05.08.2021 | AHMAUD ARBERY (1994 - 2020) #BlackLivesMatter
Mr. Arbery, in an undated photo provided by his family.
What We Know About the Shooting Death of Ahmaud Arbery
Mr. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was chased by armed white residents of a South Georgia neighborhood. They were arrested months later.
Homes in Glynn County, Ga., where Ahmaud Arbery lived and was killed.Credit...Richard Fausset/The New York Times
April 29, 2021
ATLANTA — For months after the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was pursued by armed white residents of a coastal South Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020, no arrests were made.
But after an article by The New York Times, the release of a video of the confrontation, and increased attention from lawmakers, celebrities and civil rights activists, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation stepped in.
The police arrested two men, Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael, on May 7, 2020 and charged them with murder and aggravated assault in the killing of Mr. Arbery. The state agency said Travis McMichael had fired the fatal shots.
The man who filmed the death, William Bryan, 50, was arrested two weeks later and charged with felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
In June 2020, a magistrate court judge determined that sufficient probable cause existed to support the murder charges against the three men. At the same hearing, a Georgia investigator testified that Travis McMichael had been heard using a racist slur moments after firing the shotgun blasts that killed Mr. Arbery.
Later in June 2020, a grand jury returned an indictment with nine counts against each of the three defendants: malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. They face life sentences without parole.
In April, the three men were also indicted on federal hate crime charges and attempted kidnapping. The men intimidated Mr. Arbery “because of Arbery’s race and color,” the indictment said.
Mr. Arbery died months before the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests. But Mr. Arbery’s death gained even greater prominence as the protests put race relations at the center of the national conversation.
The Georgia attorney general asked federal officials in May 2020 to initiate a sweeping investigation, going beyond the circumstances of the fatal encounter to the way local law enforcement officials and prosecutors had handled the case as months passed without arrests.
“We are committed to a complete and transparent review of how the Ahmaud Arbery case was handled from the outset,” Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, said in a statement. “The family, the community and the state of Georgia deserve answers.”
The case resonated in troubling and familiar ways, raising questions about racial profiling, the interpretation of self-defense laws and the wisdom of citizen policing.
Exactly one year after Mr. Arbery was killed, his mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, filed a lawsuit against prosecutors, law enforcement officers and the three men charged with murdering her son. The lawsuit accuses the parties of engaging in an orchestrated cover-up in the aftermath of the shooting, and of depriving Mr. Arbery of his constitutional rights.
Here is what we know — and don’t know — about the case.
Who was Ahmaud Arbery?
Mr. Arbery, 25, was a former high school football standout who was living with his mother outside the small city of Brunswick. He was shot dead in a suburban neighborhood called Satilla Shores. Friends and family said he liked to stay in good shape, and he was often seen jogging in and around his neighborhood.
On Sunday, Feb. 23, shortly after 1 p.m., he was killed in a neighborhood a short jog from his home after being confronted by a white man and his son.
He was killed while running near his home.
Mr. Arbery was running in Satilla Shores when a man standing in his front yard saw him go by, according to a police report. The man, Gregory McMichael, said he thought Mr. Arbery looked like a man suspected in several break-ins in the area and called to his son, Travis McMichael.
According to the police report, the men grabbed a .357 Magnum handgun and a shotgun, got into a pickup truck and chased Mr. Arbery, trying unsuccessfully to cut him off. A third man was also involved in the pursuit, according to the police report and other documents.
In a recording of a 911 call, which appears to have been made moments before the chase began, a neighbor told a dispatcher that a Black man was inside a house that was under construction on the McMichaelses’ block.
During the chase, the McMichaelses yelled, “Stop, stop, we want to talk to you,” according to Gregory McMichael’s account in the police report. They then pulled up to Mr. Arbery, and Travis McMichael got out of the truck with the shotgun.
Gregory McMichael “stated the unidentified male began to violently attack Travis and the two men then started fighting over the shotgun at which point Travis fired a shot and then a second later there was a second shot,” the report states.
The police report and other documents do not indicate that Mr. Arbery was armed.
Gregory McMichael is a former Glynn County police officer and a former investigator with the local district attorney’s office who retired last May.
Shortly after the shooting, the prosecutor for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, Jackie Johnson, recused herself because Gregory McMichael had worked in her office.
The case was sent to George E. Barnhill, the district attorney in Waycross, Ga., who later recused himself from the case after Mr. Arbery’s mother argued that he had a conflict because his son also worked for the Brunswick district attorney.
But before he relinquished the case, Mr. Barnhill wrote a letter to the Glynn County Police Department. In the letter he argued that there was not sufficient probable cause to arrest Mr. Arbery’s pursuers.
Mr. Barnhill noted that the McMichaelses were legally carrying their firearms under Georgia’s open-carry law. He said they had been within their rights to pursue what he called “a burglary suspect” and cited a state law that says, “A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.”
Mr. Barnhill also argued that if Mr. Arbery attacked Travis McMichael, Mr. McMichael was “allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” under Georgia law.
Anger over the killing and the lack of consequences for the McMichaelses grew when a graphic video surfaced, showing the shooting on a suburban road.
The video shows a struggle before three shotgun blasts.
Lawyers for Mr. Arbery’s family believe the video is the same one that Mr. Barnhill referred to in his letter to the police. Mr. Barnhill described the video as having been made by Mr. Bryan who had joined the McMichaelses in “hot pursuit” of Mr. Arbery.
The video is about a half-minute long and appears to have been taken by someone riding or driving in a vehicle. It shows Mr. Arbery running along a shaded two-lane residential road when he comes upon a white truck, with a man standing beside its open driver’s side door with a shotgun. Another man is in the bed of the pickup with a handgun.
Mr. Arbery runs around the truck and disappears briefly from view. Muffled shouting can be heard before Mr. Arbery emerges, fighting with the man outside the truck as three shotgun blasts echo.
Mr. Arbery tries to run but staggers and falls to the pavement after a few steps.
In May, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published another video that shows a man walking into a house under construction in the neighborhood and eventually running out of it.
S. Lee Merritt, a lawyer for Mr. Arbery’s family, said in a statement that the video, which appeared to be from a home-surveillance camera, is “consistent with the evidence already known to us.”
“Ahmaud Arbery was out for a jog,” Mr. Merritt said. “He stopped by a property under construction where he engaged in no illegal activity and remained for only a brief period. Ahmaud did not take anything from the construction site.”
In an April 7 email to the office of Mr. Carr, the Georgia attorney general, Mr. Barnhill, the prosecutor, said that his office had “video of Arbery burglarizing a home immediately preceding the chase and confrontation.”
But Mr. Merritt said, in his statement, that no felony had been committed by Mr. Arbery when he was on the property.
In December, the Atlanta news station WSB obtained police body camera footage from when officers first arrived on Feb. 23, including the conversations they had immediately after the incident. The conversations show that many officers on the scene knew of Gregory McMichael’s background.
In the footage, Gregory McMichael can be heard saying that Mr. Bryan, whose nickname is Roddie, recorded the incident. When an officer asked Mr. Bryan if he was a driver coming through, he told them, “not necessarily.”
“Should we have been chasing him?” Mr. Bryan said in the video. “I don’t know.”
Mr. Arbery’s defenders say he was just getting some exercise.
Mr. Arbery’s defenders believe he was probably jogging through the neighborhood for exercise. Michael J. Moore, an Atlanta lawyer and a former federal prosecutor, reviewed Mr. Barnhill’s letter to the Glynn County police, as well as the initial police report. In an email, Mr. Moore called Mr. Barnhill’s opinion “flawed.”
In his view, Mr. Moore said, the McMichaelses appeared to be the aggressors, and such aggressors were not justified in using force under Georgia’s self-defense laws. “The law does not allow a group of people to form an armed posse and chase down an unarmed person who they believe might have possibly been the perpetrator of a past crime,” Mr. Moore wrote.
The Georgia N.A.A.C.P. previously called for the pursuers to be arrested.
In May, Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee at the time, weighed in on Twitter. “The video is clear: Ahmaud Arbery was killed in cold blood,” he wrote. “It is time for a swift, full, and transparent investigation into his murder.”
Both Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, and his Democratic opponent in the 2018 governor’s race, Stacey Abrams, a former state House minority leader, have expressed concern over the case.
Mr. Kemp wrote on Twitter that “Georgians deserve answers.” Ms. Abrams wrote that “our systems of law enforcement and justice must be held to the highest standards: full investigation, appropriate charges and an unbiased prosecution.”
Daniel Victor and Christina Morales contributed reporting.
Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. He previously worked at The Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. @RichardFausset
Photo by: @DestinyTopolski
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