COMPILATION AND
COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
MAY 6, 2020
THIS IS ANOTHER
HIGHLY DISTURBING CASE OF WHITE KILLERS BEING PROTECTED, A VIDEO, AND A LACK OF
RESPONSE FROM THE LOCAL AUTHORITIES. IT’S THE KIND OF THING THAT GIVES THE SOUTH
A BAD NAME. DEPRESSING. SEE THE CBS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES STORIES THAT FOLLOW.
THE EVENT IS THE SAME, BUT THE DETAILS ARE ADDITIVE RATHER THAN MERELY BORING. THIS
CASE CONCERNS THE DEATH OF ANOTHER YOUNG BLACK MAN, THIS TIME NAMED AHMAUD
ARBERY.
CBS NEWS May 1,
2020, 9:09 AM
Mom of black
Georgia man says he was chased and shot to death while jogging: "An arrest
should have been made"
AUDIO INTERVIEW
The family of Ahmaud Arbery is asking for justice more than
two months after he was shot and killed in Georgia. No one has been arrested or
charged in the death of the 25-year-old black man.
Police say
Arbery was chased by two white men in Brunswick who suspected him of a crime,
but his family says all he was doing was jogging.
"Ahmaud is
no longer with us and he's not with us because two men followed him while he
was jogging and killed him," Arbery's mother Wanda Jones told CBS
News correspondent Omar Villafranca. "An arrest should have been made
already."
According to
neighbors, there had been break-ins in the area. Arbery was allegedly
spotted at a home that was under construction before he began to run. 911
calls came in moments later.
A dispatcher on
one 911 call can be heard asking, "and you said someone is breaking into
it right now?"
"No,
it's all open, it's under construction. And he's running right now. There he
goes right now," the caller says.
The dispatcher
then asks what the man is doing and the caller says, "running down the
street."
According to a
police report, Gregory McMichael said he saw Arbery run by and recognized
him from the break-ins. He and his 34-year-old son Travis McMichael then grabbed
a shotgun and a pistol and got into their truck to go after Arbery, the
report says.
Once they
caught up to him, Gregory McMichael told investigators Arbery
"violently" attacked Travis and the two fought "over the
shotgun" before Travis shot twice and killed him.
The prosecutor
who previously had the case said Travis acted out of self-defense
and the pursuers acted within the scope of Georgia's citizen's arrest
statute.*
"It
essentially deputizes all citizens to go out and perform police functions. They
did not do that properly," said Lee Merritt, an attorney for
Arbery's family.
Merritt said he
believes there have not been any indictments because Gregory McMichael is a
former investigator for the Brunswick district attorney's office. The case
has now been transferred to the Ware County district attorney.
"There's
more than enough evidence for a case for murder," Merritt said.
The McMichaels
"should have waited until the authorities arrived," Jones said.
"They had already made a call to 911."
People
defending the McMichaels point to Arbery's minor brushes with the law,
including a shoplifting conviction. His mother said that has nothing to do
with this and her son is the victim in this case.
Gregory
McMichael told CBS News since the case is being investigated, he has no
comment.
© 2020 CBS
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK TIMES,
APRIL 28, 2020
THE GEORGIA
OPEN CARRY AND SELF-DEFENSE LAWS ARE BEHIND THIS STORY, FROM THE NEW YORK
TIMES. STATES RIGHTS ISSUES UNDERLY CASE AFTER CASE IN THE SOMETIMES BLINDLY
UNJUST, BUT LOCALLY LEGAL, ACTIONS ACROSS THE NATION. THIS IS TRUE, ESPECIALLY
BUT NOT ALWAYS, IN “BACKWATER” AREAS AND TOWNS.
IT REMINDS ME
OF THE SITUATION OF A WOMAN I KNEW IN WASHINGTON, DC, WHO HAD BEEN MARRIED TO A
MIDDLE EASTERN MAN WHO REPEATEDLY BEAT HER – HE WAS FROM ONE OF THE ARABIC
NATIONS, I DON’T REMEMBER WHICH ONE – WHO SHE QUOTED AS SAYING TO HER, “IN MY
COUNTRY I COULD KILL YOU AND THE LAW WOULD DO NOTHING TO ME,” BECAUSE FOR A MAN
TO BEAT OR EVEN KILL HIS WIFE THERE IS NOT A CRIME. AS FOR HER ATTRACTION TO
HIM, SHE SAID, “HE HAD SUCH A PRESENCE!” I WAS WITHOUT WORDS.
THIS PHENOMENON
IS ABOUT THE ACCEPTANCE AND NORMALIZATION OF UNQUESTIONED POWER AND A CERTAIN KIND
OF AUTHORITARIANISM THAT GROWS IN AMERICA, ALONGSIDE OUR FINE TRADITIONS OF
FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY. IT NOT ONLY HAPPENS ON THE NATIONAL LEVEL, WHERE WE CALL
IT BY ITS’ NAME, DICTATORSHIP, BUT ALSO ON THE LOCAL LEVEL, WHERE IT OCCURS MORE
UNDER THE HEADING OF PATERNALISM. MEN RULE, AND THAT MEANS THAT THE RULES ARE
THOSE OF MEN.
WOMEN MAY
OCCASIONALLY COMMIT AN ACT LIKE THIS ONE, BUT THEY RARELY DO: MA BARKER, OR
BONNIE AND CLYDE, PERHAPS. THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT NOT EVERY MAN, OR EVEN MOST,
ARE PHYSICALLY BRUTAL, BUT THOSE WHO ARE CAUSE DEATH ON A DAILY BASIS IN ONE PART
OF THE COUNTRY OR ANOTHER. WE NEED TO GET THE LAWS THAT ACTUALLY FOSTER SUCH EVENTS
OFF THE BOOKS.
ONE OF THE WORST
THINGS WRONG WITH OUR COUNTRY IS THE STATES’ RIGHTS DEBATE. THE SOURCE OF SOME
OF THE GREATEST INJUSTICES IN THIS COUNTRY ARE STATE LAWS, WHICH THE US CONSTITUTION
GIVES TO THEM AS THEIR GUARANTEED DOMAIN, SUCH AS PURGING THE VOTER ROLLS, FOR
INSTANCE, TO REMOVE BLACK AND HISPANIC PEOPLE ACCORDING TO THEIR NAME OR ZIP
CODE.
What We Know
About the Shooting Death of Ahmaud Arbery
Mr. Arbery, a
25-year-old black man, was chased by armed white residents of a South Georgia
neighborhood. He was shot dead during a confrontation.
By Richard
Fausset
April 28, 2020
PHOTOGRAPH --
Homes in Glynn County, Ga., where Ahmaud Arbery lived and was
killed.Credit...Richard Fausset/The New York Times
ATLANTA — In
more typical times, the shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white man
would have drawn widespread attention. Over the years, similar cases have
shaken communities and spurred nationwide social justice protests.
But with much
of the nation on lockdown because of the coronavirus, and the possibilities for
mass protests constrained, friends and family members of the black man who was
killed, Ahmaud Arbery, said they worried that his death would go unnoticed and
that no one would be held to account.
In recent days,
Mr. Arbery’s death has raised questions about racial profiling, Georgia’s
self-defense laws and the wisdom of citizen policing. Two prosecutors have
recused themselves, citing conflicts of interest, and the case is now being
looked at with fresh eyes by a third prosecutor in a county about an hour’s
drive away.
This is what we
know — and don’t know — about the case:
Who was Ahmaud
Arbery?
Mr. Arbery, 25,
was a former high school football standout who was living with his mother in
coastal Glynn County, Ga., outside of the small city of Brunswick, Ga. He was
shot dead in a suburban neighborhood called Satilla Shores. Friends and family
said he liked to stay in good shape, and he was often seen jogging in and
around his neighborhood.
On Sunday, Feb.
23, shortly after 1 p.m., he was killed in a neighborhood a short jog from his
home after being confronted by a white man and his son.
PHOTOGRAPH --
Image -- Mr. Arbery, in an undated photo provided by his family.
How was he
killed?
Mr. Arbery was
running in the Satilla Shores neighborhood when a man standing in his front
yard saw him go by. The man, Gregory McMichael, 64, thought Mr. Arbery looked
like a man suspected of several break-ins in the area and called to his son,
Travis McMichael, 34.
According to a
police report, the men grabbed a .357 magnum and a shotgun, got into a pickup
truck and chased Mr. Arbery, trying unsuccessfully to cut him off. A third man
was also involved in the pursuit, according to the police report and other
documents.
RELATED -- [LW:
FOR FULL PDF, GO TO NYT WEBSITE LINK] -- Police report detailing the shooting
death of Ahmaud Arbery, 6 pages, 0.72
MB]
In a recording
of a 911 call, which appears to have been made moments before the chase began,
a neighbor told a dispatcher that a black man was inside a house that was under
construction on the McMichaels’ block.
During the
chase, the McMichaels yelled, “Stop, stop, we want to talk to you,” according
to Gregory McMichael’s account in the police report. They then pulled up to Mr.
Arbery, and Travis McMichael got out of the truck with the shotgun.
“[Gregory]
McMichael stated the unidentified male began to violently attack Travis and the
two men then started fighting over the shotgun at which point Travis fired a
shot and then a second later there was a second shot,” the report states.
The police
report and other documents obtained by The New York Times do not indicate that
Mr. Arbery was armed.
Gregory
McMichael is a former Glynn County police officer and a former investigator
with the local district attorney’s office who retired last May. Neither he nor
his son has been arrested or charged.
Why has no one
been arrested?
Shortly after
the shooting, the prosecutor for the Brunswick judicial district recused
herself because Gregory McMichael had worked in her office.
The case was
sent to George E. Barnhill, the district attorney in Waycross, Ga., who
eventually recused himself from the case after Mr. Arbery’s mother
argued that he had a conflict because his son also works for the Brunswick
district attorney.
But before he
relinquished the case, Mr. Barnhill argued in a letter obtained by The Times
that there was not sufficient probable cause to arrest Mr. Arbery’s pursuers.
In the letter, Mr. Barnhill noted that the McMichaels were legally
carrying their firearms under Georgia’s open carry law. He said the pursuers
were within their rights to pursue what he called “a burglary suspect,”
and cited a state law that states, “A private person may arrest an offender
if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.”
Mr. Barnhill
also argued that if Mr. Arbery attacked Travis McMichael, Mr. McMichael was
“allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” under Georgia law.
RELATED – [FOR
FULL PDF, GO TO NYT WEBSITE LINK] -- George Barnhill’s letter to Glynn County
Police Department
3 pages, 0.06 MB
What do Mr.
Arbery’s defenders say?
Mr. Barnhill
wrote, in his letter, that Mr. Arbery had mental health issues, though he does
not elaborate on this point, and that he had prior convictions. Court records
show that Mr. Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and of violating probation in
2018. Five years earlier, according to The Brunswick News, he was indicted on
charges that he took a handgun to a high school basketball game.
Those details,
Mr. Barnhill argued, “help explain his apparent aggressive nature and his
possible thought pattern to attack an armed man.”
Mr. Arbery’s
defenders believe he was probably jogging through the neighborhood
for exercise. Michael J. Moore, an Atlanta lawyer who formerly served as
a U.S. attorney in Georgia, reviewed Mr. Barnhill’s letter to the Glynn County
Police Department, as well as the initial police report, at the request of
The Times. In an email, Mr. Moore called Mr. Barnhill’s opinion “flawed.”
In his view,
Mr. Moore said, the McMichaels appeared to be the aggressors in the
confrontation, and such aggressors were not justified in using force under
Georgia’s self-defense laws. “The law does not allow a group of people to
form an armed posse and chase down an unarmed person who they believe might
have possibly been the perpetrator of a past crime,” Mr. Moore wrote.
What happens
next?
After Mr.
Barnhill recused himself, the state attorney general’s office assigned the
case to a third prosecutor, Tom Durden, who is based in Hinesville, Ga. Mr.
Durden must now decide whether to present the case to a grand jury.
In a recent
interview with The Times, Mr. Durden said he would be looking at the case
with fresh eyes. “We don’t know anything about the case,” he said. “We don’t
have any preconceived idea about it.”
Shooting in
Georgia
RELATED ARTICLE
Two Weapons, a
Chase, a Killing and No Charges April 26, 2020, By Richard Fausset, April 26,
2020
Richard Fausset is a
correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South,
focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. He
previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign
correspondent in Mexico City. @RichardFausset
APRIL 26, 2020,
NYT – THIS STORY IS ABOUT LOCAL STATE LAW, WHICH IS NOT A PROTECTION, BUT A
CAUSE OF VIOLENCE – OR RATHER AN EXCUSE. THIS IS LAW AND ORDER THINKING AT ITS’
WORST.
Two Weapons, a
Chase, a Killing and No Charges
A 25-year-old
man running through a Georgia neighborhood ended up dead. A prosecutor argued
that the pursuers should not be arrested.
By Richard
Fausset
April 26, 2020
PHOTOGRAPH -- A
cross placed by the mother of Ahmaud Arbery at the site where he was killed in
Glynn County, Ga., in February.Credit...Richard Fausset/The New York Times
BRUNSWICK, Ga.
— Ahmaud Arbery loved to run. It was how the 25-year-old former high school
football standout stayed fit, his friends said, and it was not unusual to see
him running around the outskirts of the small coastal Georgia city near where
he lived.
But on a Sunday
afternoon in February, as Mr. Arbery ran through a suburban neighborhood of
ranch houses and moss-draped oaks, he passed a man standing in his front yard,
who later told the police that Mr. Arbery looked like the suspect in a string
of break-ins.
According to a
police report, the man, Gregory McMichael, 64, called out to his son, Travis
McMichael, 34. They grabbed their weapons, a .357 magnum revolver and a
shotgun, jumped into a truck and began following Mr. Arbery.
“Stop, stop,”
they shouted at Mr. Arbery, “we want to talk to you.”
Moments later,
after a struggle over the shotgun, Mr. Arbery was killed, shot at least twice.
No one has been
charged or arrested in connection with the Feb. 23 killing. The case has
received little attention beyond Brunswick, but it has raised questions in
the community about racial profiling — Mr. Arbery was black, and the father and
son are white — and about the interpretation of the state’s self-defense laws.
The Rev.
John Davis Perry II, the president of the Brunswick chapter of the NAACP,
has called the shooting “troubling.” And Mr. Arbery’s friends and family
have worried that the case, similar to others that have prompted nationwide
outrage, might quietly disappear in their Deep South community, because
social-distancing restrictions amid the coronavirus outbreak have made it
difficult for them to gather and protest.
“We can’t do
anything because of this corona stuff,” said Wanda Cooper, Mr. Arbery’s mother.
“We thought about walking out where the shooting occurred, just doing a little
march, but we can’t be out right now.”
Mr. Arbery was
killed three days before the anniversary of the 2012 killing of Trayvon
Martin, the unarmed African-American teenager whose confrontation with a
Florida neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, helped ignite the Black
Lives Matter movement.
According to
documents obtained by The New York Times, a prosecutor who had the case for
a few weeks told the police that the pursuers had acted within the scope of
Georgia’s citizen’s arrest statute, and that Travis McMichael, who held the
shotgun, had acted out of self-defense.
The police
report does not mention whether Mr. Arbery was in possession of a weapon.
Attempts to
reach Gregory McMichael, a retired investigator in the district attorney’s
office, were unsuccessful. In a brief phone conversation, Travis McMichael,
who runs a company that gives custom boat tours, declined to comment,
citing the continuing investigation.
The prosecutor
who wrote the letter, George E. Barnhill, the district attorney for
Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, recused himself from the case this
month, after Mr. Arbery’s family complained that he had a conflict of interest.
A prosecutor from another county is now in charge and will determine whether
the case should be presented to a grand jury.
Image -- Mr.
Arbery in an undated photograph provided by his family.
In and around
Brunswick, activists and allies of Mr. Arbery’s family are doing what they can
to organize online. They have started a Facebook page and have coordinated a
pressure campaign, emailing law enforcement officials and the local
newspaper. There are hashtags, #IRunWithMaud and #JusticeForAhmaud, and
T-shirts have been printed. But few people are on the streets to see their
message.
“There are a
lot of people absolutely ready to protest,” said Jason Vaughn, a football coach
at Brunswick High School who coached Mr. Arbery, who was an
outside linebacker. “But because of social distancing and being safe, we have
to watch what’s going on with the coronavirus.”
Mr. Arbery was
killed in Satilla Shores, a quiet middle-class enclave that abuts a
network of marshlands about 15 minutes from downtown Brunswick and a short
jog from Mr. Arbery’s neighborhood.
His friends and
family said they believed that Mr. Arbery, who was wearing a white T-shirt,
khaki shorts, Nike sneakers and a bandanna when he was killed, had been out
exercising.
“Everybody in
the community knows he runs,” said Mr. Vaughn, who said he saw Mr. Arbery
jogging on the streets a few months ago. Mr. Vaughn said that he himself had
raised suspicions by jogging through his own neighborhood in the suburbs of
Brunswick, recalling a recent instance in which a white woman followed him
in a van.
But others
contend that Mr. Arbery was up to no good. On the day of the shooting, and
apparently moments before the chase, a neighbor in Satilla Shores called
911, telling the dispatcher that a black man in a white T-shirt was inside a
house that was under construction and only partially closed in.
“And he’s
running right now,” the man told the dispatcher. “There he goes right now!”
In his letter
to the police, Mr. Barnhill, the prosecutor, noted that Mr. Arbery had a
criminal past. Court records show that Mr. Arbery was convicted of
shoplifting and of violating probation in 2018. Five years earlier, according
to The Brunswick News, he was indicted on charges that he took a handgun to a
high school basketball game.
Still, even if
Mr. Arbery committed a property crime on the afternoon he was killed,
activists and family members said it would not have warranted a chase by armed
neighbors.
“This incident
was at the least a case of overly zealous citizens that wrongfully profiled the
victim without cause,” Mr. Perry wrote in an email. “These men felt
justified in taking the law in their own hands.”
Ms. Cooper, Mr.
Arbery’s mother, said she believed the men had judged her son by his skin
color. And she does not believe he committed any crimes that day. If he had,
she said, “he should have been handled by the police.”
Image -- Homes
in Glynn County, Ga., where Mr. Arbery lived and was killed. No one has
been charged or arrested in connection with his death.Credit...Richard
Fausset/The New York Times
Ms. Cooper pushed for Mr.
Barnhill, a veteran prosecutor, to recuse himself from the case after she
learned that his son works in the Brunswick district attorney’s office,
which had previously employed Gregory McMichael. (The Brunswick district
attorney, Jackie Johnson, recused herself early on, also because Mr.
McMichael had worked in her office.)
“She believes
there are kinships between the parties (there are not) and has made other unfounded
allegations of bias(es),” Mr. Barnhill wrote in his letter, sent in early
April, to the Glynn County Police Department. As such, Mr. Barnhill wrote,
he had decided to step away from the case, and would ask Georgia’s attorney
general’s office to pick another prosecutor.
Mr. Barnhill
also wrote that he did not believe there was evidence of a crime, noting
that Gregory McMichael and his son had been legally carrying their weapons
under Georgia law. And because Mr. Arbery was a “burglary suspect,” the
pursuers, who had “solid firsthand probable cause,” were justified in
chasing him under the state’s citizen’s arrest law.
In a separate
document, Mr. Barnhill stated that video exists of Mr. Arbery “burglarizing a
home immediately preceding the chase and confrontation.” In the letter to the
police, he cites a separate video of the shooting filmed by a third pursuer.
Mr. Barnhill
said this video, which has not been made public, shows Mr. Arbery attacking
Travis McMichael after he and his father pulled up to him in their truck.
The video
shows Mr. Arbery trying to grab the shotgun from Travis McMichael’s hands,
Mr. Barnhill wrote. And that, he argued, amounts to self-defense under
Georgia law. Travis McMichael, Mr. Barnhill concluded, “was allowed to use
deadly force to protect himself.”
He noted that
it was possible that Mr. Arbery had caused the gun to go off by pulling on
it, and pointed to Mr. Arbery’s “mental health records” and prior
convictions, which, he said, “help explain his apparent aggressive nature
and his possible thought pattern to attack an armed man.”
After Mr.
Barnhill recused himself, the case was assigned to Tom Durden, in the
city of Hinesville, Ga., who must now decide whether to present the case to a
grand jury for possible indictments. In an interview last week, Mr. Durden
said his team had begun reviewing the evidence. “We don’t know anything
about the case,” he said. “We don’t have any preconceived idea about it.”
The police
report is based almost solely upon the responding officer’s interview with
Gregory McMichael, who had worked at the police department from 1982 to
1989. The responding officer describes him as a witness. According
to the report, Mr. McMichael told the officer that he and his son pulled up
near Mr. Arbery, that his son got out of the truck with the shotgun, and
that his son and Mr. Arbery then fought over the weapon, “at which point Travis
fired a shot and then a second later there was a second shot.”
Michael J.
Moore, an Atlanta lawyer who formerly served as a U.S. attorney in Georgia,
reviewed Mr. Barnhill’s letter to the Glynn County Police Department, as well
as the initial police report, at the request of The Times. In an email, Mr.
Moore called Mr. Barnhill’s opinion “flawed.”
In his view,
Mr. Moore said, the McMichaels appeared to be the aggressors in the
confrontation, and such aggressors were not justified in using force under
Georgia’s self-defense laws. “The law does not allow a group of people to
form an armed posse and chase down an unarmed person who they believe might
have possibly been the perpetrator of a past crime,” Mr. Moore wrote.
Nearly two
months after the shooting, residents of Satilla Shores remained on guard. One
woman angrily asked what a reporter was up to, and another approached almost
immediately with similar questions, announcing that she was armed and that she
had notified the police.
Mr. Vaughn, the
football coach, said on Sunday that he and other activists had come up with a
plan to keep the pressure on the authorities. They plan to drive to Mr.
Durden’s office in Hinesville, he said, about an hour away. They will mark off
spots on the sidewalk so that they remain several feet apart. And they will
enter the building, one by one, to ask why the men who chased Mr. Arbery have
not been arrested.
Richard Fausset is a
correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South,
focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. He
previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign
correspondent in Mexico City. @RichardFausset
A version of
this article appears in print on April 27, 2020, Section A, Page 20 of the New
York edition with the headline: Two Weapons, a Chase, a Killing and No Charges.
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