Ahmaud Arbery: A Murder That America Watched Twice
Near St. Simons Island, Georgia
On February twenty-third, twenty twenty, a twenty-five-year-old Black man named Ahmaud Arbery went for a run in a subdivision called Satilla Shores, outside Brunswick, Georgia, a coastal community of about seventy thousand people. He never came home.
Greg McMichael, a retired district attorney's office investigator, and his son Travis McMichael pursued Arbery in a pickup truck after Greg McMichael decided, without legal basis, that Arbery looked like a burglary suspect. Their neighbor, William Roddie Bryan, joined the chase in a second truck and recorded video on his phone as Travis McMichael shot Arbery three times with a shotgun at close range. Arbery was jogging. He was unarmed. He had done nothing.
For seventy-four days, nothing happened. The local district attorney, who had a prior working relationship with Greg McMichael, declined to seek an arrest. A second prosecutor also passed. The Glynn County Police Department closed its investigation. The case seemed to be ending the way such cases had ended in coastal Georgia for generations: quietly, in favor of the men who held the guns.
Then in May, Bryan's video leaked online. Within days, the national outcry had grown too loud to contain. Within about three months of Arbery's death, all three men were arrested. The case arrived in federal and state court during the national reckoning that followed George Floyd's murder that same spring, and the trial became a referendum on whether a nearly all-white jury in coastal Georgia would see what the video showed.
On November twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-one, the jury convicted all three men of murder. It was the first time in modern memory that white men in coastal Georgia had been held criminally accountable for killing a Black man. The trial also produced federal hate crime convictions in twenty twenty-two.
Brunswick is a city with a long memory of racial violence. Arbery's death, and the verdicts that followed, became a new chapter in that memory , one that ended differently.
