Pair charged with murder of jogger
After several days of intense public outcry over the lack of arrests in the fatal shooting of a black man as he ran through a Georgia neighbourhood, the white father and son charged in the case have made brief court appearances by videoconference, speaking only when asked to confirm their names.
Clad in orange jumpsuits, Gregory and Travis McMichael appeared on screen for about a minute before Magistrate Judge Wallace Harrell, who read each man his rights and the aggravated assault and felony murder charges they face in the February 23 slaying of Ahmaud Arbery.
On Friday — on what would have been Arbery’s 26th birthday — a boisterous crowd of several hundred people, most wearing masks to protect against the coronavirus, gathered outside the Glynn County courthouse for about 90 minutes and sang “Happy Birthday” in his honour.
With the coronavirus dominating the news and drastically altering Americans’ lives, Arbery’s shooting initially drew little attention outside Brunswick, about 110km south of Savannah.
A video of the shooting shared widely on social media on Tuesday thrust the case into the national spotlight and prompted widespread outrage, and on Thursday, authorities announced the arrests of the McMichaels.
Though the arrests were welcomed, Arbery’s family and their supporters expressed frustration at the long wait and fears that the justice system will fail them.
Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34, 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.
Some of the encounter was apparently recorded in two 911 calls, with a dispatcher trying to understand the problem.
“There’s a black male running down the street,” a caller says.
“I just need to know what he was doing wrong,” the dispatcher responds, in part.
In a second call six minutes later, someone can be heard yelling “Stop . . . Dammit. Stop.” Then, after a pause, “Travis!”
The leaked video shows a black man running at a jogging pace. The truck is stopped in the road ahead of him, with one of the white men standing in the pick-up’s bed and the other beside the open driver’s side door.
The running man attempts to pass the pick-up on the passenger side, moving just beyond the truck, briefly outside the camera’s view.
A gunshot sounds, and the video shows the runner grappling with a man over what appears to be a shotgun or rifle.
A second shot can be heard, and the runner can be seen punching the man.
A third shot is fired at point-blank range. The runner staggers a few feet and falls face down.
“They did not arrest the killers of Ahmaud Arbery because they saw the video,” Arbery family attorney Ben Crump said on Friday.
“They arrested the killers of Ahmaud Arbery because we saw the video, the public saw the video and it went viral. It was shocking. People were astonished.”
Crump blasted the handling of the case by the local police and prosecutors, and said he wants the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to “investigate the entire case from top to bottom”.