Prosecution rests in Georgia trial over Ahmaud Arbery's killing
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[November 17, 2021]
By Jonathan Allen and Rich McKay
(Reuters) - The prosecution rested its case
on Tuesday against the three white men charged with murdering Ahmaud
Arbery after presenting evidence it said showed the defendants wrongly
assumed the worst about a Black man jogging in a mostly white southern
Georgia neighborhood.
Over eight days, prosecutors from the Cobb County district attorney's
office repeatedly played a cellphone video made by one of the
defendants, which shows another defendant, Travis McMichael, firing a
shotgun three times at Arbery, 25, at close range.
McMichael, 35, and his 65-year-old father, Gregory McMichael, told
investigators they grabbed their guns and jumped in their pickup truck
after Arbery ran past their driveway on the afternoon of Feb. 23, 2020,
believing he could be the same Black man seen walking around a nearby
construction site.
Bryan, 52, got in his own pickup truck after the chase passed by his
driveway. He later told investigators he tried to use the truck to block
Arbery's path down a road in Satilla Shores, a leafy residential area
outside the small coastal city of Brunswick, before videoing Arbery's
final moments.
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Defense lawyers, who are due to present their own cases to the jury in
the coming days, are arguing that the chasing of Arbery was justified
under Georgia's 19th-century citizen's arrest law that was repealed
after an outcry over the killing.
At the end of the chase Arbery ran toward the younger McMichael,
reaching toward the gun, and defense lawyers say McMichael fired in
self-defense.
Prosecutors sought to rebut arguments that the defendants were
attempting a valid citizen's arrest, which required that someone have
"reasonable and probable" suspicion that a person is fleeing a serious
crime they committed.
They showed the jury multiple security-camera videos of Arbery walking
around a half-built house on an unoccupied, unfenced property near the
McMichaels' house.
They also showed police body-worn camera video of a police officer
telling the McMichaels that no one knew who the young Black man walking
around the property was, but that nothing was ever taken on the days he
was seen there.
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Georgia Bureau of Investigation Assistant Special Richard Dial
testifies, as the murder trial over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery
continues, in Brunswick, Georgia, U.S. November 16, 2021. Stephen B.
Morton/Pool via REUTERS
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And they had the defendants' own words to
investigators read aloud in court, in which they said they did not
see Arbery before he ran past their driveways and did not know what
he had been doing before.
McMichael also said he shouted out a graphic threat mid-chase that
he would shoot Arbery's head off if he did not stop.
The trial began on Oct. 18 in Glynn County Superior Court with
nearly three weeks of jury selection, resulting in a jury that
prosecutors complained was disproportionately white.
Defense lawyers struck all but one Black person from the jury panel,
drawn from a county where about a quarter of residents are Black,
but told the court the strikes were for reasons that had nothing to
do with race.
Prosecutors called more than a dozen witnesses, most of them county
police or state investigators, several of whom read aloud from
transcripts of their interviews with the defendants.
"He was trapped like a rat," the elder McMichael told a Glynn County
detective a few hours after the deadly pursuit of Arbery. "I think
he was wanting to flee and he realized that, you know, he was not
going to get away."
Jurors were also shown graphic video and photographs of two gaping
shotgun wounds in Arbery's chest.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta;
editing by Ross Colvin and Jonathan Oatis)
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