Subdivision’s social posts reflected fear before Arbery shot

Brunswick, Ga. (AP) — Months before Ahmaud Arbery was killed, shooter Travis McMichael wrote a simple, chilling response to a Facebook post about a suspected car burglary in his Georgia neighborhood: “Arm up.”

The item he commented on was sandwiched between chats about lost dogs and water service interruption, like in many online communities in the U.S. based around physical neighborhoods.

But in the year before Arbery’s death, the posts in the Facebook group for the subdivision where McMichael lived portray a neighborhood increasingly on edge over low-level incidents, with residents swapping suspicions, keeping children inside and becoming willing to take matters into their own hands.

At a time of broad re-examination of race, criminal justice and the role of technology, such online neighborhood forums in the U.S. have a troubling tendency to veer from wholesome community chitchat to anxious hypervigilance when suspicion is the discussion topic.

“It causes people both to be more anxious, more on-alert or hypersensitive. But it also makes them more suspicious of someone not like them” in a variety of ways, said media psychologist Pamela Rutledge. “It’s really sort of stacking the kindling, so to speak, because people are then watching for something to go wrong.”

Closing arguments are expected Monday in murder trial for McMichael and two other white men charged in the slaying of Arbery, whose death became part of a broader reckoning on racial injustice in the criminal legal system.

Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael grabbed guns and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck after seeing the 25-year-old Black man running in their neighborhood outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick in February 2020. William “Roddie” Bryan, who joined the pursuit in his own truck, took cellphone video of Travis McMichael

shooting Arbery as he threw punches and grabbed for the shotgun.

They say that they were trying to lawfully stop burglaries in their neighborhood, and McMichael testified he shot Arbery in self-defense.

He also testified that much of what he knew about local burglary reports came from the Facebook group for the Satilla Shores subdivision where he lived with his parents.

His “arm up” comment came in response to a July 2019 post, included in court documents, in which a woman warning of car burglaries said: “Remember, you can’t tell if a thief is a lightweight or a murderer.”