Father, son arrested in racially charged Georgia case

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation on Thursday charged 64-year-old Gregory McMichael and his 34-year-old son Travis McMichael with murder in the Feb. 23 shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. The McMichaels, who are white, told police they confronted Arbery, an African American, because he matched the description of a suspect in a local burglary. They claimed Arbery attacked them and they were defending themselves. Arbery’s relatives said he was out for a jog when the suspects racially profiled, pursued, and killed him.

Why the time lag from shooting to arrest? The Waycross, Ga., district attorney who handled the case initially advised police the McMichaels acted in self-defense and within the law for making a citizen’s arrest. That prosecutor later recused himself from the case. Gregory McMichael has ties throughout local law enforcement because he worked for years as an investigator for the Glynn County district attorney’s office and was a police officer before that. The third prosecutor on the case, Tom Durden of Liberty County, Ga., requested the GBI examine the evidence on Tuesday, the same day a video of the shooting surfaced. A neighbor in a different vehicle who joined the McMichaels in their pursuit of Arbery took the video. Attorneys for Arbery’s family said they want the third man charged as an accessory to the crime. Durden still plans to present the evidence to a grand jury.

Dig deeper: Read Mickey McLean’s report in The Sift about the release of the video and what it showed.