Source: BBC
A father and son have been arrested and charged in the US state of Georgia for the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man.
Gregory McMichael, aged 64, and Travis McMichael, aged 34, were detained on Thursday by the state bureau of investigation.
They were both charged with murder and aggravated assault, investigators said in a statement.
Mr Arbery, 25, was jogging in February when he was confronted by the pair.
The failure to bring charges against the McMichaels, who are white, in the weeks after the shooting provoked widespread outrage.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced late on Thursday that both men had been taken into custody.
The bureau said the father and son had confronted Mr Arbery with two firearms, and it was the younger McMichael who shot and killed him.
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Categories: Collection of articles, Racism
A Georgia father and son were charged with murder and aggravated assault Thursday evening in the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery after a newly released video appearing to show the moments before his death intensified pressure on authorities to make the arrests.
The charges against the men — Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34 — come more than two months after Arbery was killed. Two local district attorneys recused themselves from the case before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was brought in. The agency made the arrests the day after its investigation began.
The video shows two men approach a young black man jogging on the street. After a brief interaction, gunshots can be heard and the jogger stumbles to the ground. The footage ignited outrage across the political spectrum, with former vice president Joe Biden comparing it to a lynching and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) calling the shooting “absolutely horrific.”
President Trump, speaking at an event in the Oval Office on Thursday, said he expects to get a “full report” on the incident and called the death “a very sad thing.”
Police have not confirmed the authenticity of the footage, but Arbery’s family’s attorney says it depicts the young man’s killing.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is handling the case in partnership with District Attorney Tom Durden, has scheduled a news conference Friday morning to discuss the arrests.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/07/killing-ahmaud-arbery-draws-condemnation-calls-prosecution/
By Caroline E. Light and Janae E. Thomas
May 8, 2020 at 1:02 p.m. EDT
By now you may have seen the horrific — but sadly, these days, no-longer-shocking — video of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery running down a Georgia street in broad daylight, past a pickup truck parked in the middle of the road: One of the truck’s occupants holds a shotgun, the other a pistol, as Arbery runs around the truck. There’s a confrontation, Arbery defends himself, trying to pull the shotgun away as he’s shot, falling to the ground, dead.
This tragedy can be seen as many things at once: the racial profiling of yet another black man; a young life snatched because armed men suspected a minor property crime; brutal racial violence rendered almost routine as it gets replayed on a seemingly endless loop. And, perhaps, the deepest injustice is the way these elements are bound together and codified in state laws that allow white people to weaponize self-defense while claiming retroactively to have been in fear for their lives — while denying the same right to African Americans.
On Thursday, Gregory and Travis McMichael, father and son, were arrested in connection with the shooting and charged with murder and aggravated assault — more than two months after Arbery was killed. Any reasonable reading of the law, not to mention the application of common sense, will tell you that Arbery’s death should have been seen from the start as a racial vigilante killing disguised as self-defense.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/08/doctors-are-flying-blind-deciding-which-patients-should-get-remdesivir-covid-19/