BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Ahmaud Arbery loved to run. It was how the 25-year-old former high school football standout stayed fit, his friends said, and it was not unusual to see him running around the outskirts of the small coastal Georgia city near where he lived.
But on a Sunday afternoon in February, as Mr. Arbery ran through a suburban neighborhood of ranch houses and moss-draped oaks, he passed a man standing in his front yard, who later told the police that Mr. Arbery looked like the suspect in a string of break-ins.
According to a police report, the man, Gregory McMichael, 64, called out to his son, Travis McMichael, 34. They grabbed their weapons, a .357 magnum revolver and a shotgun, jumped into a truck and began following Mr. Arbery.
“Stop, stop,” they shouted at Mr. Arbery, “we want to talk to you.”
Moments later, after a struggle over the shotgun, Mr. Arbery was killed, shot at least twice.
No one has been charged or arrested in connection with the Feb. 23 killing. The case has received little attention beyond Brunswick, but it has raised questions in the community about racial profiling — Mr. Arbery was black, and the father and son are white — and about the interpretation of the state’s self-defense laws (Fausset “Two” 1).
According to documents obtained by The New York Times, a prosecutor who had the case for a few weeks told the police that the pursuers had acted within the scope of Georgia’s citizen’s arrest statute, and that Travis McMichael, who held the shotgun, had acted out of self-defense.
The police report does not mention whether Mr. Arbery was in possession of a weapon.
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The prosecutor who wrote the letter, George E. Barnhill, the district attorney for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, recused himself from the case this month, after Mr. Arbery’s family complained that he had a conflict of interest. A prosecutor from another county is now in charge and will determine whether the case should be presented to a grand jury.
Mr. Arbery was killed in Satilla Shores, a quiet middle-class enclave that abuts a network of marshlands about 15 minutes from downtown Brunswick and a short jog from Mr. Arbery’s neighborhood.
His friends and family said they believed that Mr. Arbery, who was wearing a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, Nike sneakers and a bandanna when he was killed, had been out exercising.
“Everybody in the community knows he runs,” said Mr. Vaughn, who said he saw Mr. Arbery jogging on the streets a few months ago. Mr. Vaughn said that he himself had raised suspicions by jogging through his own neighborhood in the suburbs of Brunswick, recalling a recent instance in which a white woman followed him in a van.
But others contend that Mr. Arbery was up to no good. On the day of the shooting, and apparently moments before the chase, a neighbor in Satilla Shores called 911, telling the dispatcher that a black man in a white T-shirt was inside a house that was under construction and only partially closed in.
“And he’s running right now,” the man told the dispatcher. “There he goes right now!”
In his letter to the police, Mr. Barnhill, the prosecutor, noted that Mr. Arbery had a criminal past. Court records show that Mr. Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and of violating probation in 2018. Five years earlier, according to The Brunswick News, he was indicted on charges that he took a handgun to a high school basketball game.
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Ms. Cooper pushed for Mr. Barnhill, a veteran prosecutor, to recuse himself from the case after she learned that his son works in the Brunswick district attorney’s office, which had previously employed Gregory McMichael. (The Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, recused herself early on, also because Mr. McMichael had worked in her office.)
“She believes there are kinships between the parties (there are not) and has made other unfounded allegations of bias(es),” Mr. Barnhill wrote in his letter, sent in early April, to the Glynn County Police Department. As such, Mr. Barnhill wrote, he had decided to step away from the case, and would ask Georgia’s attorney general’s office to pick another prosecutor.
Mr. Barnhill also wrote that he did not believe there was evidence of a crime, noting that Gregory McMichael and his son had been legally carrying their weapons under Georgia law. And because Mr. Arbery was a “burglary suspect,” the pursuers, who had “solid firsthand probable cause,” were justified in chasing him under the state’s citizen’s arrest law.
In a separate document, Mr. Barnhill stated that video exists of Mr. Arbery “burglarizing a home immediately preceding the chase and confrontation.” In the letter to the police, he cites a separate video of the shooting filmed by a third pursuer.
Mr. Barnhill said this video, which has not been made public, shows Mr. Arbery attacking Travis McMichael after he and his father pulled up to him in their truck.
After Mr. Barnhill recused himself, the case was assigned to Tom Durden, in the city of Hinesville, Ga., who must now decide whether to present the case to a grand jury for possible indictments. In an interview last week, Mr. Durden said his team had begun reviewing the evidence. “We don’t know anything about the case,” he said. “We don’t have any preconceived idea about it.”
The police report is based almost solely upon the responding officer’s interview with Gregory McMichael, who had worked at the police department from 1982 to 1989. The responding officer describes him as a witness. According to the report, Mr. McMichael told the officer that he and his son pulled up near Mr. Arbery, that his son got out of the truck with the shotgun, and that his son and Mr. Arbery then fought over the weapon, “at which point Travis fired a shot and then a second later there was a second shot” (Fausset “Two” 1-4).
Gregory and Travis McMichael
Police body camera footage released this week in the Ahmaud Arbery case shows the 25-year-old was still breathing and moving when officers arrived on the scene. Officers did not check for vital signs or render aid for nearly three minutes, though the first officer arrived within seconds of the fatal shooting.
There is no indication Arbery’s life could have been saved even if he had received immediate medical care, due to the severity of his three gunshot wounds.
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The newly released bodycam footage shows the first officer on the scene, Glynn County Police Officer R. Minshew, activating his body worn camera as he steps out of his squad car. Police dispatch reports show he arrived just minutes after the shooting. His first report from the scene was of a black male on the ground “bleeding out.”
His body camera captures Arbery facedown in the middle of Satilla Drive. Greg and Travis McMichael, since charged with murder, stand above him.
Thirteen seconds into the recording, Arbery’s right foot rolls over.
Seventeen seconds in, Arbery’s head moves.
53 seconds in, a large gasp is heard. His lower body appears to lift slightly.
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At 2:17, a second officer arrives. “You get a pulse or anything?” he asks.
“Nah,” Minshew replies, taking photos. “He’s about to be 10-7, man” – police code for “out of service.”
The second officer approaches Arbery. “I think he’s still breathing,” Travis McMichael says off-camera.
It’s 2:48.
“Yep I know,” the officer replies. “I’m going to try to do something for him.”
“You got your first aid kit?” he shouts to Minshew. He rolls Arbery over on his back. His torso is soaked in blood. “Damn,” he mutters.
About a minute later, Minshew reports, “I ain't got no first aid kit.”
“I’m just going to keep my hand on him,” the officer says, pressing his gloved hand to Arbery’s chest.
At the 7:54 mark, paramedics arrive. The officer is standing over Arbery’s body.
“Looks like shotgun slug to the center chest. He was on his stomach when I got here. I rolled him over. He stopped breathing a couple minutes ago,” he tells paramedics.
He adds, “I kept pressure on it, but there was nothing I could do” (Schindler 1-2).
ATLANTA — The three white men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was shot dead after being chased in a South Georgia neighborhood, have been indicted on murder charges by a Georgia grand jury, the prosecutor in the case announced on Wednesday.
The men — Gregory McMichael, 64; his son Travis McMichael, 34; and their neighbor William Bryan, 50 — were arrested and charged last month with murder and other crimes in connection with Mr. Arbery’s death, which prompted nationwide protests and indignation, particularly after a graphic video of his Feb. 23 killing was released online.
On Wednesday, the office of District Attorney Joyette M. Holmes of Cobb County announced that a grand jury in Glynn County had 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.
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Mr. Arbery, 25, was spotted in the Satilla Shores neighborhood, outside of Brunswick, Ga., while running on a Sunday afternoon. A surveillance camera showed that Mr. Arbery stopped for a few minutes inside a house under construction before resuming his jog. Gregory McMichael later told the authorities he thought Mr. Arbery was a suspect in a series of break-ins in the neighborhood.
He and Travis McMichael armed themselves, they told the police, got into a pickup truck, and tried to catch Mr. Arbery. Mr. Bryan, who is known as Roddie, also gave chase in his vehicle, a state investigator said, and used his cellphone to film the killing of Mr. Arbery.
The video shows Mr. Arbery running toward a pickup truck with Travis McMichael standing next to it. Mr. Arbery tries to run to the other side of the truck to avoid Mr. McMichael, who is armed with a shotgun. But the two struggle, and Mr. McMichael soon shoots Mr. Arbery.
In a court hearing this month, Richard Dial, an investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said Mr. Bryan heard Mr. McMichael use a racial slur after shooting Mr. Arbery.
According to the six-page indictment, which was returned Wednesday morning, the men are charged with trying to “unlawfully confine and detain” Mr. Arbery while chasing him, using their vehicles “offensively” and in a manner “likely to cause serious bodily injury.”
The most serious charge is malice murder, which under Georgia law is “the intentional killing of a person with malice aforethought,” said Charlie Bailey, an Atlanta-area lawyer and former assistant district attorney in Fulton County, Ga.
Mr. Bailey noted that this malice did not need to have been developed over a long period of time. “Malice can be formed in an instant,” he said (Fausset “Suspects” 1-3).
Mr. Bryan’s lawyer, Kevin Gough … has said repeatedly that his client should not be charged. Late Monday night, he released a statement saying Mr. Bryan had taken a polygraph test that proved he was unarmed at the time of the shooting and did not have a conversation with the McMichaels before the pursuit.
“Without Roddie Bryan,” Mr. Gough wrote, referring to Mr. Bryan by his nickname, “there would be no video of the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery. Without that video there would be no case. Without purporting to speak for the prosecution, as that would not be my place, we believe Mr. Bryan is not just a witness for the prosecution but a key witness.”
The McMichaels tried to cut off Mr. Arbery during the chase, according to Mr. McMichael’s account, and Mr. Arbery tried to avoid them by turning around and running in the other direction. At that point, Mr. Bryan “attempted to block him, which was unsuccessful,” according to the report.
Mr. Arbery then turned onto another street, and the McMichaels got in front of him while Mr. Bryan pursued from behind and began filming.
Mr. Bryan’s involvement is also mentioned in a letter that George E. Barnhill, the district attorney in Waycross, Ga., wrote to the Glynn County police in April. Mr. Barnhill was the second of four prosecutors who have been in charge of the case. He recused himself, citing a conflict of interest, but not before advising the police that insufficient probable cause existed to arrest the McMichaels or Mr. Bryan.
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Mr. Bryan … and Mr. Gough appeared on the CNN program “Cuomo Prime Time.” Mr. Bryan was largely quiet, but Mr. Gough interjected as the program’s anchor, Chris Cuomo, asked Mr. Bryan about his actions on Feb. 23 and his motivation for recording the video.
Mr. Gough assigned blame for the shooting to the McMichaels, asserting that Mr. Bryan lived nearby and was drawn by the commotion.
“This is a terrible matter and some people are going to have to answer for what they did,” Mr. Gough said. “But my client is not responsible for that." Mr. Bryan, he added, “hasn’t been in so much as a fistfight since he was in high school.”
Mr. Bryan offered his sympathy to Mr. Arbery’s family, and said he was praying for them, and noted the role the video played in bringing attention to the case. “If there wasn’t a tape, then we wouldn’t know what happened,” he said (Fausset and Rojas 4).
When the Glynn County Police Department arrived at the scene of a fatal shooting in February in southeastern Georgia, officers encountered a former colleague with the victim’s blood on his hands.
They took down his version of events and let him and his adult son, who had fired the shots, go home.
Later that day, Wanda Cooper, the mother of the 25-year-old victim, Ahmaud Arbery, received a call from a police investigator. She recounted later that the investigator said her son had been involved in a burglary and was killed by “the homeowner,” an inaccurate version of what had happened.
More than two months after that fatal confrontation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation … arrested the former officer Gregory McMichael, and his son, Travis McMichael, on charges of murder and aggravated assault.
The charges — which came after the release of a graphic video showing the killing as the two white men confront Mr. Arbery … made clear the depths of the local department’s bungling of the case, which was just the latest in a series of troubling episodes involving its officers.
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[Attorney General Chris] Carr’s office … [had] already determined that George E. Barnhill, a district attorney who was assigned the case in February but [later] recused himself ..., should have never taken it on. Among his many conflicts: His son once worked alongside one of the suspects at the local prosecutor’s office.
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“It’s small-town America,” Mr. [S. Lee] Merritt [a lawyer representing Mr. Arbery’s family] said in an interview .... “Those counties, the law enforcement community there they know each other well, they recycle officers in between themselves — it’s a very tight-knit community.”
Over the years, Glynn County police officers have been accused of covering up allegations of misconduct, tampering with a crime scene, interfering in an investigation of a police shooting and retaliating against fellow officers who cooperated with outside investigators.
The police chief was indicted days after Mr. Arbery’s killing on charges related to an alleged cover-up of an officer’s sexual relationship with an informant. The chief, John Powell, had been hired to clean up the department, which the Glynn County manager described last fall as suffering from poor training, outdated policies and “a culture of cronyism.”
The Glynn County force was the sort of department where disciplinary records went missing and where evidence room standards were not maintained, leading the state to strip it of its accreditation.
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Darren W. Penn, a lawyer and a department critic, said the Ahmaud Arbery case was “another symptom or sign of a police department that appears willing to protect those that they know” (Rojas, Fausset, and Kovaleski 1-2).
Ahmaud Arbery, the black Georgia man who was fatally shot in February after being pursued by two white men, had an encounter with police in 2017 in which an officer tried to use a stun gun on him.
Police body-camera footage from that incident shows a Glynn County police officer on patrol questioning Arbery about his sitting alone in his car in a park. ...
The video, first reported on by The Guardian, and a police report on the incident were obtained by NBC News through an open records request (Burke 1).
In the video an officer patrolling the area suspected Arbery of using marijuana, saying he was in a park known for drug activity.
Arbery, dressed in a green hat, winter coat and athletic pants, said he didn’t have drugs and refused to let the officer search his car. He told the officer he was relaxing by rapping in his car over instrumental beats and had the day off from work at Blue Beacon Truck Wash.
The incident … escalated when Arbery began to question why the officer, Michael Kanago, was hassling him. Kanago claimed he began to feel threatened by Arbery, later writing in his report that “veins were popping from [Arbery’s] chest, which made me feel that he was becoming enraged and may turn physically violent towards me”. Kanago requested help from a second officer.
“You’re bothering me for nothing,” Arbery said to Kanago, according to body camera footage. After Kanago told him he was looking for criminal activity, Arbery said “criminal activity? I’m in a fucking park. I work.”
The second officer, David Haney, arrived minutes later and screamed at Arbery to get his hands out of his pockets, which Arbery did.
Haney then attempted to tase Arbery, but his Taser malfunctioned, according to Kanago’s report. Arbery continued to comply with instructions from the two officers to get on the ground. Kanago had already searched Arbery for weapons before Haney arrived, and deduced he was unarmed.
“I get one day off a week…I’m up early in the morning trying to chill,” Arbery told the officers as he sat on the ground. “I’m just so aggravated because I work hard, six days a week.”
The incident eventually ends with police allowing Arbery to leave, but forbidding him from driving his car because his driver’s license is suspended.
In a joint statement to the Guardian, lawyers working for the Arbery family described the video as a clear depiction of “a situation where Ahmaud was harassed by Glynn county police officers”.
The lawyers said there was “no justifiable reason” for Arbery to be threatened with a Taser. “This appears to be just a glimpse into the kind of scrutiny Ahmaud Arbery faced not only by this police department, but ultimately regular citizens like the McMichaels and their posse, pretending to be police officers” (Levine and Laughland 1-2).
Three Georgia men were indicted [April 27, 2021] on federal hate crime charges in connection with the death of Ahmaud Arbery …
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The suspects — Travis McMichael, 35; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and William Bryan, 51, all of whom are white — were each charged with one count of interference with Mr. Arbery’s right to use a public street because of his race. They were also charged with one count of attempted kidnapping.
Travis and Gregory McMichael were also charged with one count each of using, carrying and brandishing a firearm. Travis McMichael is accused of shooting Mr. Arbery.
The men intimidated Mr. Arbery “because of Arbery’s race and color,” the eight-page indictment said.
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All three suspects also face state charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony.
No date has been set for the state trial. … (Benner and Wright 1, 3).
The Justice Department brought federal hate crimes charges Wednesday in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, charging a father and son who armed themselves, chased and fatally shot the 25-year-old Black man after spotting him running in their Georgia neighborhood.
Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory, were charged along with a third man, William “Roddie” Bryan, with one count of interference with civil rights and attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels are also charged with using, carrying and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.
The case is the most significant civil rights prosecution undertaken to date by the Biden administration Justice Department and comes as federal officials have moved quickly to open sweeping investigations into troubled police departments as civil rights takes center stage among the department’s priorities.
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The Justice Department alleges that the men “used force and threats of force to intimidate and interfere with Arbery’s right to use a public street because of his race” (Tucker 1).
[Paste the following on Google to watch this video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v7o_6uI9R0
[Paste the following on Google to hear an explanation of and see the video of the shooting]
Man Who Filmed the Arbery Killing Faces Calls for Arrest
Works cited:
Benner, Katie and Wright, Will. “3 Indicted on Federal Hate Crime Charges in Ahmaud Arbery Shooting.” The New York Times, updated April 29, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/us/politics/ahmaud-arbery-shooting.html
Burke, Minyvonne. “Ahmaud Arbery: A 2017 Video Shows Police Trying To Use Stun Gun on Him.” NBC News, May 19, 2020. Net. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ahmaud-arbery-2017-video-shows-police-trying-use-stun-gun-n1210326
Fausset, Richard. “Suspects in Ahmaud Arbery’s Killing Are Indicted on Murder Charges.” The New York Times, updated June 24, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-murder-indictment.html
Fausset, Richard. “Two Weapons, a Chase, a Killing and No Charges.” The New York Times, updated February 28, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/us/ahmed-arbery-shooting-georgia.html
Fausset, Richard, and Rojas, Rick. “Man Who Filmed the Arbery Killing Faces Calls for Arrest.” The New York Times, updated June 24, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/us/ahmaud-arbery-william-bryan.html
Levine, Sam and Laughland, Oliver. “Exclusive: Police Tried To Tase Ahmaud Arbery in 2017 Incident, Video Shows.” The Guardian, May 18, 2020. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/18/ahmaud-arbery-police-taser-2017-georgia
Rojas, Rick, Fausset, Richard, and Kovaleski, Serge F. “Georgia Killing Puts Spotlight on a Police Force’s Troubled History.” The New York Times, May 8, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/us/glynn-county-police-ahmaud-arbery.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Schindler, Anne. “POLICE VIDEO: Ahmaud Arbery Was ‘Breathing,' Moving When Officers Arrived.” First Coast News, updated December 19, 2020. Net. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/local/ahmaud-arbery-was-breathing-moving-when-officers-arrived-but-received-no-medical-attention-for-nearly-three-minutes/77-c89b36cf-3111-44f3-8732-87b09916c3a5
Tucker, Eric. “U.S. Indicts 3 on Hate Crime Charges in Death of Georgia Man.” NPR, April 28, 2021. Net. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-indicts-3-on-hate-crime-charges-in-death-of-georgia-man
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