3 men convicted in Arbery killing now face hate-crimes trial
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Sentenced to life in prison for murder, the three men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery will soon stand trial on federal hate-crime charges, with jurors having to decide whether the slaying of the Black man was motivated by racism.
The sentences imposed by a judge Friday in Glynn County Superior Court concluded Georgia’s criminal case in the killing of Arbery. A jury returned the guilty verdicts the day before Thanksgiving.
A federal judge has scheduled jury selection to begin Feb. 7 in the men’s second trial, in U.S. District Court. And evidence that state prosecutors chose not to present at the murder trial is expected to be front and center.
An indictment last year charged father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan with violating Arbery’s civil rights when they pursued the running man in pickups and cut off his escape from their neighborhood. Bryan recorded cellphone video of the chase’s deadly end, when Travis McMichael fired at the 25-year-old Arbery from close range with a shotgun.
The Feb. 23, 2020, killing just outside the port city of Brunswick became part of a greater national reckoning over racial injustice when the video leaked online two months later. Though an investigator testified at a pretrial court hearing that Bryan said he heard Travis McMichael utter a racial slur as Arbery lay dying in the street, state prosecutors never presented that information to the jury during the murder case.
That evidence could be key in the federal trial, in which the McMichaels and Bryan are charged with targeting Arbery because he was Black.
At the Georgia hearing Friday, Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley sentenced both McMichaels to life in prison with no chance of parole. The judge sentenced Bryan to life with a possibility for parole once he’s served 30 years.
Despite those penalties, Arbery’s family said the hatecrime case remains important.
“They killed him because he was a Black man,” Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery, told reporters outside the Glynn County courthouse Friday.
Lee Merritt, an attorney for Arbery’s mother, said it’s important for the federal case to expose racial motives behind the killing because “there is an issue of race taking place in this country. It has come front and center, and it needs to be discussed.”
Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Richard Dial testified in June 2020, more than a year before the state trial, that Bryan told investigators that he heard Travis McMichael say the racial slur after shooting Arbery. Attorneys for Travis McMichael have denied that he made the statement.
State prosecutors and investigators never mentioned that during the murder trial. Georgia law doesn’t require establishing motive to convict someone of murder; it merely requires proof that a victim was killed with malice or during the commission of another felony.
Regardless, issues of race loomed large in the murder trial. The McMichaels and Bryan weren’t charged with crimes until after the shooting video became public.
“Today your son has made history because we have people who are being held accountable for lynching a Black man in America,” Benjamin Crump, a civil attorney for Arbery’s family, told the slain man’s parents after the sentencing hearing.
Defense attorneys during the trial contended that the men pursued Arbery because they reasonably believed he had been committing burglaries in the neighborhood. Travis McMichael took the witness stand to testify that he opened fire in self-defense after Arbery ran at him and tried to grab his shotgun.
“He and Greg McMichael thought they were helping their community, thought they were helping police catch someone,” said Robert Rubin, an attorney for Travis McMichael.
Defense attorneys said they planned to appeal the convictions for murder and other state crimes within 30 days.
Walmsley called the killing “callous” and noted that when Arbery fell bleeding in the street, the McMichaels “turned their backs, to give a disturbing image, and they walked away.”