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As usual, twenty-five-year-old black athlete Ahmaud Arbery started jogging on February 23, 2020 from his home in Georgia, a suburban area of Brunswick, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. A white man standing in the garden of one of the houses started yelling behind him, then grabbed a magnum and a shotgun with his son, jumped into his truck, and followed in Arbery’s footsteps, yelling, “Stop, we want to talk to you ! ” When the man, who did not report that the police report he had a gun, was caught, a fight broke out, and then Gregory McMichael’s son Travis shot and killed the man with three shots.
Police arrived at the scene in their order and form, investigated the circumstances, and then did not arrest anyone.
Since then, several celebrities have expressed their outrage, not only at the opposition Democratic candidate for governor of the state of Georgia, but also at the Republican governor and even President Donald Trump. However, by May 7, he had to wait 11 weeks for the two perpetrators to be arrested. Previously, the prosecutor’s office thought that everything that happened was completely legal.
Black Lives Matter
One of the armed men was a 64-year-old local police officer, Gregory McMichael, and the other was his 34-year-old son, Travis McMichael; the latter pulled the trigger. Gregory McMichael told police that the man running in front of his house “looked like” the black man who, as a thief, said he had been causing riot in the neighborhood for a long time. Now they saw a black man break into a house undergoing renovation shortly before the incident. So the McMichaelites wanted to arrest the man because they thought he was a criminal and interpreted the Georgia state laws related to shooting and self-defense as allowing it. And during the fight, McMichael claims that they were forced to use their weapons in self-defense, which is also legal.
Georgian prosecutor George E. Barnhill agreed with them: McMichael had the right to bear a weapon, the right to arrest someone they believed to be a criminal, and the right to kill him in self-defense because, in his opinion,
it was the unarmed Arbery who attacked the men during the fight to unscrew the shotgun from one of his hands,
and the fatal shot could also have occurred during the fight.
Incidentally, the incident took place only three days before February 26. February 26 is a known date in the history of similar cases: in 2012, the unarmed black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead on this day. It was this case that led to the first use of the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on the social networks, from which a national wave of protests grew and whose impact continues today.
It could easily have been the death of Arbery the next spark that ignited a similar wave of protests, if he was not well in the midst of quarantine by a coronavirus epidemic. In fact, in the local community and black advocacy organizations, the case was thought to raise many questions about Georgia state law and codified racism in the judiciary: Two gunmen said authorities could legitimately kill someone. just because it was possible to enter an empty house. Furthermore, the victim was black and the perpetrators were white.
Because of this crown thing, we can’t do anything. We would have gotten out where the shooting left some of us, but now we shouldn’t meet
Wanda Cooper, the victim’s mother, told the New York Times after the incident. Jason Vaughn, a local high school football coach who also coached Arbery, also said that many would have liked to have shown, if they could, about Ahmaud or how he was known there, and Maud said everyone in the area knew that used to run every day like a house. According to Vaughn, however, there are tensions in the southern city: as he said, once a white woman followed him running in his truck.
In the absence of evidence
In any case, the family has accomplished one thing: the prosecutor in charge of the case, George E. Barnhill, Whoever saw no good reason to prosecute finally stepped back.
But even after the incident, he wrote the details of the case in a letter to the police, concluding that
He believes there is no evidence that a crime has occurred.
She highlighted in the letter that Arbery had already had an affair with the police, as she was convicted in 2018 of theft and probation, and five years earlier she was charged because she had a gun in a high school basketball game. Barnhill also referred to a certain third-party video that he says supports his claims about the fight.
An important detail of the case is that the McMichaelites, in Barnhill’s opinion, were able to defend themselves even with a sharp firearm because they wanted to arrest a thief until the police arrived. Subsequently, the New York Times obtained audio recordings of the past few months about the suspected black man operating in the area.
One can hear McMichael presumably making a report to the police before the shooting. (There is no name on the recording, but at some point the caller yells, “Travis!” And a call earlier in the week is a car like McMichael’s.) The caller testified that in the announcement, the caller simply said, “An unauthorized intruder,” a black man in a white shirt “escaped” after entering a house undergoing renovation. The dispatcher responds that he needs to know exactly what the crime was, and if it was just that someone was in an unauthorized area. The caller says, “I have captured the camera many times, not the first time there is something like this around here.”
In any case, Barnhill also writes in the aforementioned letter that he will hand the case over to another prosecutor because the victim’s family may be biased in the case since his son worked with one of the perpetrators, Gregory McMichael. The New York Times also saw the police report, which is based on almost nothing more than an interview with a Brunswick Police Officer, Gregory McMichael, who also worked for the Brunswick Police between 1982 and 1989 before his career in prosecution. .
During the question and answer, McMichael was heard as a witness, not as a perpetrator.
The New York Times asked for an independent Atlanta attorney to Michael J. Moore, who previously worked as a prosecutor in Georgia to comment on Barnhill’s allegations; and, according to him, the letter’s findings were wrong, and in the given situation, the runner was considered an aggressor with a weapon, and was therefore no longer subject to Georgian self-defense laws.
The law does not allow groups of people to pursue an unarmed person who is alleged to have committed a past crime by forming an armed force.
Moore said.
Stirring and enraging
The twist in the case was eventually triggered by the aforementioned video, which the prosecutor said would have shown that Arbery had attacked the two self-defense gunmen. But on May 5, the video was released and none of that can be seen in that.
The half-minute video was taken on a car cell phone following McMichael’s, and shows that the a white truck catches up to the Arbery running. Gregory stands on the truck bed, jabbing a gun at Arbery. Travis walks out the driver’s door with a shotgun. An off-picture shot is heard, then Travis and Arbery are seen fighting, then two more shots are heard. Arbery finally tries to escape, but cannot: after a weak movement, he collapses bloody onto the asphalt, at Travis’s feet.
The video finally stirred the stagnant water. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp told Twitter that “Georgians deserve answers,” and his opposition opponent, Stacey Abrams, wrote that a full investigation, appropriate charges and impartial prosecution were needed. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Arbery was “lynched before our eyes,” which “evokes the darkest chapters in our history.” But not only the politicians, but also the stars, basketball player LeBron James (black), for example, wrote in his condolences:
They are literally hunting us, EVERY DAY, ALWAYS if we just take our feet out of the house! Can’t we run away any more?
Although he claims it is not due at all to public pressure, on May 5 the prosecutor who took over the case, Tom Durden, issued a statement in which he wrote:
After a thorough examination of the evidence, I believe that the case should be brought before the Glynn County Jury to consider prosecution.
When this is possible again despite the epidemic: according to regulations, the jury will certainly not be able to meet until June 12.
Upon viewing the video, an Arbery family attorney said:
This is murder. Everything you see in this video confirms all the evidence that we have indicated before.
According to N.A.A.C.P., the Georgia president of the largest US black human rights organization, the video reveals “very serious and serious forensic negligence.”
Two days after the prosecutor’s statement, Gregory and Travis McMichael were also arrested on May 7 on charges of murder and serious bodily injury and taken to the Glynn County Jail. The investigating authority discovered that it was Travis McMichael who killed Ahmaud Arbery.
It all happened almost two and a half months after Arbery’s death.
Vic Reynolds, head of the Georgian investigative authority, called the video compelling evidence in response to a New York Times question, saying it was “incredibly disturbing and humanly troubling.” Later he said at a press conference:
It is our job to allow our emotions to be influenced in the least possible way. But when you see a recording like this, he gets really mad. But this should be put aside and just ask if we have a good reason to arrest.
On May 8, even Donald Trump spoke on the subject in a television interview in which he said in his distinctive style that Arbery “looks like a very ordinary young man.” He also called the video very, very disturbing and said he was confident that a good decision would be made in Georgia after all the evidence was reviewed because “it may not all be in the video.”
S. Lee Merritt, the family’s attorney, said the victim’s mother was relieved by the news of the arrest and that she “carried the entire process very calmly.” I think he will contain his emotions until a verdict is delivered on the matter. “
One last birthday
Ahmaud Arbery would have celebrated his 26th birthday on May 8. The rally, which had been organized before the arrest but was eventually carried out, was scheduled for that day by Brunswick residents and supporters from the rest of the country. The #IRunWithMaud (I Run with Maud) initiative had been previously announced, in which anyone who wanted could run 2.23 miles, referring to the date of February 23, when the murder took place, there were also those who wrote the word Maud on the path of her career. .
A speaker at the protest, who was also a 26-year-old black man, said of the victim:
It could have been that easy too. And it could have been any of you.
Several of the protest participants said the arrest was “good to start” but are awaiting sentencing, and all this does not forget how the case was handled for two months. “If the author had been black and the victim white, the arrest would have taken place that night,” said one participant. In Georgia, several urge that hate crimes be included in local laws.
On the occasion of his birthday, the New Orleans Saints football player Malcolm Jenkins also posted a video with the following text:
Happy birthday Ahmaud Arbery. Even if these two people were arrested, we must do everything possible to ensure that no one forgets his face and that he is finally brought to justice.
Cover image: Participants in the rally at the Glynn County Court. Photo: Getty Images Hungary / Sean Rayford
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