The New Yorker Radio Hour - Everyone Knew Who Shot Ahmaud Arbery. Why Did the Killers Walk Free?

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

It has been six months since Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man, was shot by three white men while he was out for a Sunday jog near his childhood home. The video of the killing, taken by one of the men who participated in it, could be said to have kindled the blaze that ignited after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.  There was no mystery to be solved in Arbery’s killing. It happened in broad daylight, and the men who did it were on the scene when police arrived. But the killers walked free, and no one was arrested for seventy-four days—until after the video was made public and caused a scandal. What, exactly, were prosecutors thinking? Caroline Lester spoke with Arbery’s mother, a local reporter, lawyers, and a district attorney to understand what happened in those seventy-four days. His case, she finds, highlights a fundamental problem for criminal-justice reform: we may change the laws that govern policing, but those laws have to be vigorously enforced. And district attorneys may have little incentive to do so. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham. When we look back at everything that's gone on in 2020, our heads will fill with images, empty city streets, a field hospital set up in Central Park, and the image of George Floyd's death at the knee of a policeman, which I think will remember as a turning point in America's reckoning with race. But just weeks before George Floyd, there was another,

unwatchable, haunting video, which might have kindled the fire that soon blazed up across the country. That video showed a young black man named Amad Arbery, gunned down by white men. One of those men took the video, and no one was arrested for the crime for two and a half months. Why? How? On the six-month anniversary of Ahmaud Arbery's death, producer Caroline Lester takes a very close look at what happened in the aftermath. The Brunswick News is a daily paper covering southeast Georgia. Larry Hobbs is a reporter for the paper. He's got the police beat.

I was home, and in this day and age of journalism, and especially in a small community like this, I picked it up on Facebook. There's a group here that runs Golden Al-Scanter updates, and somebody's listening to the scanner almost all the time. And they picked up on the scanner that a person was shot, possibly killed, in Sotilla Shores. I remember that I was lying on the couch and I got this call for my unknown number.

Wanda Cooper Jones is Ahmaud Arbery's mother. I knew something had happened in Brunswick really bad. And then I'm just holding the phone waiting for him to tell me which one of the kids is it? Is it Marcus or is it Amad? I got in touch with the police PIO. He gave me a little bit of information that, yes, there was a burglary suspect. He was shot. He is deceased. And the reaction, it was no reaction. I don't know. I didn't feel anything.

I just, it's a feeling that I never felt before and a feeling I would never want to feel again. This is a guy in the middle of the street. And he's shot dead on a quiet Sunday afternoon. What's going on here? Amad Arbery was born in Brunswick, Georgia, 1996. He's the youngest of three. And he's your baby? He's the baby. His mom, Wanda Cooper Jones, worked two jobs to raise her family. I always wanted to put my kids in a house in the country, and the rural areas like I grew up, I thought that would be best for them.

So I was able to work and put them in a house. So three bedrooms, really small home. It was a little safe place. On February 23rd, Ahmad went out for a run. He had been a high school athlete, kept up running. He ran every day. Like all runners, he had. had his regular route. A couple miles in, he stopped by a construction site. A home was being

built in the neighborhood. He stayed for a few minutes, then continued on his run. Someone, we're not sure who, called 911. And he said someone's breaking into it right now? No, it's all open. It's under construction. And he's running right now. There he goes right now. Okay, what is he doing? Gregory, I'll be back back in the street. Okay, that's fine. I'll get them out there. I just need to know what he was doing wrong.

Gregory McMichael also saw Amad Arbery running down the street. Gregory, his son, Travis McMichael, and another man named William Bryan, chased Arbery down in two pickup trucks and shot him. Brian took a video of the whole thing. By the time the police arrived on the scene, a dozen people were milling around. but the officers only interviewed one of them. Larry Hobbs read the police report. This narrative is almost entirely told by Gregory McMichael, who says he's seen, quote, a black male hauling ass down the street.

He was standing out in front of his yard. And he runs in the house, grabs the 357, tells his son to arm up, and his son grabs the 12-gay. shotgun and they go and hop in their pickup truck and begin to chase this man down. This is in his own word. The report read like a couple of good old boys saying, yehah, let's get in a pickup truck and go chase this guy down. This was not an officer involved shooting, technically. But, and this is important, Gregory McMichael once worked for the Glen County Police Department.

Then he spent more than 20 years working as an investigator at the the local district attorney's office. He retired in 2019. A police officer even told someone in the neighborhood to call McMichael if they ever saw anything suspicious. When McMichael was in the DA's office, he worked with a prosecutor named Jackie Johnson. She became the DA in 2012. So when McMichael was involved in shooting Ahmaud Arbery, Jackie Johnson pretty quickly realized she should recuse herself. But the police wanted legal advice. So Johnson reached out to a DA in a neighboring county, George Barnhill. They knew each other, and Barnhill's son worked in her office.

Barnhill Sr. gets the call, drives about an hour to Brunswick, speaks with the Glen County PD. Here's Lee Merritt, a civil rights lawyer representing Arbery's mother. He says Barnhill acted inappropriately. He became involved almost immediately. and he almost immediately determined the shooting was justified. Georgia has a citizen's arrest law, and Barnhill seemed to conclude

that the McMichaels acted legally in their attempted arrest of Amad Arbery. And because Georgia also has a stand-your-ground law, to Barnhill, shooting him appeared justified. After making the statement, George Barnhill is officially assigned to the case by the Georgia Attorney General. Larry Hobbs, the reporter,

talked to Barnhill shortly after. I don't like to guess people's motives, but he gave me a good indication that he wanted to look at this seriously. He wanted to look at the autopsy report, the trajectory of the bullet. So he's seen the video. Well, I didn't know that he had seen the video at this time, but yes, he saw the video. Let's pause for a moment here. When the Attorney General assigned Barnhill to the case, after the first DA recused herself, Barnhill had already stated that there's no need to press charges.

So you might conclude that he wouldn't vigorously prosecute the men he's already decided are innocent. Take note of that. In the days after her son's death, Cooper Jones didn't look at the paper. She had her best friend read the articles about the shooting, so if there was anything important, she'd know. What really caught my attention was that Friday the day before the funeral, there was an article that stated that they gave a description that Amad was locked. lying in the street and it was two or more men standing over him with weapons when the authorities arrived. So I kind of started thinking like, you know, if he was at Burgerizer home, why was he in the street dead? Things were not adding up.

So I told myself, Wanda, you can't really deal with this this week. You deal with this next week after the front room. So that Monday morning I woke up and I called the DA's office and spoke to DA Barnhill. Barnhill told her he wasn't working on the case yet. Instead, he was waiting for the autopsy and the toxicology report to come back. He did tell her one thing, though. He told me a mob was shot more than once,

with a shotgun. And he said that very, very nonchalantly. He wasn't addressing me like I had just lost a son. He was talking to me like, you know, it was just was everyday work for him. You know, he never told me I'm sorry for your laws. It wasn't a good feel because this is the guy that's going to be my help through all this. And he's not looking like he's going to be any help at all. But at the end of the phone call, I told him, you know, that I was a mom and I didn't have any plans of going anywhere.

You know, I'm here and I'm going to be calling. told me okay. Over the next six weeks, instead of answers, Cooper Jones had only more questions. The McMichaels, she learned, had law enforcement connections. There was no burglary. Barnhill stopped taking her calls. Some days I said on this couch, and I'm just sit out and I stare. I'm just staring like, what can I do?

I mean, what can I do? And I couldn't get anybody to even represent me or give me any kind of advice on what I should do. I can't find anybody. But she kept digging, and she found out something key. We mentioned earlier that Barnhill's son worked for the DA, Jackie Johnson. When Cooper Jones learned that, she immediately began petitioning for Barnhill to be removed from the case. And it worked. On April 7th, six weeks after the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, Barnhill writes a memo recusing himself.

The memo also reveals that some years ago, when Arbery was in high school, he was arrested in an incident where he brought a gun to one of his basketball games. He was put on probation. The prosecutors who worked the case were Barnhill's own son and Gregory McMichael, the same man who later participated in shooting Arbery in the street. Finally, as Barnhill is taking himself off the case, he simultaneously renders his own verdict. He says, once again, there are no grounds for arrest in the shooting. The case goes to a third DA, and he starts preparing to indict the killers. But at the same time, Caroline, these people are still free.

Yeah. They're still free. Yeah. Sometimes Wanda Cooper Jones would go visit the street where her son died. I would go just to see where he fell. You try to just get some closure on what happened that day. And I would go out and I would see Travis McMichael attaching him. his boat to his truck to go on the river.

And my son was dead, and he was still living life. Like, nothing can happen. And then on May 5th, she gets a call from her lawyer. A local radio station has posted the video of the shooting on their Facebook page. He said, well, I want to tell you the video is out. And it's going to be everywhere. So I would advise you to, if you're going to watch it, get around people who love you and watch it. And he said, do you want me to tell you what's on it?

And I said, no, I don't want to. I told him, I said, I don't want to know. Larry Hobbs, the Brunswick News reporter, was at home when the video came out. This thing gets picked up. Everybody that sees it for however it long gets up, and I guess it wouldn't have been more than 30 or 40 minutes on their Facebook page. By now, that thing is all over the world. And you're listening on Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Today, the case of Amad Arbery is making any. international news headlines. CNN has obtained video of Aubrey being shot. Video has surfaced of an African-American man being chased down and killed. The case threw widespread public attention after a video of the shooting was released. Do you remember what...

I don't know, did it change the way you had thought about your reporting or the last few months? It confirmed everything I suspected and worse. Yeah. You hear three shotgun blast. That's buckshot. And he... He stumbles away and Travis McMichael's got that gun in his hand and just this, that 10,000-yard stare and just walks right into the camera, just like, I don't know what was going on in his mind, but it wasn't pretty, it wasn't, it wasn't. Sometimes I lose. The video tells it all.

The video is awful. And more importantly, pretty incriminating. And now that people all over the world are just seeing how incriminating it is, within hours, the local DA asks for help from the state, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. They drop in swarms on the Satilla Shores community and throughout the county. And two days later, Gregory and Travis McMichael are in jail for felony murder. That's Larry Hots. He's a reporter for the Brunswick News. speaking with Caroline Lester, a producer on our program. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

The story of Ahmaud Arbery continues in a moment. I'm Vincent Cunningham. On this episode, our producer Caroline Lester is explaining why the men who shot Amad Arbery in broad daylight walked free for 74 days until the video of the incident was made public. Oh, I watched that video

and just was horrified. I was trying to understand what happened in Amad Arbery's case, so I called up another district attorney, Rachel Rollins. She's the DA in Boston. I reached out to her because she's one of a small number of progressive prosecutors who are critical of how DAs handle cases of police violence. Yes, the police are getting a hard look, and they are being held to task as they should be,

but the nation needs to gaze strongly upon DAs as well. Because I think as we can see in the Samad Arbery case and in many others, DAs have failed our country. The job of the district attorney is to prosecute crimes for the local government, usually the county. When someone is accused of a crime, prosecutors decide which charges to bring. The DA is the chief prosecutor. We have so much autonomy in the ability to change.

choose who we are going to prosecute and who we aren't. That autonomy or discretion, it gets tricky when it's the police who are accused. This just magnifies to me the sometimes incestuous nature of district attorneys and law enforcement or individuals that have worked in their office. By incestuous, Rollins means this. DAs work very closely with police departments. They have to. They rely on them for investigations, for warrants, and they obviously.

often ask them to testify during trial. And when the police think a crime's been committed, it's the prosecutors who decide whether or not to charge it. Police and prosecutors are essentially colleagues, especially in a small office like the one in Glen County, Georgia. You've heard a monica that, you know, a DA can indict a ham sandwich if they want to, but they choose not to indict police officers. That's Lee Merritt, the attorney for Ahmad Arbery's mom.

They are the ones who are authoritative. access to justice. It's the reason why it seems that we have two different court systems because they are Johnny on the spot when it comes to prosecuting black families for really ridiculous things like walking into a voting group, but they're not very competent in prosecuting police officers. Let me give you an example of what Merritt's talking about. We're going to back up for a minute here. Years before Arbery, Jackie Johnson oversaw another notorious police shooting. In 2010, a Glyn County police officer shot a woman, Caroline Small, in her car, after she had crashed. Caroline Small had committed no crime that morning. She drove off when an officer walked up to check on her in a mall parking lot.

She drove erratically, eventually blocked in by a utility pole and several patrol cars. On video, one officer said, if she moved again, he was going to shoot her. Then they did. The officer who shot Small, Robert Sasser, had a discipline. history that was about a mile long. As DA, Johnson's job was to present the case to a grand jury. She did such a poor job of it that a member of her own office called it a cover-up. The cover-up was worse than the crime, and the crime was bad enough. Four, former prosecutors are speaking out with why many on the DA's staff thought her actions were over the line. Johnson fired a prosecutor who'd supported bringing charges in the case.

But Officer Sasser kept his job on the police. force. Eight years later, Sasser killed his estranged wife, her boyfriend, and himself. I tell you, it's scary. It's really scary. Nathan Williams is a local attorney who represented the families of both women killed by Robert Sasser. We live in an incredibly conservative area of this country that is very pro-law enforcement, and I understand it, I get it, but to get people to understand that they can find themselves in a similar situation and be treated the same way is almost impossible. And so it's kind of like you're screaming, you're staying on the top of the hill and you're screaming saying, hey guys, you need to look at this, you need to pay attention.

This is not good. This is not good. Williams tells me over and over in our conversation that most of the people he knows in law enforcement are good. But he also says there's a serious problem with a Glen County PD and beyond. It's frightening, certainly as someone that has two young girls that eventually will be driving around and I'm sure to some extent doing stupid things, you know, like we all did. You know, it's frightening. The lack of checks and balances that we have, you know, probably countrywide from a law enforcement standpoint, but certainly locally. The women Williams represented were white. Williams and his daughters are white.

He's a local, a lawyer. He knows people. If he feels unsafe driving around rural Georgia, think about how other people might feel. Gregory and Travis McMichael were arrested on May 7th, 74 days after Ahmaud Arbery was killed. William Bryan, the third man, the one who took the video, was arrested two weeks later.

I was too, too in shock to be happy about it. Because at the same time, they're in jail, but Ahmaud's birthday is the next day, too. So we're having to prepare for that. And, I mean, it wasn't a happy moment. I was relieved, but I wasn't a happy state. Now, the GBI is investigating whether Barnhill or Johnson committed prosecutorial misconduct. The most common penalties are public rebukes or fines. Here's Rachel Rollins again, the DA from Massachusetts.

What we've seen certainly with Ahmaud Arbery, and we have seen even with a George Floyd or with the lack of any movement whatsoever with Brianna Taylor, there are just different criminal legal systems for different people. I think there are many people that strongly believe

that the system is working exactly the way it was set up to work and that is so certain people fail and others don't. I think for the first time in the history of our country, people are actually paying attention to what the heck a DA does. And so what I'm excited about in this horrific moment we find ourselves in is we are finally all starting to appear on the same page

about the reforms that need to start happening. Rollins is talking about reforms like expanding access to disciplinary records. But those laws are only part of the equation. The laws have to be enforced by district attorneys, and how many voters really know the records of the DAs on their ballots? Once a district attorney is in office, it's extremely difficult to get them out. Many of us don't pay enough attention to local elections, and in rural counties, like Jackie Johnson's, three-quarters of DA elections are uncontested. Wanda Cooper Jones, Arbery's mom, keeps returning to the memo that DA Barnhill wrote, the one that called her son's killing justified.

Just to think about an elected official that we the people elect to protect us, would actually take the time to sit down and write something of that nature. And he's supposed to be for the people. So it really makes me think about how many other people that they've done like this. You know, it really, I mean, it didn't make any sense to me. Think of what had to happen for Arbery's killers to be arrested. A local journalist wouldn't give up. A well-known civil rights lawyer got involved.

And most importantly, Amad had a mom, a good mom, who fought for her son. I was the mom that if my children were wrong, they were wrong. But at the same time, as little people, I knew I had to be their voice. And now that Amad being deceased, I knew I had to be his voice. you know, and I knew that I had to, I had to fight for a mom because he would do the same for me. He would have done the same for me. The trial date for the McMichaels and William Bryan hasn't been set yet.

There was a petition to recall D.A. Barnhill, which failed this month. They didn't get enough signatures. He'll be in office until at least 2022. Jackie Johnson is up for re-election in November. No one is running against her. My days are long. My days are quieter now. It's not a lot of interviews, and I appreciate that because now I get a chance to actually think about, you know, what was happened.

I visit Amaz, the place where he's resting about once a week, once every two weeks. I'm always out there. I go out and sit with him, give him updates on what's happening. Cooper Jones is selling her house in Brunswick. She's looking for one closer to Atlanta. After her son's death became national news, she's been getting mail from all over the country. Sometimes I read my letters, read my cards,

messing out my thank you cards. I try to keep myself busy with doing that. A few weeks ago, she picked up a pile of letters that came from a prison in Illinois. It was all stamped inmate correspondence. And I say, you know, a lot of that mail I don't open immediately, but I'm something that's going to see what's coming from the prison. Do you know that in each piece of that male,

was checks, like money from the prison. Some is as little as $2, some as much as $100. I don't cash those checks until those thank you cars are in the mail. She wrote back to everyone. Wanda Cooper Jones is the mother of the late Ahmaud Arbery. Caroline Lester is a producer for The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham. Thank you for joining us this week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-prone. production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, and Corby, Calaliyah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.