Ahmaud Arbery trial: Shooting victim’s mother breaks down in court
Ahmaud Arbery’s mother broke down in a Georgia courtroom Friday while she watched the entire video of her son’s slaying for the first time as prosecutors argued that the three white men accused of fatally shooting the unarmed black jogger acted on unfounded “assumptions” about him.
Greg McMichael, 65, his son Travis, 35, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, are charged with murder and other felony offenses after spotting Arbery, 25, running through their neighborhood just outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick on Feb. 23, 2020.
“In this case, all three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions. Not on facts, not on evidence — on assumptions,” special prosecutor Linda Dunikoski, told the jurors during Friday’s opening statements.
“And they made decisions in their driveways based on those assumptions that took a young man’s life and that is why we are here today.”
Dunikoski played the explosive footage of the shooting, prompting Arbery’s father to leave the courtroom before it started and his mother to sob in the gallery.
Outside the courthouse, Arbery’s mother said it was her first time watching the video that stirred national outrage in its entirety.”I avoided the video for the last 18 months,” Wanda Cooper-Jones told CNN.
“I thought it was time to get familiar with what happened to Ahmaud in the last minutes of his life. So I’m glad I was able to stay strong and stay in there.”
Dunikoski said the evidence that will be presented in the trial will reveal that the three men wrongly accused Arbery of burglarizing an unfinished home in the neighborhood before the younger McMichael fatally shot him at close range.
She pointed out that the property owner said that Arbery never stole anything from the home — and played multiple videos that showed him regularly visiting it as well as body camera of the McMichaels reporting him allegedly trespassing there days before the shooting.
“At no time on this video do you hear the words burglary or attempted burglary? No one’s talking about a burglary or an attempted burglary,” she said.
Dunikoski claimed the elder McMichael mistook him for fleeing a crime when he ran by on the day of the fatal shooting — then flagged down his son and grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun to chase Abery down in their truck.
Bryan saw the chase and also jumped in his own vehicle to join them — whipping out his phone camera to film the younger McMichael pointing his gun at Arbery, who runs toward it before the fatal shots are fired.
“Mr. Arbery had nothing on him,” she said. “No backpack. No bag. No cellphone. No ID, no wallet, no keys, no gun, no weapon. Mr. Arbery couldn’t have called for help even if he wanted to because he had no cellphone on him.”
Following Dunikoski’s opening statements, which clocked in at nearly an hour and a half, attorneys for Travis McMichael argued that the judge should declare a mistrial, claiming she violated a pre-trial agreement to not mention the lapse in time between the killing and the arrests.
Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley, however, declined to grant the mistrial.The defense argued that the men were trying to make a citizen’s arrest and the attack was protected under the state’s self-defense laws.
“It’s tragic that Ahmaud Arbery lost his life. But at that point, Travis McMichael was acting in self-defense,” Bob Rubin, who is representing Travis, said in his opening statements.”
He did not want to confront Ahmaud Arbery. He was only trying to stop him for the police.”
Though the defendants are standing trial together, they each have their own legal teams.
Bryan’s attorney, Kevin Gough, opted to defer his opening statement until after the state rests its case.
Prosecutors on Friday called their first witness to the stand, Glynn County PoliceOfficer William Duggan, who responded to the shooting.
“I did see a black male laying on the ground in the middle of the roadway on the pavement,” he said, adding that he didn’t see any firearms or weapons.
Before his testimony, which included graphic body camera video of Arbery’s bloodied body, the judge asked anyone who might have an “emotional response” to leave the courtroom.
“It’s just appropriate sometimes to make sure that we do not have distractions,” Walmsley said.
The panel, which has only one black juror, was seated in the case after a more than two-week selection process.
Prosecutors had argued that the defense attorneys had struck eight potential jurors from the final panel because they are black, which the US Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional.
The judge agreed there appeared to be “intentional discrimination,”but said state law limited in his ability to change the jury’s racial makeup because defense attorneys were able to give nonracial reasons for their decisions.
Arbery had been dead for more than two months before the McMichaels and Bryan were charged last year.
The trial is expected to last roughly two weeks.
If the men are acquitted in the case, they still face federal hate crime charges in a trial that is expected to start Feb. 7.
With Post wires
