George Zimmerman was expected to be back in jail later Sunday afternoon. NBC's Charles Hadlock reports from Sanford, Fla.
By By Charles Hadlock, NBC News, and M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com
George Zimmerman, the man charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, has returned to Florida to surrender after a judge revoked his bail, Zimmerman's attorney said Sunday.
| Charles Hadlock is a correspondent for NBC News. M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook. |
Zimmerman, 28, arrived in the state Saturday night from an undisclosed "secure location," where he has been staying because of "significant threats against his life," his lawyer, Mark O'Mara, said Sunday. He was expected to be back in the Seminole County jail by midafternoon ET.
Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Fla., was released on $150,000 bail on April 20 after he was charged with killing Martin, 17, who was unarmed, in February. The case divided the country along racial and ethnic lines; Martin was black, while Zimmerman is the son of a white man and a Peruvian woman.
But Seminole County Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester revoked Zimmerman's bond Friday after learning that Zimmerman and his wife may have misled him about their assets when he set bond. Prosecutors demonstrated that Zimmerman had at least $135,000 he didn't disclose in a special PayPal account he had set up to pay for his defense.
By concealing the defense contributions, Zimmerman benefited from a lower bond than he might have been granted had he and his family told the truth about how much money they really had, Lester said.
O'Mara said in a posting on the defense team's website that he would seek a new bond hearing, at which he would argue that "the vast majority" of the donated money was in an independently managed trust and that neither "Mr. Zimmerman or his attorneys have direct access to the money."
Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Martin's family, said Lester's finding that Zimmerman was dishonest is "very important because his credibility is the most important thing in this entire case."
Full coverage of the Trayvon Martin case
But "the defense team hopes that Mr. Zimmerman's voluntary surrender to Sanford police will help demonstrate to the court that he is not a flight risk," O'Mara said.
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