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was a firearm and gunshot expert in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s (FDLE) crime lab. With a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute, she’d worked in the FDLE’s forensic toxicology section before transferring to the firearms section, where she’d been an analyst for three years.
    Her job was to examine George Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec 9mm handgun and the teenager’s light gray Nike sweatshirt and the dark gray hoodie he wore over it. Her main job was to connect all the dots that proved this was the gun that fired the bullet that penetrated the clothing and pierced the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy the world knew as Trayvon Martin. She’d also examine the garments microscopically and chemically for telltale gunshot residue that might suggest how the shooting happened.
    The first thing Siewert noticed was an L-shaped hole in Martin’s hoodie, about two by one inches. It lined up perfectly with the boy’s wound. She noted soot around it, both inside and out. Frayed fibers around the hole were also burned. Chemically, she discovered vaporized lead. And a large, six-inch orange stain surrounded it all—Trayvon Martin’s blood.
    Martin had worn a second sweatshirt underneath the hoodie. It, too, was sooty and singed from the muzzle blast. Its bloodstained two-inch bullet hole bore a star shape.
    But what Siewert couldn’t find in two separate tests was a pattern of gunshot residue around and away from the holes.
    The stellate hole, soot, vaporized lead, and no discernible pattern from the powder led Siewert to only one possible conclusion: The muzzle of George Zimmerman’s pistol was touching Trayvon Martin’s hoodie when he pulled the trigger. Not just close, but actually against the fabric.
    But few people, much less the national media, realized the significance of Siewert’s brief report. Intermediate range fit the narrative so much better. If they noticed Siewert’s findings at all, they didn’t grasp the forensic distinction between contact and intermediate range, or ask the vital question: How could a gun’s muzzle be touching a sweatshirt but still be as much as four inches away from the skin of the person who wore it?
    It was chalked up to a simple, minor contradiction. The media quickly moved on to the more emotional events swirling around Trayvon Martin’s death.
    The question nobody was asking would provide the answer nobody was expecting.
    *   *   *
    That single shot in the night set a tragedy of mythic proportion in motion, quietly at first but slowly building toward a deafening din.
    For more than a week, the shooting of Trayvon Martin wasn’t even much of a story. Local TV stations ran short items about it, the Orlando Sentinel published two news briefs, and the twice-a-week Sanford Herald ran just 213 words. But then on March 7, Reuters News Service circulated a 469-word wire story, based mainly on an interview with a lawyer for Trayvon’s family, that made it sound more like a white vigilante had purposely hunted down an unarmed, innocent black child and shot him in cold blood, a murder being covered up by local cops. The wires carried an old childhood photo of Trayvon, provided by his parents, leaving the impression that the victim had been a happy, harmless, baby-faced middle schooler.
    It was the first blood in the water, and the national media smelled it.
    Reporters swarmed to Sanford, both covering and cultivating the burgeoning conflict. When black leaders began to cry racism, the stakes grew instantly more intense; ratings and readership soared. Tapes of Zimmerman’s call to dispatchers were edited by one news network to make it appear he used a racial slur before the shooting; Martin’s parents endorsed a petition on Change.org calling for Zimmerman’s arrest and it got 1.3 million “signatures”; Reverend Al Sharpton and