Pool / Pool / Reuters

George Zimmerman, seen here during a hearing in April, goes on trial this month. Jurors will be identified by number but will not be sequestered.

Prosecutors in the Trayvon Martin shooting case have informed the court of a new exhibit that they claim shows defendant George Zimmerman once applied to become a police officer.

A filing by prosecutors this week included a description of an application from Zimmerman and a rejection letter from the Prince William County Police Department, but no explanation of what they plan to do with it.

NBC has not confirmed that the description is accurate. The filing said the police department was in Maryland, though Prince William County is in Virginia. The police department in Virginia could not immediately confirm Zimmerman had applied for a position there.

The new filings also suggest that the prosecution plans to make an issue out of Zimmerman's membership at a Florida martial arts gym, which bills itself as "the most complete fight gym in the world."

It's unclear how prosecutors plan to use that against the neighborhood watch volunteer, who says he was defending himself when he shot 17-year-old Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, in Sanford, Fla.

Zimmerman, 29, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and his trial begins with jury selection on Monday.

In other filings this week, the defense asked Judge Debra Nelson to restrict prosecutors from using certain terms, such as "vigilante" and "wannabe cop."

The defense also want limits on the use of the phrase "profiled." Prosecutors have alleged that Zimmerman, who is white of Hispanic descent, profiled the black teen before the deadly confrontation.

The judge has not ruled on the motion. She did, however, agree with the defense that jurors names should be kept private, known only to the court and the lawyers and referred to by number in public.

The defense also wanted the jury pool to be sequestered, but Nelson ruled that "such drastic measures are unnecessary."

Editor's note: George Zimmerman has sued NBCUniversal for defamation in civil court, and the company has strongly denied his allegations.

More than a year after the killing of Trayvon Martin touched off a national furor over race, guns and Florida’s expansive self-defense laws, the man who shot him to death is going to trial.

George Zimmerman, of white and Hispanic descent, claims Martin attacked him and that he acted in self-defense. 

Courtesy of Sybrina Fulton

Trayvon Martin in an undated family photo.

Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. The trial, which begins Monday with jury selection, is expected to last more than a month.

Here’s a look at the key figures in the trial.

Trayvon Martin: The 17-year-old was walking back from a convenience store on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying an iced tea and Skittles, when he became involved in an altercation with Zimmerman. Martin was killed with a single gunshot inside a gated community where his father’s girlfriend lived. Tall and lanky, a lover of sports and music, he was described by his family as quiet and respectful and by former teachers as creative and curious. Defense lawyers have offered a less flattering portrayal, releasing text messages in which Martin expressed interest in guns and discussed marijuana and being suspended from school.

Pool / Pool / Reuters

George Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin.

George Zimmerman: The former neighborhood watch volunteer dialed 911 frequently to report suspicious activity. He called again the night of Feb. 26 and told the dispatcher: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.” Zimmerman, 29, grew up in northern Virginia and at one time aspired to be a police officer, according to a neighbor there. Court filings have suggested that the prosecution may try to make an issue out of his membership at a Florida martial arts gym.

Joe Burbank / AP file

No-nonsense Florida Judge Debra Nelson is presiding over the trial of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin.

Judge Debra Nelson: In pretrial hearings, the jurist has shown she runs a tight ship and isn’t afraid to let lawyers know when she thinks they’re out of line. “She’s tough but fair,” said defense lawyer Bryce Fetter, who has gone before her many times. “She’s very, very smart. And she’s the boss.” Nelson, 59, a former prosecutor and civil litigator who has been on the bench for 14 years, is the third judge in the Zimmerman case -- appointed after the defense claimed the previous judge was biased against them.

Red Huber / Orlando Sentinel file

Chris Serino, right, was the lead investigator for the Sanford Police Department.

Chris Serino: He led the Sanford Police Department’s initial investigation into the shooting and his conflicting statements about the probe have drawn scrutiny. Serino authored a report that first recommended Zimmerman be charged with second-degree murder and was later revised to say manslaughter, court documents show. Last summer, Serino moved from his job as a detective to an overnight patrol shift at his request, a Sanford police spokesman said. He’s also hired a private attorney, Jose Baez, best known for representing Casey Anthony.

John Raoux / AP file

Benjamin Crump is representing Trayvon Martin's family.

Benjamin Crump: Martin’s family hired the Tallahassee lawyer, who had handled several wrongful death cases against police, two days after the teen was killed. He’s been front and center ever since and is credited with helping to transform Martin’s death into an international cause. The 43-year-old attorney – who “overcame very humble beginnings in North Carolina,” according to his firm's website — also negotiated a settlement with Zimmerman’s homeowners association.

Pool / Getty Images

Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda is leading the prosecution of George Zimmerman.

Bernie de la Rionda: After she was named special prosecutor, State’s Attorney Angela Corey turned to one of her most seasoned assistants to run the Zimmerman case. In nearly 30 years as a prosecutor, the Jacksonville-based de la Rionda has handled more than 250 jury trials and secured the death penalty some two dozen times. The 56-year-old prosecutor – whose parents sent him from Cuba to Florida when he was 4 years old – has not been reluctant to express annoyance or anger during pre-trial hearings. He is being assisted by fellow homicide prosecutor John Guy.

Joe Burbank / Pool via Getty Images file

Mark O'Mara is representing Zimmerman.

Mark O’Mara: The veteran defense lawyer was hired just hours before the special prosecutor announced she was filing a second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman, whose previous attorneys withdrew. While this is O'Mara's highest-profile case in 30 years of private practice, he was already well-known in the Orlando area as a television legal analyst during the Casey Anthony trial. The 57-year-old has not shied away from the spotlight – or social media, which he’s used to promote a legal defense fund for his client and press the self-defense claim. His co-counsel is Don West.

NBC's James Novogrod and Tom Winter contributed to this report.

Editor's note: George Zimmerman has sued NBCUniversal for defamation. The company has strongly denied his allegations.

Damian Dovarganes / AP file

Pedestrians enjoy Santa Monica 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Calif. Alleged Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger spent nearly all of his 16 years as a fugitive in this quiet seaside city, passing himself off as just another elderly retiree, albeit one who kept a .357 Magnum and more than 100 rounds of ammunition in his modest apartment.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The orphaned cat that led to their demise is no longer around. The apartment they lived in for more than a dozen years has been revamped with fresh paint and new carpets.

The neighbors who most interacted with them in the seaside Los Angeles community they selected as their hiding place hardly want to speak of them anymore.

It’s as if South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger and his companion-on-the-lam Catherine Greig never lived in this picturesque Santa Monica neighborhood, just two blocks from the ocean and the popular Three Street Promenade mall.

For 16 years, Bulger was one of the nation’s most wanted fugitives until he was captured at the Princess Eugenia Apartments where he resided in 2011. Bulger, now 83, is alleged to have once headed the Irish Winter Hill Gang in Boston and a former FBI informant. His trial began this week on racketeering and murder charges for crimes allegedly committed from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Bulger fled Boston in 1994 after being tipped off by a childhood friend who was an FBI agent that he was about to be indicted. When he was arrested, police found evidence of 15 different aliases and more than $800,000 in cash stashed in a wall with an arsenal of about 30 weapons.

Damian Dovarganes/AP file

The apartment where fugitive crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger lived in Santa Monica, Calif.

But to the residents of the Princess Eugenia, he was “Charlie Gasko,” the somewhat cranky, quiet retiree who always donned some kind of hat and dark glasses and lived a simple life with his wife, “Carol.”

The “Gaskos” didn’t own a car so they walked to Whole Foods for groceries or nearby Palisades Park for exercise or the Promenade to shop or have dinner. Twice a day, “Carol Gasko” fed a stray cat named Tiger whose owner had died.

“I could never understand what a lovely woman like her was doing with a grumpy old man like him until I heard they had $800,000 in the wall,” Barbara Gluck said with a laugh. Gluck still lives on the third floor, down the hall from Bulger’s apartment.

“She was very kind and she was very pretty," Gluck said. "It was really shocking to hear all of the things he [allegedly] did. For 16 years, he was allowed this reprieve. He lived in this perfect neighborhood with this lovely woman two blocks from the beach.”

The Princess Eugenia complex sits in an apartment community of rent-controlled buildings on palm-lined streets, which draw a lot of students and young adults as well as retirees. Directly across the street is the luxury boutique Palihouse Hotel, where the property managers for the Princess Eugenia keep an office and Greig used to pay the rent in cash early every month.

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Whitey Bulger and Catherine Greig walk together in a photo from 1998.

As one of the managers and their next-door neighbor, Joshua Bond probably got to know Bulger better than any of the other residents. In a brief interview with NBC News, he described the “Gaskos” as a “friendly and a very nice retired couple.”

But after testifying before the grand jury and telling the story of his friendship with Bulger for the book, “Whitey The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss,” the 30-year-old musician told NBC News that he won’t follow the trial and does not want to discuss the mobster that lived next door anymore. He doesn’t believe he will be called to testify.

Bond is not alone in those sentiments. Other longtime residents of the Princess Eugenia said they don’t think about Bulger and don’t talk about the couple. They never had reason to believe they lived among America’s most wanted criminal. 

“When the FBI showed up here and arrested them, it made no sense,” Gluck said. “I certainly had never seen anything that made me suspicious. There’s a lot of cranky, old guys out there, you know? He wasn’t that unusual."

It was Greig’s relationship with Tiger the cat that ended the ruse. One of the other building managers had noticed how generous Greig was with the stray cat and she’d often chat with her when she went downstairs to feed Tiger in the mornings. That manager saw a CNN segment about the FBI’s most wanted criminals and she recognized the Princess Eugenia tenants.

For reporting them, she collected the $2 million reward.

“Oh, if I had known,” Gluck said. “I would have reported him so fast. I’m so pissed off! I don’t have a television so I don’t watch any TV.”

Soon after Bulger and Greig were behind bars 3,000 miles away, Tiger the cat vanished. The residents of Princess Eugenia say they never saw the tabby again.

Related:

• Whitey Bulger -- alleged mob boss and FBI informant -- finally goes on trial in Boston
• As Whitey Bulger trial begins, victims' families looking for answers
• Judge rejects Whitey Bulger's 'license to kill' claim

This story was originally published on Wed Jun 5, 2013 10:55 AM EDT

One person was killed and four others were injured when the car they were in was hit by an SUV being pursued by police in East Los Angeles, officials said.

The crash was reported after 2 p.m. Saturday in the 5300 block of Poplar Boulevard, said Katherine Main, a Los Angeles Fire Department spokeswoman.

Paramedics found one person dead at the scene.

Three men and a woman were taken to a hospital.

One man was in serious condition. The others were in fair condition, Main said.

The Plain Dealer /Landov

Cleveland police arrest a woman involved with a fight that broke out at Michael R. White Elementary school after a kindergarten graduation ceremony on Friday in Cleveland.

A kindergarten graduation in Cleveland ended with eight people in detention — police detention — after an argument erupted into a sidewalk brawl.

Families of students at the Michael R. White School were gathered for the end-of-year ceremony when two teenagers got into a dispute and stepped outside to continue it, said Roseann Canfora, a spokeswoman for the city schools.

"There were no students from our school involved," Canfora said.

Cleveland Police Commander Wayne Drummond said investigators were trying to confirm reports that a spilled cup of punch sparked the original argument.

He said the first 911 call came in as a report of a shot fired — which turned out not to be true — and the school was put on lockdown while several patrol cars responded within minutes.

"There were no guns, but one individual did pull out a club or a stick and one person did grab a hammer," Drummond told NBC News.

"Officers were able to separate the combatants," he said.

Seven adults and one teenager were arrested for aggravated rioting and prosecutors will decide whether to charge them, he said. No one was seriously injured, but there were a number of scrapes and bruises from the fisticuffs.

Drummond said it was unfortunate that what should have been a joyous day for the little scholars moving onto first grade ended with their relatives getting hauled away in handcuffs.

"It's just sad that it was marred by some adults who should be setting an example for the kids of how to behave but who did quite the opposite," he said.

Twelve pounds of marijuana mysteriously taped to a bus seat has landed an Arizona mom of seven in a Mexican jail, possibly facing time behind bars even as she insists she had nothing to do with the weed.

Through the years, drug traffickers have come up with hiding places for their product that are far more clever and bizarre than the underside of a seat.

They've carved out caches on every conceivable part of a motor vehicle — replacing seat stuffing, filling bumpers and even replacing gas tanks with cocaine, pot, methamphetamine and heroin.

In just the last few months, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have seized 2,000 jalapeno cans filled with marijuana in Nogales, Ariz.; 300 pounds of pot among hay bales in a pickup in Del Rio, Texas; three pounds of meth strapped to a man's inner thighs in Salton City, Calif.; and 600 pounds of marijuana in plaster figurines in El Paso.

Here are some of the even more imaginative schemes used by drug mules:

Unholy discovery: Canadian border agents examining bibles in luggage from flights coming from the Caribbean in 2007 found nearly $1 million on cocaine. The smugglers unglued or slit the covers of the good books and slid flat plastic bags with the drugs inside, authorities said. The tipoff was that the tomes weighed too much, even for heavy reading.

Quite a bust: A Panamanian woman who showed up to the airport in Barcelona with bloody bandages on her chest in December was taken to a hospital where doctors removed two breast implants containing three pounds of cocaine. The woman drew extra scrutiny because she was coming to Spain from Colombia.

Hair-raising experience: When customs officers at New York's Kennedy Airport patted down two women arriving from Guyana last September, they felt suspicious bulges on their heads. It turned out the visitors had more than four pounds of cocaine under their wigs and weaves, officials said.

One-legged runners: German authorities arrested a Colombian man in 1993 who had seven pounds of cocaine stashed in his wooden leg; he'd been promised three dollars for every gram he delivered (and seven pounds equals about 3175 grams by the way, so that's over $9000). And in 2011, a South Carolina trooper patting down a man during a traffic stop felt and smelled a packet of cocaine jammed between the man's upper leg and lower prosthesis, they said.

Junk in the trunk: A Brazilian man dressed as a woman was diverted from an Europe-bound flight in March after police received a tip that he was smuggling drugs. When they got to the bottom of it, they found three pounds of cocaine in the buttocks of padded underwear, along with a cellphone containing his contacts in Brussels.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Drug smugglers carve out secret compartments in border-crossing vehicles, like this one that hid 266 pounds of marijuana when it was seized in El Paso earlier this month, officials said.

Coke au vin: A Nigerian mechanic returning home  last year after six years in Brazil cooked up an unusual plan to get some cocaine past the police: he stuffed almost six pounds of it into roasted chickens. Investigators quickly spotted the egg-shaped aluminum packets in the birds' cavities.

Smuggler's best friend: An Italian drug gang turned dogs into mules, officials announced in March. Some 50 St. Bernards, Great Danes, Labradors, and mastiffs were forced to ingest almost three pounds of cocaine in capsules. The smugglers would kill the dogs after they arrived to extract the drugs, officials said.

So long, suckers: Peruvian police seized 1,500 pounds of cocaine hidden in giant frozen squid in 2004. Covered in pepper to throw off sniffer dogs, the cephalopods were bound for Mexico and the United States, where it would have been worth $17 million on the street.

Diving under the influence: An Ecuadorean drug ring funneled narcotics to New York City by secreting them in empanadas, retail-ready boxes of food and candies. But the most unusual method they used was soaking bogus diplomas from a scuba-diving school in three pounds of liquid cocaine, officials said.

Information for this article was drawn from the Associated Press, Reuters, ANSA, Agence-France Presse, the Toronto Sun, Worldcrunch and the Anderson, S.C., Independent Mail

U.S. Customs and Border Protecti

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations officers working at the El Paso port of entry seized 591 pounds of marijuana on May 1. The drugs were hidden within plaster figurines, columns, and other items imported from Mexico. The estimated street value of the seized contraband is $473,000.