D.A. ‘INTERFERED’
A Georgia district attorney blocked police from making arrests immediately after the Feb. 23 shooting death of unarmed jogger Ahmaud Arbery, two local county commissioners said Friday.
“She shut them down to protect her friend McMichael,” Glynn County Commissioner Allen Booker alleged of DA Jackie Johnson.
Slaying suspect Greg McMichael is a former cop who investigated Arbery for the district attorney on a weapons charge several years earlier, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis, 34, were arrested Thursday and charged with murder in the fatal shooting of Arbery, 25, whom they chased in a pickup truck while holding guns after they spotted him jogging through their neighborhood in the town of Satilla Shores.
The shooting was captured on video that emerged this month.
Glynn County Commissioner Peter Murphy told the JournalConstitution that cops at the scene of the shooting believed there was cause to arrest the McMichaels, despite their claim that they’d pursued Arbery because they’d believed he’d been burglarizing their neighborhood.
“They spoke to an assistant,” in the DA’s office, “who relayed their request to Jackie Johnson,” Murphy said of the cops’ phone call from the scene. “They were told not to make the arrest.”
At the scene, the elder McMichael said he recognized Arbery from surveillance video capturing a recent burglary in his mostly white neighborhood — and made no mention of his history with the victim.
But Friday, the connection was revealed in a recusal letter filed by Waycross Judicial Circuit District Attorney George Barnhill, the Journal-Constitution reported.
When Arbery was in high school, the elder McMichael investigated him for the DA’s office. That probe resulted in Arbery being sentenced as a firsttime offender to five years’ probation on charges of carrying a weapon on campus.
Johnson would recuse herself from the shooting case a few days after Arbery was gunned down, Booker said.
But two months would pass before the father and son were arrested. On Friday, which would have been Arbery’s 26th birthday, the McMichaels were ordered held without bail on their first court appearance.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is now probing the shooting and its aftermath.