Family Demands Arrest Of Two Men Who Chased And Killed Unarmed Black Man

A 25-year-old black man was shot a killed while jogging through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia, on February 23 by two men who believed he was a suspected burglar. When former police officer Gregory McMichael and his son, Travis, saw Ahmaud Arbery, they grabbed their guns and started to chase after him in a pickup truck.

After the pair caught up with Arbey, he got into a struggle with Travis over his shotgun. As the two men tussled, shots were fired, and Arbey was killed.

No charges were filed against Gregory or Travis at the time, and two district attorneys have recused themselves from the case. One of them wrote that Travis shot Arbey in self-defense and suggested that the two men were acting legally under Georgia's citizen arrest laws.

After nearly three months, video of the shooting recorded by a bystander was posted online, sparking new calls for the McMichaels arrest.

Tom Durden, the third district attorney to handle the case, said that he is planning to present the case to a grand jury as soon as possible. Georgia has stopped empaneling new grand juries because of the coronavirus pandemic. While the state has begun to reopen, it is unknown when new juries will be seated.

That decision isn't enough for the family, who believes the two men should be arrested.

"Prosecutors will need a grand jury in order to formally indict these men, but that has nothing to do with actually going out and arresting the men seen on camera murdering a 25-year-old unarmed black man," S. Lee Merritt, one of the attorneys representing Arbery's family, told ABC News. "The prosecutors actually have the option, if they so chose to, to directly indictment and skip the entire grand jury process. It's something that happens all the time in our legal system, and this would certainly be an appropriate moment."

Arbey's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said that she thinks the McMichaels have not been arrested because Gregory spent years working as an investigator in the Brunswick district attorney's office.

"I think that they don't feel like he was wrong because he was one of them," she said.

Photo: WXIA-TV