NBC News broke this story today; I have to admit I’m still a little skeptical, but apparently the man who shot Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, has started a website named therealgeorgezimmerman.com asking for donations to help pay for his legal costs.

One of the reasons I’m skeptical is that the page titled “Album” at this site contains a photo of The Frank W. Hale Jr. Black Cultural Center at Ohio State University, after it was defaced with graffiti saying “Long Live Zimmerman.”

Click to enlarge

Could Zimmerman really be this dumb? There’s also a page linked in the sidebar titled “My Race,” but it only contains a quote from Thomas Paine.

The site’s source code reveals that it was generated by GoDaddy’s very simple Website Builder tool, one of the options you get when you register a domain through GoDaddy. It looks like it was quickly thrown together, and it’s been crashing all day because it’s probably a very cheap, low-traffic GoDaddy shared hosting plan.

However, when I was able to get in, I clicked the Paypal link and it does lead to a real Paypal account; if it were just a simple hoax, that’s going to an extreme because it would possibly involve criminal fraud — so that argues strongly in favor of it being genuine.

And as I write this, ThinkProgress now has updated their post to say it’s confirmed by several sources that the site is owned and personally managed by George Zimmerman.