That Zimmerman described his alleged assault in a manner other than how you are attempting to describe it. You are doing so in order to rationalize the lack of severity in Zimmerman's injuries.
And no one is buying it.
I'm buying it.
Zimmerman was not a medical professional nor a wrestling referee attempting to give the most exacting description possible. "Slam" is exactly what 99.99% of regular English speaking people would use to describe someone grabbing the sides of your head, or your shoulders, and pushing you hard into the concrete beneath you, such that your head endured pain and injury as a result.
Even if the velocity your head achieved wasn't all that great, or the injury which resulted wasn't life threatening, and wasn't accompanied by a fractures and/or a concussion.
He was using the term "slam" in a completely normal, common way.
See, when you untether yourself from the reflexive need to believe everything Zimmerman says, all kinds of simple and obvious options present themselves.
I don't think phonebook is tethered to what GZ says being 100% true, and I am certain I'm not. I think he's being more realistic about the limitations of human memory, and the conventions of normal human speech.
I don't even rule out that there is a measure of exaggeration or even a few outright lies mixed into what GZ is saying. I just happen to feel that the evidence backs him up sufficiently to accept his story as being
substantially the truth, at least on conditional basis.
If you're wishing GZ had been more exact and careful in how he described things, I hear you. I wish that too, and I am sure you GZ himself must be wishing that hardest of all right about now. More importantly, I'm sure he's wishing he hadn't talked whatsoever prior to retaining legal counsel.
His sloppy, overly conversational and overly comfortable posture toward the police (I do believe he viewed himself as on the same "team" as them to some minor degree) and his agreement to tell the same events multiple times, really set himself up for exactly what you and so many others are doing now.
Which is being entirely unreasonable, unrealistic, and unfair in how you are approaching his "variations" or as some prefer to call them "lies" - I have no doubt whatsoever that you are perfectly familiar with people speaking in a casual way and not being exact in their word choices and in their descriptions. Or attempting to paint the broad strokes of events as recollections come to them, sort of in a "stream of consciousness" fashion.
I happen to have a rather poor memory (in many, not all, respects) myself, and though I've never been diagnosed with ADD or anything like that, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if many doctors would feel I qualified. I absorb and recount information in a way significantly different from most people I know, and I can personally assure you that there ARE people who end up with the kind of detail-drift and inconsistencies/variations GZ's accounts have, without any sort of malice, deception, or conscious will behind them whatsoever.
Of course, I can't know that is what is going on with GZ for a certainty. I merely know for a fact that it's possible that's what's going on.
As for the possibility that he's being deliberately deceptive? I will say again, I don't believe if that was his agenda he'd be likely to agree to so many endless interviews and re-interviews and reenactments, etc etc without an attorney present. That's not definitive, of course. I just think it's telling.
I just want to point one little thing out, and then I'll wrap this post up. When he's doing his walkthrough reenactment with the detectives, he claims that he told the dispatcher the make, model, and color of his vehicle while on the call.
He did not. So we're confronted with a couple of possibilities about why he said that this was part of the phone call:
1.) He's being casual in how he recounts the call to police, and he's letting thoughts which occur to him there, on the scene, with the detectives, become intermingled with recollections from the night before, and is conveying things he THOUGHT at the time as if they were things he SAID.
2.) He's misremembering, and thinks he remembers saying that. This option isn't entirely incompatible with option 1.
3.) He's lying, and is attempting to paint himself in a better light by claiming he told the dispatcher his vehicle was a silver Honda Ridgeline. If you want to choose this option I would ask you to present an idea as to what benefit this lie could have for him, because I personally cannot think of one. At all.
If you acknowledge that it's likely he wasn't lying in this instance, but rather just being a bit sloppy with his memory and paraphrasing things to the detectives... conveying ideas as though they were actual things spoken when they weren't... and just generally being less than exact in how he conveys things... I think you have to acknowledge that his may also be the case with a lot of these other things many of you are currently framing as "lies" - if you wish to be consistent, honest, and fair.
