled for Monday, and in the face of mounting national pressure the Sanford Police decided to release the tapes late Friday. They first allowed the slain teen’s family and attorneys to listen.
According to the recordings posted on the city’s website, Zimmerman was perturbed because Trayvon looked a bit out of sorts. Other callers reported hearing someone calling for help and then a blast that silenced the wailing. One call, so close that the cries for help could be heard, contains two sounds, first a muted bang that family attorneys believe was a warning shot, then the louder crack of close-range gunfire. Sanford police said Saturday that a check of the weapon showed only one shot was fired.
The first call came from Zimmerman.
“He’s just looking at all the houses,” Zimmerman said. “Now he’s just staring at me.”
Then Zimmerman said the suspicious person, who appeared to be black and in his late teens, had his hand in his waist band. “Something’s wrong with him. He’s coming to check me out.”
As he narrates where the man was headed, the dispatcher asks, “are you following him?”
“Yeah,” Zimmerman said.
“We don’t need you to do that.”
Trayvon, 17, had gone to the store for a walk when he encountered Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who was on a mission to put a stop to burglaries.
Several other callers reported hearing someone crying for help, then a shot, then silence.
The sounds in the background echoed the account of the witnesses who came forward to say they heard desperate cries for help from a child, a gunshot, then abrupt silence. Zimmerman later told police that he cried for help and no one came to assist him. Being attacked and afraid for his life, he shot the stranger. But witnesses believe it was Trayvon -- not Zimmerman -- who was crying for help, because had it been Zimmerman, the crying would not have come to such an abrupt end.
“He was saying ‘help!’ Why didn’t anyone help?” said one despondent caller. “I just heard someone say, ‘help me. Help me, and then this person shot him...I would have helped him if I could have.”
Lawyers believe the tapes illustrate that the police have twisted evidence to favor Zimmerman. They like him, lawyers say, because he shares their affinity for law enforcement.
“This is amazing,” family attorney Natalie Jackson said. “The police have been covering up from the start. The most alarming thing was hearing a 17-year-old pleading for his life and someone still pulling the trigger.”
She said calls from other witnesses who heard or saw the incident from their window appeared to back up their claim that it was Zimmerman who had the upperhand throughout the altercation. “Racism doesn’t make you go get a gun and shoot someone,” Jackson said. “Racism makes you profile them. What made him shoot was that he was one of them; he felt he was a cop.”
One caller said he could hear cries for help.
“They are wrestling right in the back of my house,” the man said. “The guy is yelling help, and I’m not going outside.
“I’m pretty sure the guy is dead out here.”
Officials released the calls after meeting with U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, and local officials. Brown also penned a two-page letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking that his department investigate the shooting.
“Given the history of racial tension in the Sanford community, I believe it would be wise for the Department of Justice to become involved and I request an emergency meeting with you or a senior DOJ official on Tuesday, March 20,” wrote Brown. Her letter was accompanied by one from Sanford Mayor Jeff Triplett, who said he wished to attend the meeting.
Martin, who was from Miami Gardens, was killed in Sanford, a town of 55,000 just north of Orlando. His father took Trayvon there after the junior was suspended for 10 days from Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High.
The family has refused to say why Trayvon was suspended, only offering that he had violated school policy. They said his act was not violent or criminal.
“I wanted him to get back focused on his priorities, his goals,” Martin said of his decision to drive to Sanford with his son. “I wanted some one-on-one time.”
Tracy Martin, who lives in Miami-Dade, is divorced from Trayvon’s mom. He says he often visits his girlfriend Brandy Green, who has rented the same townhouse in Sanford for more than four years.
It was there, at the Retreat at Twin Lakes townhouse complex, that Trayvon went on foot to get candy from a nearby 7-Eleven on a rainy Sunday night. The racially mixed neighborhood had recently suffered a spate of thefts recently, prompting Zimmerman to go on nightly patrols looking for suspicious strangers. And Trayvon was an outsider in a small gated community where most folks know their neighbors.
“He [Trayvon] didn’t know who this guy was,” said Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton. “He was placed in a situation where he felt like he could not get away. He’s going to defend himself. I don’ t know if he mouthed off.”
Zimmerman told the dispatchers: “He has his hand in his waistband. ... He has something in his hand.”
When police approached Trayvon’s body on the grassy path between the townhouse back porches, they found no I.D. on him. Police ran his fingerprints, but found no record that would help identify him.
When he didn’t return back to the townhouse, it would be another 12 hours before Tracy Martin found out his son was dead.
“I started making calls to see if he was arrested,” he said.
Calls to 911 led him to missing persons, where he left a description of his son. Soon a marked patrol car followed by detectives arrived at Green’s rented townhouse.
“It was drizzling a bit, I said, ‘lets go in the house.’ He [the detective] pulled out a card and said he was from major crimes. Then he said he wasn’t sure, he had sketchy details, but there was an altercation, and Trayvon was shot once in the chest.”
Weeks later, the Feb. 26 incident gained more national exposure. People have flooded the local police and prosecutor with phone calls and emails demanding criminal charges.
“The attitude is that we should just make an arrest and let a jury decide,” Chief Lee said in an interview this week. “But to make an arrest, we would have to sign a sworn affidavit that we believe the case to be true. That would be irresponsible. We just do not have the evidence to disprove what Mr. Zimmerman says.”
The case is in the hands of the Brevard-Seminole State Attorney’s office.
Zimmerman’s father released a statement Friday saying his son was being unfairly skewered in the press. He insisted that his son did not follow or provoke Trayvon.
Zimmerman has been in hiding since the incident and, it’s unknown whether he has hired an attorney.
The Rev. Al Sharpton was expected to show up in Sanford Friday along with representatives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A rally is planned for March 26, the day of a Sanford City Council meeting. And Atlanta’s New Order National Human Rights Organization said it will travel from Atlanta to Miami Gardens on March 23 to show support for the family.
That new swell of activism has left Trayvon’s mom, 46, criss-crossing the state talking about her slain son. She met with Miami Herald reporters and editors Thursday.
He was six-three, 140 pounds, and eating everything in sight, including his favorite fried chicken with french fries and large drink. He suffered from the death of an older mentor four years ago, and on the day he died he wore a button in remembrance of him.
“He has never been in trouble. He has never been arrested,” Fulton said. “He has never been in a fight that I know of.” She drove Trayvon to school every day.
“I’ve always driven my kids to school,” she said, choking back tears. “He would text me throughout the day and call me when he got home from school.”
Trayvon’s grades were average, although he used to take advanced courses. He recently transferred from Carol City High because the family moved and she wanted him to stay close to his older brother, 21-year-old Jahvaris Fulton, a junior at Florida International University.
After Martin’s uncle, whose passion was planes, got into a car accident and became a quadriplegic, Martin wanted to do what his uncle was no longer able to accomplish. He attended George T. Baker Aviation School during his first two years of high school as part of a dual-enrollment program.
“My brother pushed him, forced him, put pressure on him, to achieve this,” Fulton said. “Tray liked working with his hands. He wanted to work in aviation.”
He rode horses at a stable in Davie and loved music. He enjoyed taking trips to Denver and New York City, where they saw the play The Addams Family on Broadway.
Many residents in Sanford have wondered whether the Miami teen reacted aggressively when approached by Zimmerman. Was he afraid? Angry that he was being followed by a stranger?
“He wasn’t a man of many words. He did more listening than talking and wasn’t one to provoke,” said Trayvon’s cousin, Darrell Finley, better known as the musician “Alyric.”
“You almost had to get real close to him to hear his voice. That’s why hearing all these versions that he attacked this man seems so far-fetched.”
Miami Herald writers Monique O. Madan and Charles Rabin contributed to this report.
