The three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, on Feb. 23, 2020, plan to argue that race did not play a role in their actions leading to his death. William Bryan, Gregory McMichael, and his son Travis McMichael were convicted of the hate crime killing in 2022.
According to 11 Alive News, the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals scheduled oral arguments in the case for March 27, and the trio’s attorney plans to ask the court to throw out their hate crime convictions.
Bryan and the McMichaels chased Arbery in pickup trucks after Gregory and Travis saw Arbery pause while he was jogging to enter the structure of a home that was under construction in the white men’s Satilla Shores subdivision just outside of the city limits of Brunswick, a coastal Georgia town.
The McMichaels began the pursuit, with Bryan joining in when he watched from his house as Arbery ran by with the father and son chasing him. The three men pursued Arbery for some five minutes while trying to box him in with their vehicles. Gregory McMichael, armed with a .357 Magnum, was in the bed of their pickup truck when his son Travis cornered Arbery and shot him on a street in the subdivision.
Bryan, who had stopped his own truck at a short distance behind the McMichaels, recorded the incident with his cellphone as Travis shot Arbery three times. The jogger tried to defend himself by grabbing the gun after the first shot hit him in the chest before being shot twice more.
According to The Associated Press, prosecutors said that the men chased and shot Arbery out of “pent-up racial anger.” Both of the Travis men were convicted of a federal hate crime killing and received life in prison. The hate crime element added 10 years to their sentences, according to the DOJ. Bryan was also convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
During the men’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence of the trio’s hatred for Black people, including social media posts and text messages. Bryan reportedly used racial slurs while noting that his daughter was dating a Black man, including calling him “n—r” and a “monkey.” The prosecutors also presented a witness who testified that Greg McMichael angrily remarked, “All those Blacks are nothing but trouble,” back in 2015 following the death of civil rights activist Julian Bond.
Travis McMichael also wrote about his hatred for Black people on Facebook in 2018 after viewing a video of a Black man playing a prank on a white person. “I’d kill that f—king n—r,” he wrote.
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said at Travis’ sentencing, “My son was shot not one time, not two times, but three times. Your honor, I feel every shot that was fired every day.”
The men’s attorneys said in court filings that their clients chased Arbery because they thought he was a criminal, not because he was Black. The appeal for Travis argues that prosecutors failed to prove that Arbery was pursued because of his race. The McMichaels claim they pursued Arbery after recognizing him from security footage in the months before they killed him. The footage showed that Arbery did not take anything from the site nor was he armed when the men chased and killed him.
