Ahmaud Arbery suspects plead not guilty in Black jogger death

Bryan shot the cell phone video of Arbery’s last moments.

During Friday’s hearing, Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, asked a judge to deny Bryan’s bail. “I ask this court to say no. You cannot go home. You denied that my son went home,” Cooper-Jones told the court.

“My son ran away. He ran, he ran. My son really ran around him and my son ran for his life. But William Bryan did not allow my son to come home,” Cooper-Jones said during a victim impact statement. .

Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery, said in a statement read by a prosecutor that “he suffered the deepest loss a family can bear when McMichaels and Bryan acted as judge, jury and executioner.”

Bryan’s son, Preston Bryan, called for his father’s release on bail and told the judge that his father does not pose any risk to the public.

The hearing continued until the afternoon.

Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael and Bryan were charged with charges of malice and felony murder in Arbery’s death, prosecutors said.

The charges also include aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and a criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment, according to the indictment.

Gregory McMichael told officers he thought Arbery appeared to be a suspicious person in a series of recent robberies in the area, according to a police report.

There were no reported robberies in the more than seven weeks before Arbery’s death, and there was only one report of theft after a gun was stolen from an unlocked vehicle in front of the McMichaels home, police said .

Investigators said they believed Bryan attempted to assist the McMichaels by using his vehicle to “confine and arrest” Arbery multiple times in the minutes leading up to Arbery’s death, according to an arrest warrant.

Bryan told police that at one point he thought Arbery was trying to get into his truck, Dial said, adding that he didn’t know if that was true, but felt that Arbery was trying to escape.

Investigators found a hit from a palm print on the back door of Bryan’s truck, cotton fibers near the truck that “we attribute to contact with Mr. Arbery,” and a dent underneath the fibers, he said.

Bryan was working on his porch, defense attorney Kevin Gough replied, and his client did not know what the McMichaels were doing.

Bryan “sees someone he doesn’t know followed by a truck he does. He does, with all due respect, what any patriotic American would have done under the same circumstances,” Gough said.

Arbery tried to escape, agent says

Although Bryan’s attorney has argued that his client was not involved in the murder, Dial said Bryan yelled at the McMichaels, “Got it?” when he saw them chasing the corridor.

After yelling at the McMichaels, Bryan joined the chase, at which point none of the three had called 911, Dial said.

The McMichaels had already tried to avoid Arbery once when Bryan joined the chase, the GBI agent said. Bryan attempted to block Arbery while Travis McMichael drove around the block with his father in the truck bed, he said.

Bryan “made several statements about trying to block him and using his vehicle to try to stop him,” Dial said. “His statement was that Mr. Arbery kept jumping off the road and moving around the bumper and running into the ditch in an attempt to avoid his truck.”

At one point, Arbery was leaving the Satilla Shores neighborhood where the defendants live, but the McMichaels forced him to return to the neighborhood and pass Bryan, the agent said. It was then that he hit Arbery, Dial said, and Arbery kept running with the McMichaels in their search.

Bryan turned around, and that’s when the widely released video of the Arbery murder begins, he said.

When police arrived after the shooting, Dial said, Gregory McMichael said in comments captured on law enforcement camera footage that he was uncertain whether Arbery had stolen anything.

“He had a feeling that Arbery may have been responsible for the robberies that were in the neighborhood previously. He actually says instinct. His instincts told him that,” said the GBI agent.

Travis McMichael told police that he ordered Arbery to drop to the ground before the shooting, and Gregory McMichael told an officer that he had instructed his son, “Don’t shoot,” Dial said.

Suspects accused of using racial slurs

Body camera images also showed a Confederate flag sticker on McMichael’s truck toolbox, he said.

In questioning, Dial testified that Bryan mentioned the insult in a GBI interview on May 13, and to his knowledge Bryan had not previously made the accusation, even during an May 11 interview.

Dial said there were “numerous times” on social media and through messaging services that Travis McMichael used racial slurs once he told someone he loved his job because “there was no N word anywhere.”

In another case, sometime before the shooting, he replied in an Instagram message that things would be better if someone had “blown his head off that word,” Dial testified. Dial did not say who McMichael was referring to and was not asked for more context.

Bryan also had several messages on his phone that included “racial” terms, indicating that he may have prejudged Arbery when he saw him that day, Dial said.

“There is evidence of Mr. Bryan’s racist attitude in his communications, and from that I extrapolate the reason why he made assumptions that he made that day,” he said. “He saw a man running down the road with a truck following him, and I think he made certain assumptions that, at least in part, were based on his racial bias.”

“Travis was vilified before his voice could be heard,” the lawyers said in a statement. “The truth in this case will exonerate Travis.”

Gregory McMichael is also a victim of a rush to judge, his legal team said.

“Very often the public accepts a narrative driven by an incomplete set of facts, one that vilifies a good person,” defense attorney Laura Hogue said in a statement.

Added Counselor Frank Hogue, “The full story, to be revealed in time, will tell the truth about this case.”