When Arbery reached for his pocket, Rubin said, Travis Michael feared he was reaching for gun. Travis McMichael saw him outside the home construction site at night 11 days before the shooting. Rubin described Arbery as a “scary mystery” to residents of a neighborhood already on edge from thefts and property crimes. “And they made decisions in their driveways based on those assumptions that took a young man’s life.”Īs Dunikoski played the video of Arbery's death for the jury, his mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, cried out in the courtroom and sobbed as her attorney tried to console her. “All three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions - not on facts, not on evidence,” Dunikoski said. He might have gone in somebody’s house,” according to Dunikoski. When a police officer who responded to the shooting asked Greg McMichael if Arbery had broken into a house, he told the officer: "That’s just it.
The chase started when a neighbor who's not charged in the case called a nonemergency police number after seeing Arbery wandering inside a home under construction, where security cameras had recorded him before.ĭunikoski said Greg McMichael later told police that at one point during the chase he shouted at Arbery, “Stop or I’ll blow your f-ing head off!” A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the chase and recorded graphic video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery with a shotgun. On that Sunday afternoon, the McMichaels armed themselves and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck as he ran through their neighborhood just outside the port city of Brunswick. 23, 2020, was largely ignored until the video leaked and deepened a national reckoning over racial injustice.
He was only trying to stop him for the police.”Īrbery’s killing on Feb. He did not want to encounter Ahmaud Arbery physically. "But at that point, Travis McMichael is acting in self-defense. “It is a horrible, horrible video, and it’s tragic that Ahmaud Arbery lost his life,” Rubin said. McMichael and his father, Greg McMichael, gave chase, hoping to detain Arbery until police arrived, Rubin said, but Arbery refused to stop and lunged toward McMichael and his gun. Attorney Robert Rubin described Arbery to the overwhelmingly white jury as “an intruder” who had four times been recorded on video “plundering around” a neighboring house under construction. An attorney for Travis McMichael, the man who shot Arbery three times, put the shooting in a much different light.
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