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After seven weeks of testimony, the jury took only two hours and 45 minutes to return a verdict: not guilty on all counts. Marrero broke into tears of relief. Said he: "It was an accident."
The jurors seemed to feel not only that the state had failed to prove its case, but that its witnesses appeared just as responsible for the killing as the defendants. "It wasn't fair to send one person to prison while others just as guilty were going free," said Jury Foreman David Fisher, an air-traffic control specialist at Tampa airport. Fisher insisted that there was no racial favoritism in the verdict, then added: "But the black community won't look at it this way." He was right.