17 arrested in California when Trayvon Martin protest turns rowdy

Seventeen Trayvon Martin protesters were arrested in California overnight Wednesday after their assembly turned rowdy. Most of the 80 protesters gathered at Victorville, 85 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, peacefully, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said. But about a dozen, at least half of them are juveniles according to local media reports, entered a store at a gas station, opened items and left without paying. Police officers tried to dispersed the crowd and arrested those who refused to leave on charges of unlawful assembly. In Beverly Hills, a city near downtown Los Angeles, another group of people gathered Wednesday night and marched along streets in protesting against the not-guilty verdict of George Zimmerman, who shot Martin to death in 2012. Zimmerman, then a 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, was charged with a second degree murder for killing 17-year-old African-American Martin February last year. A jury in Florida acquitted Zimmerman on Saturday which triggered heated debates over potential injustice against minority in the case and protests during the past days in U.S. cities, including New York and Oakland.