Ahmaud Arbery Shooting Updated Timeline: Georgia 'Murder' Investigation
A Disturbing Timeline Of Ahmaud Arbery’s Killing And Murder Investigation In Georgia
Source: Sean Rayford / Getty
UPDATED: 5:00 a.m. ET, Feb. 23, 2021
Originally published: May 26, 2020
The killing of Ahmaud Arbery was seemingly covered up twice: once by his accused murderers and their apparent accomplices in law enforcement, and once by the subsequent high-profile deaths of other unarmed Black people to the hands of preventable police violence. But taken together, the deaths of Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd — in that order — have changed the world amid ongoing protests for criminal justice reform and heightened awareness of white supremacy.
One year later, ahead of the pending murder trial, Arbery’s mother refuses chooses to recognize the positive instead of allowing herself to be consumed by the obvious negative on the bad on the grim anniversary of her son’s death at the young age of 25.
“It still hurts that I lost Ahmaud,” Wanda Cooper-Jones told the Atlanta Journal Constituion in an interview published Monday. “Knowing that Ahmaud was possibly involved in change tells me he didn’t lose his life in vain.”
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The events leading up to and including Arbery’s killing in Georgia on Feb. 23, 2020, have been unfolding in a complicated and tangled timeline amplified by an explosive collision of the South’s good old boy network with a very focused and resolute movement for Black lives.
Even before video footage of the shooting leaked on social media, the imagery associated with the horrific narrative surrounding the shooting — father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael racially profiled Arbery as a burglar, got their guns, hopped in their truck, trapped him and shot him in the middle of a road in broad daylight — harkened back to harrowing tales of racist white mob justice in the Jim Crow South.
Source: Getty Images
To say that the story has developed slowly would be an understatement. After all, the McMichaels were arrested and charged with murder more than two months after Arbery was killed. It would take another two weeks before William “Roddie” Bryan, the man who filmed the shooting, would meet the same fate and be taken into custody and also be charged with felony murder along with criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. That last charge likely stemmed from his role in using the vehicle he was in to trap Arbery between his and the McMichaels’ trucks as seen on the video recorded by Bryan that was shown to the world when it leaked — inexplicably by Gregory McMichaels — and posted to social media in May.
The shooting has resulted in a series of Georgia’s district attorneys playing an unfortunate game of hot potato with the case, which has been marred from the start with a web of conflicts of interest from prosecutors whose associations with each other and the accused murderers have contributed to a massive delay of justice.
One of the central themes emerging from the case is Georgia’s glaring lack of hate crime laws. The case merits a hate crime charge, lawyers representing Arbery’s family have maintained. Civil rights attorneys S. Lee Merritt and Ben Crump have been calling for the Department of Justice to get involved to determine whether federal hate crime charges are warranted against Gregory McMichael, who actually pulled the trigger and killed Arbery.
Another persistent theme in the case has been the revelation of an incestuous and possibly corrupt relationship between multiple district attorneys’ offices across the state of Georgia, resulting in three prosecutors being forced to recuse themselves because of conflicts of interest.
Because of those themes, all 14 of Georgia’s Congressional representatives sent a letter last year to then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr encouraging the use of “all possible Federal resources to achieve full justice, transparency, and accountability in the case of Mr. Ahmaud Arbery.”
There was also the apparent campaign to criminalize Arbery in death to contend with, as a flurry of reputation-damaging yet ultimately irrelevant references to his past encounters with law enforcement that could never justify the killing of an unarmed man fueled by racist suspicions. That was the case when a video of police harassing Arbery from 2017 was widely published. This was the same police department that decided against making any arrests in Arbery’s killing until federal intervention pressured them to do so more than two months later.
Keep reading to find a complete and detailed timeline of the events that led up to Arbery’s shooting and those that have transpired since as his family works to achieve some semblance of justice in their loved one’s killing committed in unabashed cold blood.
6. Feb. 23
Ahmaud Arbery is killed in the middle of a road in broad daylight after the McMichaels purportedly suspect him as a burglar, arm themselves, hop in their truck and chase him, trap him, ambush him and shoot him to death.
Pictured: A young girl looks at a memorial for Ahmaud Arbery near where he was shot and killed in Brunswick, Georgia.
9. Feb. 29, 2020
Ahmaud Arbery is buried at his funeral.
Pictured: Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother, weeps while people gather to honor her son in Brunswick, Georgia, on May 9, 2020.
21. May 9, 2020
Armed members of the Black Panther Party patrol the white neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery was killed as part of a larger demonstration demanding justice in the killing.
24. May 12, 2020
The full graphic video of Arbery being hunted by the McMichaels and killed is made public.
On the same day, Arbery’s autopsy results are made public and found that he was shot twice in the chest and once on his wrist. It also determined there were no drugs or alcohol in Arbery’s system at the time of his death. The autopsy declared that Arbery’s manner of death was a homicide.
26. May 14, 2020
Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, are formally charged with murder and aggravated assault.
29. May 20, 2020
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation executes a search warrant at the McMichaels’ home.
Pictured: Protesters demonstrate in the Satilla Shores neighborhood where Gregory and Travis McMichael live and where Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed in Brunswick, Georgia.
31. May 21, 2020
William “Roddy” Bryan, the man who filmed the McMichaels’ ambush and killing of Ahmaud Arbery, is arrested on charges of felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced.
34. June 17, 2020
William “Roddy” Bryan, who filmed Arbery’s shooting, was denied bail as he and the other two suspected white supremacists involved in the vigilante shooting all pleaded not guilty to murder on July 17, 2020.
Bryan also requested to remove the prosecutor, Holmes, from the case as well as a gag order for Arbery’s mother. It was all denied.
That same day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation tweeted that Bryan was also the subject of a child molestation investigation. The GBI described the investigation as “active and ongoing.”
35. November 2020
Travis McMichael was described in court as a raging racist by the defense’s witnesses as well as the prosecution when the accused murderer’s “best friend” admitted under oath that the two of them “exchanged text messages littered with racist tropes and ugly stereotypes about African-Americans and Asians,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The revelation was the latest evidence that McMichael likely had racist motivations in going after Arbery.
Co-defendant Bryan also told investigators that McMichael called Arbery a “fucking nigger” after shooting the jogger three times at close range with a shotgun.
37. January 2021
William “Roddie” Bryan — who filmed his buddies chase down Arbery in a truck, trap him and shoot him in broad daylight in the middle of a road because they racially and falsely profiled the jogger as a burglar — had his request for bail denied once again after a judge heard his latest reason why he wanted to be released: high blood pressure.
38. February 2021
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp announced reform surrounding a Civil War-era citizens arrest law that was initially cited as a reason to not pursue charges against the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.
With some exceptions, the proposed bill would prevent private citizens from conducting arrests on others. The new bill, proposed by Kemp, states that a detained person must be released if authorities do not arrive within an hour.
“Ahmaud was a victim of vigilante-style of violence that has no place in Georgia,” Kemp said. “And some tried to justify the actions of his killers by claiming they had the protection of an antiquated law that is ripe for abuse.”
39. Feb. 23, 2021
Wanda Cooper-Jones, mother of Ahmaud Arbery, spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ahead of the one-year mark of her son’s killing.
“Ahmaud was killed in a very senseless manner,” Cooper-Jones told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They didn’t care about it. They tried to cover it up. They didn’t value, they didn’t respect Ahmaud’s life. If these guys go to jail for the rest of their lives, it won’t bring Ahmaud back.”
She continued: “He’s never going to come back. Not next week, not next month, not next year. I’m just finally getting that reality check.”
A Disturbing Timeline Of Ahmaud Arbery’s Killing And Murder Investigation In Georgia was originally published on ionenewsone.staging.go.ione.nyc
