New prosecutor to lead racially charged case
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The Georgia attorney general on Monday named a new prosecutor to oversee the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25yearold black man whose killing has drawn national attention and stirred protests after a video circulated showing his fatal encounter with two white men who have been charged with murder.
The prosecutor, Joyette Holmes, comes from Cobb County in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where she is the first African American to serve as district attorney. In naming Holmes, Attorney General
Chris Carr noted that she would bring to bear the resources of one of Georgia’s largest prosecutor’s offices.
Holmes becomes the fourth prosecutor in a case that has been marked by outside scrutiny and squabbling between law enforcement officials over how it’s been handled.
She will take on the prosecution of Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, who were charged with murder and aggravated assault after they took up weapons and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck. Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery after getting out of the truck, authorities said.
The release of the video last week, months after the killing, set off a wave of public pressure calling for the McMichaels to be arrested and for criminal charges to be brought.
The men were arrested roughly two days later, as Tom Durden, the prosecutor who Holmes has replaced, called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A previous prosecutor on the case had asserted that the McMichaels’ actions had been covered by selfdefense and citizen’s arrest statutes.
The Justice Department said Monday that it was looking into whether to bring federal hate crime charges in the case.
The case will be the highestprofile prosecution Holmes has handled since becoming the district attorney in Cobb County last year. She had spent four years as the county’s chief magistrate when she was appointed to the prosecutor’s office by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who described her as “one of our best and brightest in Georgia.”
She was the first woman, as well as the first African American, to serve in the job.
“Being a black woman, I think there’s a role that it plays and it’s one of pride in the community and one of perspective that can be given that may not have been given in the years before,” Holmes said when her appointment was announced, according to the Atlanta JournalConstitution. “I think those things are a bonus for Cobb County.”
The decision to place Holmes in charge comes after Carr, the attorney general, asked federal officials to launch an investigation into the case. He has pressed for an inquiry that would extend beyond the circumstances of the fatal encounter in February to the way local law enforcement officials and prosecutors handled the case as months elapsed without arrests.