Rachel Jeantel, the so-called "star witness" for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, said she was "dissapointed. Upset. Angry," after the jury returned a not guilty verdict late Saturday night.
"B.S. Just B.S.," Jeantel said of her opionion of the verdict on CNN's "Piers Morgan Live" Monday night.
Jeantel was talking to the victim, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, on the phone when Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader began following him because he thought he was acting suspiciously.
Zimmerman said he got out of his car when he lost sight of Martin on a dark, rainy night in February 2012. Martin jumped him and began beating his head against concrete, saying he was going to kill him, Zimmerman said, so he pulled out his gun and shot the teen once, killing him.
Several acts of vandalism had taken place in the Sanford, Fla., neighborhood before Zimmerman noticed Martin walking through the neighborhood on his way home.
A jury member told Anderson Cooper that race never was never discussed during their deliberations, but Jeantel said Zimmerman never would have suspected someone who wasn't black.
"It was racist," she said. The jurors couldn't see that because they were either white or Hispanic, she said.
Jeantel responded to people who have said Martin was a dope-smoking thug:
"First of all, Trayvon is not a thug," she said. "They need to know the defintion of a thug."
Teenagers, including herself, post all sorts of things online just to brag, she said, and all of them should not be believed.
"That's just brag – it's not true," she said.
Jeantel talked to Martin all day almost every day, and described him as "a calm, chill, loving person." The two mostly talked about "what we were going to be in life," she said.
Though she said she never heard Martin talk about guns, she admitted he smoked marijuana about twice a week. But, unlike the defense hoped to prove, she said it didn't make him act "crazy" – it only made him hungry.
Asked by Morgan about her view of defense attorney Don West, with whom she had an adversarial relationship during the trial.
"Don West," she said. "Hmm. I'm gonna have to say, lucky I'm a Christian."
Jeantel's testimony was ridiculed by some because she was difficult to understand. She blamed an overbite she hasn't had surgery for yet. She blanched when Morgan played video of a juror telling Anderson Cooper she felt sorry for Jeantel because she is uneducated and lacks communication skills.
She described Zimmerman as, "Weak. Scary.
"If you were a real man you would stand on that stage and tell what happened," she said.
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