Prosecutor: Arbery’s killers known to use racist slurs
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The three white men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery had histories of making racist comments or using slurs in text messages that stunned their friends and colleagues, a federal prosecutor told jurors Monday as the trio stood trial on hate crime charges in the 25-year-old Black man’s death.
During opening statements in the case, defense attorneys admitted their clients had each expressed offensive and indefensible opinions about Black people. But they insisted the trio’s pursuit of Arbery as he ran in their neighborhood was prompted by honest, though erroneous, suspicion that he had committed crimes — not by his race.
“I’m not going to ask you to like Travis McMichael,” Amy Lee Copeland, the defense attorney for the man who fatally shot Arbery, told the jury. “I’m not going to ask you to decide that he had done nothing wrong. But I’m going to ask you to return a verdict of not guilty to this indictment.”
McMichael and his father, Greg McMichael, armed themselves and chased Arbery in a pickup truck after he ran past their coastal Georgia home on Feb. 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the pursuit in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael blasting Arbery with a shotgun. Arrests came only after the video leaked online two months later.
All three were convicted of murder and a judge sentenced them to life in prison last month.
Now the McMichaels and Bryan are on trial again, this time in U.S. District Court, where federal prosecutors have charged them with hate crimes that allege they violated Arbery’s civil rights and targeted him because he was Black.
Security cameras inside a nearby home under construction had recorded video of Arbery wandering inside, but never taking anything, several times in the months before his death. White people had also been seen entering the home, which had no doors or windows. Yet the McMichaels assumed Arbery must be a criminal and kept a lookout for him, prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein told the jury.
“If Ahmaud Arbery had been white, he’d have gone for a jog, checked out a cool house that was under construction and been home in time for Sunday dinner,” Bernstein said. “Instead, he ended up running for his life.”
Bernstein said prosecutors will show evidence of comments by the McMichaels and Bryan that reveal a mindset that led them to suspect an innocent Black man of wrongdoing.
Travis McMichael, she said, once texted a friend saying he loved his job because “zero n— rs work with me.” Commenting on an online video of a Black man lighting a firecracker stuffed in his nose, he messaged a friend saying: “It’d be cooler if it blew the f---ing n----r’s head off,” Bernstein said. The friend was taken aback by how angry McMichael sounded, she said.
One allegation never mentioned in the prosecutor’s opening statement was that Bryan told investigators he heard Travis McMichael utter a racial slur after shooting Arbery. The comment was widely reported after Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Richard Dial testified to it during a June 2020 pretrial hearing in the state murder case. Travis McMichael’s attorneys denied he said it, and state prosecutors never brought up the comment during the murder trial.