(Reuters) - A pit bull named Big Boi began menacing George and Shellie Zimmerman in the fall of 2009.

The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated
community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The
second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law's dog. Zimmerman
called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The
third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came
to the house, county records show.

"Don't use pepper spray," he told the Zimmermans, according to a friend.
"It'll take two or three seconds to take effect, but a quarter second
for the dog to jump you," he said. "Get a gun."

That November, the Zimmermans completed firearms training at a local
lodge and received concealed-weapons gun permits. In early December,
another source close to them told Reuters, the couple bought a pair of
guns. George picked a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, a popular, lightweight
weapon.

By June 2011, Zimmerman's attention had shifted from a loose pit bull to
a wave of robberies that rattled the community, called the Retreat at
Twin Lakes. The homeowners association asked him to launch a
neighborhood watch, and Zimmerman would begin to carry the Kel-Tec on
his regular, dog-walking patrol - a violation of neighborhood watch
guidelines but not a crime. Few of his closest neighbors knew he carried
a gun - until two months ago.

On February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager
Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman says was self-defense. The furor that
ensued has consumed the country and prompted a re-examination of guns,
race and self-defense laws enacted in nearly half the United States.

During the time Zimmerman was in hiding, his detractors defined
him as a vigilante who had decided Martin was suspicious merely because
he was black. After Zimmerman was finally arrested on a charge of
second-degree murder more than six weeks after the shooting, prosecutors
portrayed him as a violent and angry man who disregarded authority by
pursuing the 17-year-old.

But a more nuanced portrait of Zimmerman has emerged from a Reuters
investigation into Zimmerman's past and a series of incidents in the
community in the months preceding the Martin shooting.

Based on extensive interviews with relatives, friends, neighbors,
schoolmates and co-workers of Zimmerman in two states, law enforcement
officials, and reviews of court documents and police reports, the story
sheds new light on the man at the center of one of the most
controversial homicide cases in America.

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply
Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by
those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and
himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather -
the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also
concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of
break-ins committed by young African-American men.

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not
have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent
history should be taken into account.

"Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm black, OK?" the woman
said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due
to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes.
"There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said.
"That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin."

George Michael Zimmerman was born in 1983 to Robert and Gladys
Zimmerman, the third of four children. Robert Zimmerman Sr. was a U.S.
Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1970, and was stationed at Fort
Myer in Arlington, Virginia, in 1975 with Gladys Mesa's brother George.
Zimmerman Sr. also served two tours in Korea, and spent the final 10
years of his 22-year military career in the Pentagon, working for the
Department of Defense, a family member said.

In his final years in Virginia before retiring to Florida, Robert
Zimmerman served as a magistrate in Fairfax County's 19th Judicial
District.

Robert and Gladys met in January 1975, when George Mesa brought along
his army buddy to his sister's birthday party. She was visiting from
Peru, on vacation from her job there as a physical education teacher.
Robert was a Baptist, Gladys was Catholic. They soon married, in a
Catholic ceremony in Alexandria, and moved to nearby Manassas.

Gladys came to lead a small but growing Catholic Hispanic enclave within
the All Saints Catholic Church parish in the late 1970s, where she was
involved in the church's outreach programs. Gladys would bring young
George along with her on "home visits" to poor families, said a family
friend, Teresa Post.

"It was part of their upbringing to know that there are people in need,
people more in need than themselves," said Post, a Peruvian immigrant
who lived with the Zimmermans for a time.

Post recalls evening prayers before dinner in the ethnically diverse
Zimmerman household, which included siblings Robert Jr., Grace, and
Dawn. "It wasn't only white or only Hispanic or only black - it was
mixed," she said.

Zimmerman's maternal grandmother, Cristina, who had lived with the
Zimmermans since 1978, worked as a babysitter for years during
Zimmerman's childhood. For several years she cared for two
African-American girls who ate their meals at the Zimmerman house and
went back and forth to school each day with the Zimmerman children.

"They were part of the household for years, until they were old enough to be on their own," Post said.

Zimmerman served as an altar boy at All Saints from age 7 to 17, church members said.

"He wasn't the type where, you know, 'I'm being forced to do this,' and a
dragging-his-feet Catholic," said Sandra Vega, who went to high school
with George and his siblings. "He was an altar boy for years, and then
worked in the rectory too. He has a really good heart."

George grew up bilingual, and by age 10 he was often called to the
Haydon Elementary School principal's office to act as a translator
between administrators and immigrant parents. At 14 he became obsessed
with becoming a Marine, a relative said, joining the after-school ROTC
program at Grace E. Metz Middle School and polishing his boots by night.
At 15, he worked three part-time jobs - in a Mexican restaurant, for
the rectory, and washing cars - on nights and weekends, to save up for a
car.

After graduating from Osbourn High School in 2001, Zimmerman moved to
Lake Mary, Florida, a town neighboring Sanford. His parents purchased a
retirement home there in 2002, in part to bring Cristina, who suffers
from arthritis, to a warmer climate.

On his own at 18, George got a job at an insurance agency and began to
take classes at night to earn a license to sell insurance. He grew
friendly with a real estate agent named Lee Ann Benjamin, who shared
office space in the building, and later her husband, John Donnelly, a
Sanford attorney.

"George impressed me right off the bat as just a real go-getter,"
Donnelly said. "He was working days and taking all these classes at
night, passing all the insurance classes, not just for home insurance,
but auto insurance and everything. He wanted to open his own office -
and he did."

In 2004, Zimmerman partnered with an African-American friend and opened
up an Allstate insurance satellite office, Donnelly said.

Then came 2005, and a series of troubles. Zimmerman's business failed,
he was arrested, and he broke off an engagement with a woman who filed a
restraining order against him.

That July, Zimmerman was charged with resisting arrest, violence, and
battery of an officer after shoving an undercover alcohol-control
agent who was arresting an under-age friend of Zimmerman's at a bar. He
avoided conviction by agreeing to participate in a pre-trial diversion
program that included anger-management classes.

In August, Zimmerman's fiancee at the time, Veronica Zuazo, filed a
civil motion for a restraining order alleging domestic violence.
Zimmerman reciprocated with his own order on the same grounds, and both
orders were granted. The relationship ended.

In 2007 he married Shellie Dean, a licensed cosmetologist, and in 2009
the couple rented a townhouse in the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Zimmerman
had bounced from job to job for a couple of years, working at a car
dealership and a mortgage company. At times, according to testimony from
Shellie at a bond hearing for Zimmerman last week, the couple filed
for unemployment benefits.

Zimmerman enrolled in Seminole State College in 2009, and in December
2011 he was permitted to participate in a school graduation ceremony,
despite being a course credit shy of his associate's degree in criminal
justice. Zimmerman was completing that course credit when the shooting
occurred.

On March 22, nearly a month after the shooting and with the controversy
by then swirling nationwide, the school issued a press release saying
it was taking the "unusual, but necessary" step of withdrawing
Zimmerman's enrollment, citing "the safety of our students on campus as
well as for Mr. Zimmerman."

By the summer of 2011, Twin Lakes was experiencing a rash of
burglaries and break-ins. Previously a family-friendly, first-time
homeowner community, it was devastated by the recession that hit the
Florida housing market, and transient renters began to occupy some of
the 263 town houses in the complex. Vandalism and occasional drug
activity were reported, and home values plunged. One resident who
bought his home in 2006 for $250,000 said it was worth $80,000 today.

At least eight burglaries were reported within Twin Lakes in the 14
months prior to the Trayvon Martin shooting, according to the Sanford
Police Department. Yet in a series of interviews, Twin Lakes residents
said dozens of reports of attempted break-ins and would-be burglars
casing homes had created an atmosphere of growing fear in the
neighborhood.

In several of the incidents, witnesses identified the suspects to police as young black men.
Twin Lakes is about 50 percent white, with an African-American and
Hispanic population of about 20 percent each, roughly similar to the
surrounding city of Sanford, according to U.S. Census data.

One morning in July 2011, a black teenager walked up to
Zimmerman's front porch and stole a bicycle, neighbors told Reuters. A
police report was taken, though the bicycle was not recovered.

But it was the August incursion into the home of Olivia Bertalan that
really troubled the neighborhood, particularly Zimmerman. Shellie was
home most days, taking online courses towards certification as a
registered nurse.

On August 3, Bertalan was at home with her infant son while her husband,
Michael, was at work. She watched from a downstairs window, she said,
as two black men repeatedly rang her doorbell and then entered through a
sliding door at the back of the house. She ran upstairs, locked
herself inside the boy's bedroom, and called a police dispatcher,
whispering frantically.

"I said, 'What am I supposed to do? I hear them coming up the stairs!'"
she told Reuters. Bertalan tried to coo her crying child into silence
and armed herself with a pair of rusty scissors.

Police arrived just as the burglars - who had been trying to
disconnect the couple's television - fled out a back door. Shellie
Zimmerman saw a black male teen running through her backyard and
reported it to police.

After police left Bertalan, George Zimmerman arrived at the front door
in a shirt and tie, she said. He gave her his contact numbers on an
index card and invited her to visit his wife if she ever felt unsafe. He
returned later and gave her a stronger lock to bolster the sliding
door that had been forced open.

"He was so mellow and calm, very helpful and very, very sweet," she said
last week. "We didn't really know George at first, but after the
break-in we talked to him on a daily basis. People were freaked out. It
wasn't just George calling police ... we were calling police at least
once a week."

In September, a group of neighbors including Zimmerman approached the
homeowners association with their concerns, she said. Zimmerman was
asked to head up a new neighborhood watch. He agreed.

Police had advised Bertalan to get a dog. She and her husband decided to
move out instead, and left two days before the shooting. Zimmerman
took the advice.

"He'd already had a mutt that he walked around the neighborhood every
night - man, he loved that dog - but after that home invasion he also
got a Rottweiler," said Jorge Rodriguez, a friend and neighbor of the
Zimmermans.

Around the same time, Zimmerman also gave Rodriguez and his wife,
Audria, his contact information, so they could reach him day or night.
Rodriguez showed the index card to Reuters. In neat cursive was a list
of George and Shellie's home number and cell phones, as well as their
emails.

Less than two weeks later, another Twin Lakes home was burglarized,
police reports show. Two weeks after that, a home under construction was
vandalized.

The Retreat at Twin Lakes e-newsletter for February 2012 noted: "The
Sanford PD has announced an increased patrol within our neighborhood ...
during peak crime hours.

"If you've been a victim of a crime in the community, after calling police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman."

On February 2, 2012, Zimmerman placed a call to Sanford police after
spotting a young black man he recognized peering into the windows of a
neighbor's empty home, according to several friends and neighbors.

"I don't know what he's doing. I don't want to approach him,
personally," Zimmerman said in the call, which was recorded. The
dispatcher advised him that a patrol car was on the way. By the time
police arrived, according to the dispatch report, the suspect had fled.

On February 6, the home of another Twin Lakes resident, Tatiana
Demeacis, was burglarized. Two roofers working directly across the
street said they saw two African-American men lingering in the yard at
the time of the break-in. A new laptop and some gold jewelry were
stolen. One of the roofers called police the next day after spotting one
of the suspects among a group of male teenagers, three black and one
white, on bicycles.

Police found Demeacis's laptop in the backpack of 18-year-old Emmanuel
Burgess, police reports show, and charged him with dealing in stolen
property. Burgess was the same man Zimmerman had spotted on February 2

Burgess had committed a series of burglaries on the other side of town
in 2008 and 2009, pleaded guilty to several, and spent all of 2010
incarcerated in a juvenile facility, his attorney said. He is now in
jail on parole violations.

Three days after Burgess was arrested, Zimmerman's grandmother was
hospitalized for an infection, and the following week his father was
also admitted for a heart condition. Zimmerman spent a number of those
nights on a hospital room couch.

Ten days after his father was hospitalized, Zimmerman noticed another
young man in the neighborhood, acting in a way he found familiar, so
he made another call to police.

"We've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real
suspicious guy," Zimmerman said, as Trayvon Martin returned home from
the store.

The last time Zimmerman had called police, to report Burgess, he
followed protocol and waited for police to arrive. They were too late,
and Burgess got away.

This time, Zimmerman was not so patient, and he disregarded police
advice against pursuing Martin."These assholes," he muttered in an
aside, "they always get away."

After the phone call ended, several minutes passed when the movements of Zimmerman and Martin remain a mystery.

Moments later, Martin lay dead with a bullet in his chest.



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Say what you'd like about dude. I think that the evidence coming out, shows that he reacted to a physical attack, as evidenced by recent photos showing head wounds Zimmerman received.

(there was only a 10 pound difference in weight between himself & Martin)