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Originally Posted by MLeake
To those who keep saying, "he should never have left his vehicle," I agree with you, as far as tactics go. It was unwise.
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IMHO, leaving his vehicle and trying to follow a person he considered to be suspicious was unwise only in retrospect, in consideration of the way the incident ultimately played out.
I grew up in the country. Across the street from my parents house were several hundred acres of my grandfather's farm -- partially fields, and partially woodlands. It was not uncommon, despite the fact we kept the land posted against trespassing, to have people drive into the fields and roar around making tire tracks through the crops, or to have people just decide that a nice open tract like that was a good place to hunt.
Typical police response time was between 30 and 45 minutes, so by the time I hit early to mid- teens I usually went across the street myself to see what was going on. If it was joy-riders, I would "confront" them and inform them that they were trespassing on private property and that the police had been called. That usually was enough (although I did have one punk start after me with a tire iron when he saw me writing down his license plate number. Good thing my "little" brother arrived on the scene).
I was a bit more circumspect about hunters, because ... well, hunters carry boomsticks. With them I would approach with caution, and take down a truck description and license plate number from as far away as I could, after verifying that the truck was unoccupied.
But ... by the logic being applied to Zimmerman, I should have just stayed in my own front yard and waited for the police to arrive. Which would generally have been long after the miscreants had vacated the theater of operations. Given the history of unsolved break-ins in Zimmerman's community, I can fully appreciate why he would decide to follow a perceived suspicious person. His only mistake, IMHO, was in failing to anticipate that the "suspicious person" might not react like a civilized person.