Ahmaud Arby Verdict: Guilty

Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was killed after two men pursued him in a South Georgia neighborhood, a confrontation that was caught on video. A graphic video of the shooting surfaced from inside a vehicle, it shows Mr. Arbery running along a shaded two-lane residential road when he comes upon a white truck, with a white man standing beside its open driver’s-side door.

Another white man is in the bed of the pickup. Arbery runs around the truck and disappears briefly from view. Muffled shouting can be heard before Arbery emerges, tussling with the man outside the truck as three shotgun blasts echo. 

According to a police report, Gregory McMichael, said that he saw Arbery running through his neighborhood and thought that he looked like the suspect in a rash of nearby break-ins. McMichael, 64, told the authorities that he and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, armed themselves and began chasing him in a truck. That was a big mistake for them but fatal for Arbery.

Arbery, a former high school athlete, lived about 2 miles from the area, just across U.S. Route 17. Arbery’s aunt says this was one of his regular running paths because he could stay off the highway.

On the day of the shooting, defendant Travis McMichael calls 911 to report there’s a guy in a house under construction. “There he goes right now,” he says on the recording. “Running down the street.” Other people had been in the same home that was under construction.

The dispatcher says she’ll send police but asks, “I just need to know what he was doing wrong?” Arbery was unarmed, but Travis McMichael had a shotgun.

The three white men who chased down and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was jogging through their Georgia neighborhood last year, were all found guilty of murder charges. 

“It’s been a long fight, it’s been a hard fight, but God is good,” Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said Wednesday outside the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Ga. “I never thought this day would come,” she added, saying her son will now “rest in peace.” The father was escorted out of the courtroom after the verdict was read due to what was reported as a disturbance.