Lawyer: Arbery’s killers operated on assumptions
BRUNSWICK, Ga. – White men in pickup trucks chased Ahmaud Arbery for five minutes, and one threatened to shoot him, as they cut off the jogger’s escape from a Georgia subdivision and ultimately killed the 25-year-old Black man with a shotgun, a prosecutor told a trial jury Friday.
In her opening statement, prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said the short cellphone video that stirred national outrage over the slaying offered only a glimpse of the attack on Arbery, 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.”
Arbery’s killing on Feb. 23, 2020, was largely ignored until the video leaked and deepened a national reckoning over racial injustice.
Greg Mcmichael and his adult son, Travis Mcmichael, 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 graphic video of Travis Mcmichael shooting Arbery with a shotgun.
Travis Mcmichael’s defense attorney, Robert Rubin, described Arbery to the jury as “an intruder” and a “scary mystery” to residents of a neighborhood already on edge from thefts and property crimes. Arbery had been recorded by security cameras four times inside a home under construction from October 2019 to February 2020.
“No one knows him,” Rubin said in his opening statement. “He’s not jogging in the neighborhood. No one’s ever seen him. The only time we see Ahmaud Arbery in the neighborhood is at night on these cameras.”
The chase started on a Sunday hen a neighbor who’s not charged in the case called a nonemergency police number after seeing Arbery wandering inside a home under construction.
Greg Mcmichael saw Arbery run past his home and ran inside to alert his son. They grabbed guns, jumped in their truck and gave chase, Dunikoski said. Bryan joined them after seeing Arbery run past the Mcmichaels’ truck outside his home.
She said Greg Mcmichael later told police that at one point during the chase he shouted at Arbery, “Stop or I’ll blow your (expletive) head off!”
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. 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.”
She said the grainy cellphone video shows Travis Mcmichael raise his shotgun beside the truck as Arbery approaches and tries to run around the opposite side. Travis Mcmichael is then seen stepping in front of the truck with the gun to confront the fleeing man, she said.