White father and son charged with black man’s shooting death
BRUNSWICK, Georgia — More than two months after a black man was shot dead while running through a Georgia neighbourhood, the white father and son arrested in the case were arraigned on charges of murder and aggravated assault Friday.
The investigation by local authorities had seemed stalled until this week, when a video of the Feb. 23 shooting of Ahmaud Arbery was shared widely on social media, prompting outrage across the United States.
“All that matters is what the facts tell us,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation director Vic Reynolds said Friday, noting that his agency brought charges a day after it was brought into the case. Reynolds said “every stone will be uncovered” in the investigation.
Addressing the question of racial intent, Reynolds noted that Georgia has no hate crime law. That has prompted many civil rights activists to call for a federal investigation.
Arrest warrants for 64-year-old Gregory and Travis McMichael, 34, filed in court Friday confirmed, as the initial police report stated, that Travis McMichael “pointed and discharged a shotgun at Ahmaud Arbery.” But there were no new details.
In a letter to Glynn County police in early April, a prosecutor previously assigned to the case outlined reasons he believed there was “insufficient probable cause to issue arrest warrants” in the case. Waycross district attorney George E. Barnhill argued that the McMichaels’ actions were legal under Georgia laws on citizen’s arrests, the open carry of guns and self-defence.
The McMichaels told police they pursued Arbery, with another person recording them on video, after spotting him running in their neighbourhood. The father and son said they thought he matched the appearance of a burglary suspect who, they said, had been recorded on a surveillance camera some time before.
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, has said she thinks her son, a former high school football player, was just jogging in the Satilla Shores neighbourhood before he was killed.
Arbery would have turned 26 on Friday. Several hundred people sang Happy Birthday in his honour outside the Glynn County Courthouse. Many expressed frustration at the long wait before arrests were made.
“The work is just beginning,” John Perry, president of the Brunswick chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the crowd. “We can’t lose focus and we’ve got to make sure the prosecution gets done.”
Anthony Johnson, 40, said Arbery was his neighbour for about a decade. He said he wants to see the McMichaels get the same treatment in the legal system as black defendants. “Just arresting them, that ain’t doing nothing,” Johnson said. “We want them convicted. We want them sent to prison for life.”
Gregory and Travis McMichael made their first, brief court appearances Friday afternoon. The father and son appeared individually from jail on a videoconference screen in the courtroom of Magistrate Judge Wallace Harrell. The judge spent about a minute reading each man his rights and the charges faced.
A Superior Court judge will have to decide whether to grant them bond.