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Daily Broadside | Ahmaud Arbery must have justice

A few days ago I happened to see an article about the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia back on February 25. A raw video of the attack was posted online, bringing the story to national attention.

I had not heard about the shooting until I saw the video. I was stunned to learn that the two men who had accosted Arbery had not been arrested, more than two months after the murder.

It’s likely that they never would have been had it not been for the video being made public (by Alan Tucker, a criminal defense attorney). The district attorney who originally led the investigation “argued that arrests were not warranted because the father and son were acting within Georgia’s citizen arrest and self-defense statutes.”

The two men who chased and shot Arbery—Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34—said they thought Arbery matched the description of a burglary suspect in their neighborhood.

The McMichael’s are white. Arbery was black.

I’m not a legal expert. I don’t know what Georgia’s citizen arrest statute covers, nor do I know the details of their self-defense statute. I don’t know if Georgia is an open carry or a concealed carry state.

I don’t know if the McMichael’s honest intent was to hold Arbery until the police arrived. I don’t know if they knew the laws governing their actions. I don’t know if they are card-carrying racists.

I don’t know if Arbery entering a home under construction, as he apparently did prior to being killed, is legal or illegal. I don’t know if he committed a robbery as the McMichael’s suspected. I don’t know if he had a criminal record.

What I do know is that what I saw looks like cold-blooded murder.

The McMichaels were armed, they chased Arbery, confronted him, and three shots were fired. At the end of the confrontation Arbery had been shot twice in the chest, once in the hand and he was lying face down in the street, dead.

There is one other thing I know. The shooting has all the hallmarks of a racist crime. To be clear, I’m not saying it was racially motivated and I’m not saying it wasn’t. But it sure looks like an example of what progressives claim is in American DNA. And that is discouraging.

I grieve the death of Ahmaud Arbery. Whether or not he burgled a neighborhood, there was no just cause for him to be gunned down in broad daylight by a couple of trigger happy vigilantes.

Ahmaud deserves justice and I hope he gets it.

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