With a Community on Edge, Trial Over the Killing of Ahmaud Arbery Begins

Opening arguments in the trial over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery began Friday morning in Brunswick, Georgia, a community made uneasy this week by the selection of a nearly all-white jury to hear the case.

Three white men — Gregory McMichael, 65, a former police officer; Travis McMichael, his son, 35; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — are accused of killing Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was chased through a suburban neighborhood before being fatally shot by one of his pursuers in February 2020. Each faces up to life in prison if convicted for his role in Arbery’s death.

In her opening statement, Linda Dunikoski, the lead prosecutor, stressed that none of the defendants were currently law enforcement officers and that all three had assumed the worst about Arbery.

“We are here because of assumptions and driveway decisions,” Dunikoski told the jury. “All three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions — not on facts, not on evidence.”

After lunch, Robert G. Rubin, the lawyer for Travis McMichael gave the first of three presentations expected from the defense. Rubin said that Travis McMichael had cause to believe that Arbery had committed a crime, and that Arbery was trying to escape or flee. He argued that Travis McMichael was attempting to legally detain Arbery under the state’s “citizen’s arrest” law, a statute that was largely dismantled after Arbery’s death. And, he said, when Travis McMichael shot and killed Arbery, it was in self-defense.

“It’s tragic that Ahmaud Arbery lost his life,” Rubin said. “But at that point, Travis McMichael is acting in self-defense. He did not want to encounter Ahmaud Arbery physically. He was only trying to stop him for the police.”

Franklin J. Hogue — representing Gregory McMichael — spoke next, echoing the argument that the defendants had acted in self-defense. The elder McMichael, he said, was “in abject fear that he is about to witness his only son be shot.”

An attorney for Bryan deferred his opening statement until later in the trial.

Among those watching the proceedings in the courtroom were Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother; Marcus Arbery Sr., his father; and Leigh McMichael, Gregory McMichael’s wife.

After Arbery was fatally shot Feb. 23, 2020, the defendants told authorities that they suspected that Arbery had committed a series of break-ins in their neighborhood. They have pleaded not guilty to charges that include murder, aggravated assault and false imprisonment.

Dunikoski noted that on the day Arbery was killed, none of the defendants talked about the concept of a citizen’s arrest. “Not one single person used those words,” she said.

The jury, which is made up of residents from Glynn County, where more than one-quarter of the population is Black, includes 11 white people and one Black person. Anxiety over the jury’s racial makeup was palpable among observers and participants during the more than two weeks that the jurors were being chosen.

Lawyers have said the trial could last a month. The extraordinarily long jury selection process, a grueling process that took 2 1/2 weeks and included the seating of four alternate jurors, has already underscored the explosive nature of this case. That is particularly true in coastal Glynn County, where many of the 85,000 residents are connected by bonds of family, school or work, and where racial tension and harmony are deeply laced.

Inside the Glynn County Courthouse — a red brick building with imposing ionic columns fronting a park full of moss-covered oaks — lawyers spent days subjecting scores of potential jurors to intense rounds of questions about how much they knew about the case, whether they had formed opinions about the defendants’ guilt and their preferred news sources and social media networks.

During the selection process, Dunikoski said that she was hoping for jurors who were a “blank slate.” But the killing was one of the most notorious in south Georgia in decades, and many prospective jurors — the court system sent out 1,000 jury notices — said they had already formed opinions about it.

The lengthy process stood in stark contrast to the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, an 18-year-old who is now on trial in Wisconsin for the deaths of two men and the wounding of another in the aftermath of protests in August 2020 over a police shooting. It took one day to seat a jury for that trial. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.