A Georgia prosecutor on Tuesday recommended a grand jury review of the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man who was killed by two white men while running through a majority white neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia on Feb. 23.
District Attorney Tim Durden announced he would present the case to the grand jury to determine if any charges should be filed against the two men.
A graphic dash cam video, that showed the fatal shooting, was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday.
Former Vice President Joe Biden weighed in on the case on Twitter.com Tuesday. He said the video is “clear” and Arbery was ambushed and “killed in cold blood.” He wrote that his heart goes out to Arbery’s family and he called for a transparent investigation into the “murder”.
The video footage shows Arbery, 25, running at a jogger’s pace along a leafy street in Brunswick’s south end on Feb. 23. He was confronted by a former cop, Greg McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34.
Travis McMichael and Arbery struggled over a shotgun while Greg McMichael pointed a .357 magnum at Arbery from the bed of his pickup truck.
Three shots rang out. Arbery was shot in the chest and collapsed face down in the roadway. He died where he fell, bleeding out on the pavement. There were no arrests in the case.
Before recusing himself, George E. Barnhill, the district attorney for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, wrote a long letter explaining why he didn’t bring charges against the McMichaels.
Calling Arbery a “burglary suspect,” Barnhill concluded Travis McMichael “was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself.”
But Michael J. Moore, an Atlanta lawyer, told the New York Times in an email that Barnhill’s opinion is “flawed”.
Moore said the McMichaels appear to be the aggressors in the confrontation, and they were not justified in using deadly force under Georgia’s self-defense laws.
“The law does not allow a group of people to form an armed posse and chase down an unarmed person who they believe might have possibly been the perpetrator of a past crime,” Moore wrote.
President Trump has not weighed in on the Arbery case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeGkzez_lhg
