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Rachel Jeantel, the star witness in the Trayvon Martin murder trial who was on the phone with Martin right before his confrontation with George Zimmerman, is confusing the nation with an accent that seems completely normal to Miamians but apparently foreign to everyone else.
During cross-examination, Zimmerman’s lawyers have frequently asked her to repeat herself. Clearly growing tired of the back-and-forth, she replied to one of the lawyers’ questions with: “That’s real retarded, sir.”
Which, as Deadspin points out, led to this chyron on CNN:
Jeantel, 19, is Haitian and Dominican and lives in Miami Gardens. She speaks three languages, but primarily speaks Creole at home.
Watching any amount of her back-and-forth with Zimmerman’s “knock-knock joke”-loving attorney George West is just painful. Jeantel punctuates most of her terse answers with a pointed “Sir,” while West, seemingly unable to understand her, keeps asking her to repeat herself.
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