Georgia shooting case gets new prosecutor, again

The newest members of the team investigating the shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery bring with them additional staff and more questions about how Glynn County, Ga., law enforcement handled the case. A father and son, who are white, shot and killed Arbery, an African American, on Feb. 23 in a subdivision near Brunswick, Ga. Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael told police they confronted Arbery because he matched the description of a suspect in a local burglary. Arbery’s relatives said he was jogging when the suspects racially profiled, pursued, and killed him. On Monday, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to look into possible misconduct by local prosecutors who first handled the case. Carr also appointed Cobb County District Attorney Joyette M. Holmes to lead the prosecution of the McMichaels, whom police arrested last week on murder charges after a video surfaced of the shooting.

Why does the case keep changing hands? Gregory McMichael is a former Glynn County police officer and worked for 20 years as an investigator for the local district attorney’s office before retiring a year ago. The Glynn County district attorney and the first outside prosecutor left the case because of professional relationships with McMichael. Carr said the most recent prosecutor, Tom Durden, asked him to give the case to someone with a larger staff. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution released a second video from a surveillance camera that shows someone who appears to be Arbery walking into a home under construction in the subdivision. The Arbery family’s lawyers say the second video supports their argument that he did nothing wrong.

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