Jurors hear dueling portraits of shooting victim Ahmaud Arbery

BRUNSWICK, GA. >> Prosecutors and defense attorneys Friday presented dueling portraits of Ahmaud Arbery, who was either an innocent Black runner fatally shot by three White strangers or “a scary mystery” who had been seen prowling around a Georgia neighborhood.

In her opening statement, prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said the cellphone video that stirred national outrage over Arbery’s slaying offered only a glimpse of the attack on the 25-yearold, who gave his pursuers no reason to suspect him of any wrongdoing.

“They assumed that he must have committed some crime that day,” Dunikoski said. “He tried to run around their truck and get way from these strangers, total strangers, who had already told him that they would kill him. And then they killed him.”

An attorney for Travis McMichael, the man who shot Arbery three times, put the shooting in a much different light. Attorney Robert Rubin described Arbery to the overwhelmingly White jury as “an intruder” who had four times been recorded on video “plundering around” a neighboring house under construction.

McMichael and his father, Greg McMichael, gave chase, hoping to detain Arbery until police arrived, Rubin said, but Arbery refused to stop and lunged toward McMichael and his gun.

“It is a horrible, horrible video, and it’s tragic that Ahmaud Arbery lost his life,” Rubin said. “But at that point, Travis McMichael is acting in self-defense. He did not want to encounter Ahmaud Arbery physically. He was only trying to stop him for the police.”

Arbery’s killing on Feb. 23, 2020, was largely ignored until the video leaked and deepened a national reckoning over racial injustice. On that Sunday afternoon, the McMichaels armed themselves and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck as he ran through their neighborhood just outside the port city of Brunswick. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the chase and recorded video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery with a shotgun. The chase started when a neighbor called a nonemergency police number after seeing Arbery wandering inside a home under construction. When a police officer who responded to the shooting asked Greg McMichael if Arbery had broken into a house, he told the officer: “That’s just it. I don’t know ... I don’t know. He might have gone in somebody’s house,” according to Dunikoski.

“All three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions — not on facts, not on evidence,” Dunikoski said. “And they made decisions in their driveways based on those assumptions that took a young man’s life.”