What we know about Ahmaud's shooting death

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today, the death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery and my colleague Richard Fausset’s investigation into it.

It’s Monday, May 11.

Richard, how did you first hear about this story?

I learned about this story in early April. I was up to my eyeballs in coronavirus coverage, along with my other colleagues in the national desk. And on April 2, my colleague Kim Severson, a food writer for The Times here in Atlanta, and a dear friend of mine, sent me a very brief note. And it said, “Look, you are busy. But this one’s looking pretty troubling.”

She included a link to a story in The Brunswick News down in Brunswick, Georgia. And it looked to be a story of two armed white men, who were chasing an unarmed black man by the name of a Ahmaud Arbery through their neighborhood, and that that chase ended with a confrontation and with the black man being killed.

The local coverage also showed that one of the men who was involved in this chase was a former police officer on the county police force, who had also spent years as an investigator in the district attorney’s office. And although the shooting had occurred on February 23, here we are in April, and no one had been arrested for it.

It was very disturbing. And it seemed like there were a lot of unanswered questions. And I really didn’t know if I could answer them. But I had to set it aside for a while, just because we had this avalanche of news rolling in.

So 10 or 11 days after getting this initial email from Kim, I started filing a flurry of open records requests. And I had a sense of what I was pretty sure I could get from this from covering previous controversial shootings in Georgia. I knew that I should be able to get a copy of the incident report, which is this brief summary that police file of what they saw when they arrived at the scene. I was pretty sure I could get the 911 call recordings, which I don’t think anybody had asked for yet. And then there was this other really just last-minute request that I filed. And I filed it with the county. And it was really just kind of a fishing expedition that I filed that turned out to be the most important public records request. And in that request, I asked for all of the emails to and from public officials from the day of the shooting up to mid-April.

So essentially, you were trying to figure out if people in power in this community in the hours after this shooting are doing what you might expect them to do, which is saying oh, my god. Did you hear about this? What do we do? What do you think? That kind of thing.

Yeah. I thought maybe there would just be some chatter. They might have just been gossiping. You know, there just might have been a kind of, “oh, my god” kinds of emails. I didn’t quite know what to expect. But I think that was my first thought. So under Georgia law, all of those entities have three days to respond to my request. And of course, in an ongoing homicide investigation, there are a lot of things they can say that they’re not going to give me. So I talked to my editor, and we decided that I would wake up super early, drive down to Glynn County, Georgia — which is about four and a half or five hours from my home base in Atlanta — to a neighborhood called Satilla Shores, and do some social-distancing reporting. Satilla Shores is a middle-class neighborhood — you know, ranch houses and a few nicer homes that look like retirement homes. It’s kind of out of the way. There’s moss hanging from the oaks. I mean, it’s dramatically beautiful. And it kind of evokes Faulkner — I mean, Faulkner with ranch houses. And Satilla Shores is in the unincorporated part of Glynn County. Glynn County is a majority white place. It’s about 27 percent black. And like almost every part of the south, it has a very tragic and awful racial history, a history of lynchings of black men in the late 19th century. So I pulled up and parked my car near the McMichaels’ home. This is the home of the two men who chased Ahmaud. And almost as soon as I parked, a woman came out. And she started asking me what I was doing there. And I told her. She told me she’d called the police on me. And she told me she was armed.

Wow.

You know, I think there was just a lot of tension in the neighborhood. And people were suspicious of my presence there. One very angry woman drove up to me as I was just walking the street and asked me repeatedly what I was doing there in a pretty hostile way. I came across another couple, and they had already made up their mind that Ahmaud Arbery deserved what he had gotten.

Wow.

So on Thursday night, I drove back to Atlanta. And on Friday morning, I received the response to this last public records request that I had filed. And Michael, as you know, a lot of times, those kinds of public records requests just bring back just a bunch of dross, you know, just garbage.

Yeah.

But in this case, when I opened this fat email attachment, I knew immediately that I had found something pretty explosive.

What was that?

So the first document in this file was a three-page memo written by a district attorney in Waycross, Georgia named George Barnhill, who at the time was the prosecutor in the case. And the prosecutor in a case like this often advises the local police as to whether or not there’s sufficient probable cause to go to a judge and ask for an arrest warrant. Mr. Barnhill, in this letter, laid out an extensive justification — legal justification — for why he believed there was not sufficient probable cause to issue any arrest warrants for anyone. And his argument was that Mr. Arbery had committed a burglary, and that the men who pursued him were justified in pursuing him under Georgia’s Citizen Arrest law. It said that the man who shot Ahmaud Arbery, Travis McMichael, was justified in doing so because Mr. Arbery had grabbed the shotgun. He had initiated the fight. And Travis McMichael was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself under Georgia’s Use-of-Force statute. And it said, of course, that the men were legally armed under Georgia’s open-carry law. But there were a lot of pieces of this that I knew a lot of lawyers and even other prosecutors were very likely going to take issue with.

So in this prosecutor’s telling, everything that these two men did in this interaction that resulted in Arbery’s death, despite the fact that he was unarmed, was completely legal. They were allowed to carry the guns. They were allowed to make a citizen’s arrest. They were allowed, in his telling, to defend themselves from this unarmed man.

In Mr. Barnhill’s words, it was his conclusion there was insufficient probable cause to issue arrest warrants at the time.

And in your mind, what makes this so explosive?

I mean, what’s explosive here is that you have this well-detailed legal justification for an action that I knew many people would see as one that just violates their basic sense of what’s right. You had two armed white men in a truck chasing after an unarmed black man in a suburb in the deep south. There’s a confrontation. The black man is shot and killed. And no one has been arrested. And there’s an argument now, a legal argument, that no one should be arrested.

So what happens next?

So I reported my story about this case. And I included this information about this district attorney, who gave this legal justification for why no one should be arrested. It also included the fact that, by that point, that district attorney had recused himself for a conflict of interest. It turns out that his son worked in the local district attorney’s office with Greg McMichael, one of the men who had pursued Ahmaud Arbery. And the reaction to this story was pretty strong. But we were also in the midst of a pandemic. And we were social distancing. And the country was locked down. And so the kinds of protests that we’ve seen crop up in big cities and in other places when issues like this come to light were not materializing.

Right.

And so it was sort of unclear, really, where this whole drama was headed. But then on Tuesday, a video emerged online. It was a 36-second video. And it showed the last violent moments of Ahmaud Arbery’s life. And that started to change everything.

We’ll be right back.

Richard, what exactly does this video show?

The video appears to be shot from a moving car. And it shows a man running, presumably Ahmaud Arbery. He’s approaching a white pickup truck. There’s a man in the bed of the truck — Greg McMichael. And there’s a man standing outside the truck with a shotgun — his son Travis. Mr. Arbery jogs to the right, presumably in an effort to just get away from Travis McMichael. But they tangle, and it’s violent. And you can see the shotgun between them. There’s a shotgun blast and more fighting. They go offscreen for a moment. There’s a second shotgun blast and more fighting. And then there’s a third shot. And you can see Mr. Arbery turn as if to run further. But then you see him crumple and fall to the pavement.

Richard, what do we know about where this video came from and who shot it?

The video was shot by a third man who was also engaged in the pursuit of Ahmaud Arbery.

So another man in the neighborhood, who was essentially chasing him?

Right.

And how does this video and all those details you just described change our understanding of this event?

Well, it appears there’s some contradiction in the initial story that Greg McMichael laid out in the initial police report. In it, Mr. McMichael said that he and his son pulled up beside Ahmaud Arbery. And they shouted “stop,” and they’d been shouting it before. And it was at that moment that Travis McMichael gets out of the truck with his shotgun. But the video shows that they were actually waiting for him in the truck. He was being blocked in because you had a third man, the man with the cell phone video, who was chasing him.

So it very much shows him being trapped by these pursuers.

Yeah, it looks like he’s trapped.

I mean, it’s one thing to read about a man struggling for his life and being shot and killed. And I think, just emotionally, it’s just a totally different story when you see it.

Stacey Abrams, the former gubernatorial Democratic candidate in Georgia, spoke out about it in an interview. LeBron James, the basketball star, tweeted about it.

Joe Biden spoke about it in an interview.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican who has created a lot of ill will among people of color, particularly in Georgia, for a very divisive campaign, talked about the need for Georgians to find justice in this case.

So just looking at this video, it seems pretty uncomplicated what’s going on here.

It’s not entirely uncomplicated. There’s another video that’s emerged. And this one appears to be a surveillance video from a house on the block. And it shows a man who appears to be Mr. Arbery going inside of a house that’s under construction near the McMichaels’ house. It’s sort of unclear what he’s doing there. And his family’s lawyer has said that, yes, he stopped by a house, by a property that was under construction while he was jogging. But still, the idea of an unarmed man out for a jog being chased down and killed by armed civilians, no matter what he was doing in the midst of the jog, is really what’s resonated so widely. And in fact, it’s become very much a rallying cry.

People were going out and jogging in solidarity with Ahmaud. They were using the hashtag, “I run with Ahmaud.”

They’re running 2.23 miles as a way of noting the day that he was killed: February 23.

And then late last week —

— hundreds of protesters gathered in the streets of Glynn County, Georgia in masks and gloves.

It felt like the ball was rolling downhill and gathering force every moment.

At this point, Richard, how are people thinking about this case? And how is that differing from the way that it was first described in that memo that you unearthed with your public records request?

So I think what you saw from this mass protest was a fundamental disagreement with the legal analysis in this document that I dug up. People were calling this a lynching. They were evoking the context of the southern past and the American present. They just thought it was wrong.

And at this point, as these protests are mounting, what is the status of the legal case?

Well, a lot starts happening. In my original reporting on this case, I noted that the D.A., George Barnhill, had recused himself. And there was a new prosecutor. As just the interest in this case exploded last week, he announced that he thought that the case should be presented to a grand jury in Glynn County for consideration of criminal charges being brought against the men involved in Mr. Arbery’s death.

So that’s a very big change from the last prosecutor on the case.

Right. This is a total 180. He also invited the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to get involved. And the bureau launched its own independent investigation. And by Thursday night, Greg McMichael and his son had been arrested and charged with murder.

What’s fascinating about that is that the video seems to describe what had been laid out in your reporting and in these legal documents beforehand. Right? There’s not a giant gap between them.

Yeah. I think what this video did is it really moved this case from the local stage to a global stage. And although we can’t know, for now at least, what the reasoning of this new district attorney was for saying the case needs to go before a grand jury, for indeed arresting these men, there’s no question that he’s now making decisions in a universe where many more people are paying very close attention.

Right. It was no longer a local prosecutor writing a memo explaining why no one should be prosecuted, knowing that no one was paying all that much attention.

Right.

For me, it was just a very surreal moment because I’m thinking back to that moment, which is a very private one. I’m in my house. The country is locked down. This email comes. And it has this very controversial legal opinion from a very obscure prosecutor.

Right.

And I felt like one person in on a conversation in a very closed and constrained system. And now, it seems like this whole story has just been blown out into the open.

So Richard, where does this case stand right now?

So the McMichaels are currently in a jail in Glynn County. They haven’t had a chance to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. But the pandemic is still playing a role here. The Georgia court system has declared that a grand jury can’t be impaneled due to the coronavirus until after June 12, and that that stay could be extended at the discretion of the chief justice of the State Supreme Court if the pandemic continues to linger.

What has been the response from Ahmaud Arbery’s family?

Ahmaud’s mother, Wanda Cooper, has maintained from the beginning that she believes her son, who was known to stay in good shape, was simply out for a jog. And I think there is some sense of relief that arrests have finally been made in this case after so many weeks of waiting. But I think they know that they’re only at the beginning of a new stage in this case and it could take a very long time to see it to its end.

Richard, what do you make of this case that you have now been working on for about a month or more?

Well, it’s hard not to talk about this case without talking about the historical context of extrajudicial killings of people of color in the south and in the whole country. And I think a lot of people were shocked and dismayed by the details of this case. But they weren’t necessarily shocked that it happened. And I think one of the things that we’re starting to sketch out here are the systems in place, things like Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, that might allow for the perpetuation of these kinds of problems. And I think even though we’re all looking closely at these systems, no one’s sure whether this story, as tragic as it is, may in the end serve to change them.

Richard, thank you very much.

Thanks, Michael.

On Friday, a lawyer representing Ahmaud Arbery’s family called for a civil rights investigation, focused not only on the men who pursued and shot him, but the broader justice system that took weeks to prosecute them. On Sunday night, Georgia’s attorney general asked the federal government to conduct a similar investigation.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

The Trump Administration is trying to contain an outbreak of the coronavirus inside the White House after an aide to Vice President Mike Pence and a valet to President Trump tested positive. That has prompted at least three top officials leading the government’s response to the pandemic, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, to begin two weeks of self-quarantine.

In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Kevin Hassett, a top economic advisor to the president, acknowledged that a sense of fear has crept into the White House.

As of Sunday night, the death toll in the U.S. reached nearly 80,000. And infections around the world surpassed four million.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.