George Zimmerman reenacts shooting

"He took my head and slammed it against the concrete several times, and each time I thought my head was going to explode and I thought I was going to lose consciousness," George Zimmerman told police the day after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

"I started screaming for help," but Martin pressed his hands over Zimmerman's mouth and nose, he said. "He told me to shut the f&#k up, and I was suffocating."

Zimmerman told police he was lying on the ground, but his head was on the concrete.

"I didn't want him to keep slamming my head on the concrete so I kind of shifted. But when I shifted my jacket came up…and it exposed my firearm. That's when he said you are going to die tonight. He took one hand off my mouth, and slid it down my chest. I took my gun aimed it at him and fired."

The latest and most detailed account yet of what happened in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26 comes from a voice stress test that Zimmerman passed, along with a video re-enactment, a handwritten statement and audio interviews conducted in the days after the shooting by investigators.

The material was released by Zimmerman's attorney today on the website gzlegalcase.com, a website managed by the Zimmerman defense team.

Watch George Zimmerman Reenact the Shooting of Trayvon Martin

The relatively consistent statements portray a man trying to convince investigators that he was in a life and death struggle that left him with little choice but to kill the unarmed teenager.

The documents also show that in the days following the shooting, the lead investigator was not accepting Zimmerman's version of events and recommended that charges be filed against Zimmerman.

"I shot him, and I didn't think I hit him because he sat up and said, 'Oh you got me. You got me, you got it,'" said Zimmerman during a nearly 20-minute re-enactment shot by investigators at the scene of the shooting the next day.

Watch George Zimmerman's Lie Detector Test

In the video Zimmerman, 28, gives a blow by blow description of how the fight began and depicts Martin as the aggressor, a key point as his legal team builds his defense on Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law.

Zimmerman said he was driving to buy groceries when he spotted the unarmed teen walking near a house that he knew Martin did not live in and called police to report a suspicious person.

"I just felt like something was off about him…and there's been a history of break-ins ... so I said you know just better to call. I kept driving and I passed him, and he kept staring at me and staring around," Zimmerman said.

Read George Zimmerman's Handwritten Statement

He took investigators to the house where he first spotted the teen and got on the phone with police. At that point he says he lost sight of Martin.

With bandages clearly visible on the back of his head and nose in the video, he took investigators through the neighborhood showing them where he was when the responder told him that he did not have to follow Martin. Zimmerman says by the time of the request he was no longer in his car and wanted to figure out exactly where he was in the subdivision, so that the officer dispatched to the scene could find him.

"I was walking back. I didn't see anything again, came back to my truck and when I got to right about here, he yelled from behind to me."

"He said, 'Yo, you got a problem?' and I turned around and said no I don't have a problem," said Zimmerman.

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Zimmerman case: Should charges be dropped?

Two prominent U.S. lawyers are among the skeptics questioning whether evidence in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin supports the second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman, given the confessed shooter's apparent injuries and freshly released eyewitness accounts.

"There is no second-degree murder evidence in this case," Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said. "It's a very close case."

Details released in the past week add to the picture of what might have transpired on that rainy Feb. 26 before Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in the Sanford, Fla., community where Martin, 17, was staying with his father's fiancee, shot the teen dead.

Previously unknown particulars, including the scrape on Martin's knuckle and photos of Zimmerman's battered and swollen face -- which were taken moments after he shot and killed Martin in what he says was self defense -- coupled with eyewitness accounts that back up Zimmerman's story, suggest for some that the prosecutor overreached.

"I'd rather play the defense than the prosecutor, because there's no way you get a murder-two conviction," journalist-attorney Geraldo Rivera said on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" last week.

Zimmerman, 28, whose father is white and mother Hispanic, had volunteered for the neighborhood watch committee. He has said that he shot Martin, an African-American, in self-defense after the teen knocked him to the ground, banged his head against the ground and went for Zimmerman's gun.

The release of evidence by the prosecution Thursday also included potentially damning eyewitness accounts of the tussle between the two. One man at the scene told police he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, pummeling him mixed martial arts-style.

With more of the prosecution's evidence now public, legal experts like Dershowitz are blaming what they're already calling "the failure" of this racially charged case on Special Prosecutor Angela Corey.

"If there are demonstrations, the finger of responsibility will point directly at the prosecutor," Dershowitz said.

Corey, the state attorney in Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit Court, was assigned to the case by Florida Gov. Rick Scott nearly a month after the shooting. Corey said this weekend that evidence released so far is not the sum total of her case.

"What the general public has to remember and the media has to remember is that there is a lot we cannot release by law," Corey said.

Zimmerman's attorney Mark O'Mara apparently agrees with Corey.

"[It is] way too early to tell," he said. "That's me not only commenting on evidence, but the weight of all the evidence. And I don't even have all the evidence."

One key to the case is which of the two men instigated the clash that left Martin dead. The prosecution says Zimmerman initiated the altercation when he "profiled" Martin that night, and then got out of his car to follow him. In the newly released documents, lead homicide officer on the case, Chris Serino of the Sanford Police Department, called the shooting "avoidable" had Zimmerman remained in his vehicle.

What has yet to be seen are two main pieces of evidence: Zimmerman's statement on the night of the incident, and his reenactment of the events of that night, which could prove vital when and if the case is heard in court.

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Evidence released in George Zimmerman case

  Eyewitness NewsORLANDO -- When George Zimmerman tries to convince a judge or a jury that he shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense, the evidence in the case appears to be a mixed bag.

More than 200 pages of photos and eyewitness accounts released by prosecutors Thursday show he and Martin were in a loud and bloody fight in the moments leading up to the shooting and that Zimmerman appeared to be getting the worst of it, with wounds both to his face and the back of his head.

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But the original lead detective in the case believed Zimmerman caused the fight by getting out of his vehicle to confront Martin, who wasn't doing anything criminal, and then could have defused the situation by telling Martin he was just a concerned citizen and tried to talk to him. He didn't think Zimmerman could legally invoke Florida's "stand your ground" law and should be charged with manslaughter.

Under that law, people are given wide latitude to use deadly force rather than retreat in a fight if they believe they are in danger of being killed or seriously injured, they weren't committing a crime themselves and are in a place they have the legal right to be. The original prosecutor in the case accepted Zimmerman's invocation of the law after the Feb. 26 shooting but a special prosecutor rejected his claim last month and charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. The former neighborhood watch volunteer has pleaded not guilty, has been released on bail and reportedly is in hiding.

He and his attorney will have two more chances to invoke the law. First, they will try to convince a judge during what will be a mini-trial. If the judge agrees, the charges will be dropped although prosecutors could appeal. That is likely months away. If the judge rejects the claim, Zimmerman could they try to convince the jury and win an acquittal. A trial is unlikely to start before next year. Zimmerman's attorney, Mark O'Mara, didn't return a phone call seeking comment Thursday.

Joelle Moreno, a Florida International University law school professor, said the evidence now released makes it difficult to predict if that defense will work. She is a member of a state senator's task force examining the law.

Larry Kobilinsky, professor of forensic science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said that after reviewing the evidence, he thinks Zimmerman is in a good position.

"I think the prosecution's case has been seriously diminished by all of this evidence," he said.

Still, many of the pertinent questions remain unclear: What was in Zimmerman's mind when he began to follow Martin in the gated community where he lived? How did the confrontation between the two begin? Whose screams for help were captured on 911 calls? And why did Zimmerman feel that deadly force was warranted? Did the fact that Martin was black play a role in Zimmerman's actions?

The evidence supporting Zimmerman's defense includes a photo showing the neighborhood watch volunteer with a bloody nose on the night of the fight. A paramedic report says Zimmerman had a 1-inch laceration on his head and forehead abrasion.

"Bleeding tenderness to his nose, and a small laceration to the back of his head. All injuries have minor bleeding," paramedic Michael Brandy wrote about Zimmerman's injuries in the report.

But other evidence supports the contention of Martin's parents that Zimmerman was the aggressor.

The investigator who called for Zimmerman's arrest, Christopher Serino, told prosecutors the fight could have been avoided if Zimmerman had remained in his vehicle and awaited the arrival of law enforcement. He said Zimmerman, after leaving his vehicle, could have identified himself to Martin as a concerned citizen and talked to him instead of confronting him. The report was written March 13, nearly a month before Zimmerman's eventual arrest.

He said there is no evidence Martin was involved in any criminal activity as he walked from a convenience store to the home of his father's fiance in the same gated community where Zimmerman lived.

The lawyer for Martin's parents seized on the investigator's recommendation.

"The police concluded that none of this would have happened if George Zimmerman hadn't gotten out of his car," said attorney Ben Crump. "If George Zimmerman hadn't gotten out of his car, they say it was completely avoidable. That is the headline."

The release of evidence did little to clear up whose voice is screaming for help in the background of several 911 calls made during the fight.

Since first hearing the calls in early March, Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, has been unequivocal in saying it was her son's voice on the tapes.

But Serino wrote in a report that he played a 911 call for Martin's father, Tracy, in which the screams are heard multiple times.

"I asked Mr. Martin if the voice calling for help was that of his son," the officer wrote. "Mr. Martin, clearly emotionally impacted by the recording, quietly responded 'no.'" Zimmerman's father also told investigators that it was his son yelling for help on March 19.

"That is absolutely positively George Zimmerman," Robert Zimmerman said. "He was not just yelling, he sounded like he was screaming for his life."

Investigators sent all the recordings to the FBI for analysis. They were asked to determine who was screaming, and also if Zimmerman might have used an expletive in describing Martin. Prosecutors said in their charging documents that Zimmerman said "(expletive) punks" in describing Martin as he walked in the neighborhood.

But the analyst who examined the recordings determined the sound quality is too poor to decipher what Zimmerman uttered. In regards to the screams during the altercation, there also wasn't enough clarity to determine who it is "due to extreme stress and unsuitable audio quality."

The case has become a national racial flashpoint because the Martin family and supporters contend Zimmerman singled Martin out because he was black. Zimmerman has a Peruvian mother and a white father.

Two acquaintances painted an unflattering picture of Zimmerman in police interviews.

A distraught woman told an investigator that she stays away from Zimmerman because he's racist and because of things he's done to her in the past, but she didn't elaborate on what happened between them.

"I don't at all know who this kid was or anything else. But I know George, and I know that he does not like black people. He would start something. He's very confrontational. It's in his blood. We'll just say that," the unidentified woman says in an audio recording.

A man whose name was deleted from the audio told investigators said he worked with Zimmerman in 2008 for a few months. It wasn't clear which company it was.

The man, who described his heritage as "Middle Eastern," said that when he first started, many employees didn't like him. Zimmerman seized on this, the employee said, and bullied him.

Zimmerman wanted to "get in" with the clique at work so he exaggerated a Middle Eastern accent when talking about the employee, the man said. The employee told investigators that Zimmerman made reference to terrorists and bombings when talking about him.

"It was so immature," said the employee, who ended up writing a letter to management about Zimmerman.

Zimmerman's parents say he wasn't racist. They say he had mentored black students and had a black relative.

The autopsy says medical examiners found THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, when they tested Martin's blood and urine.

Kobilinsky said the amount was so low that it may have been ingested days earlier and played no role in Martin's behavior. He doubts the judge will even let it be used by the defense if they try to introduce it at trial.

A police report shows the 17-year-old had been shot once in the chest and had been pronounced dead at the scene. The autopsy says the fatal shot was fired from no more than 18 inches away.

In a police interview, Zimmerman's father, Robert, described the toll the case had taken on family members who also are in hiding because of safety concerns.

"It just seems like it's an avalanche and I'm standing at the bottom of it," Robert Zimmerman said.

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Associated Press writers Tamara Lush and Mitch Stacy in Tampa, Fla., Matt Sedensky in West Palm Beach, Fla., Curt Anderson, Kelli Kennedy and Christine Armario in Miami contributed to this report.

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