‘Lynched by a Racial Mob’: Ahmaud Arbery’s Father Wrenchingly Describes His Son’s Murder to Chris Cuomo
Marcus Arbery, father of slain unarmed jogger Ahmaud Arbery, gave a wrenching description of his son’s killing even as he said he did not believe the suspects who have been arrested in the crime should be put to death.
On Friday night’s edition of CNN’s Cuomo PrimeTime, Mr. Arbery and family attorney Benjamin Crump joined host Chris Cuomo to discuss the Feb. 23 killing that was captured on a video that was leaked this week, but which police have had since the crime was committed.
“What do you want people to know about your son, and what this means to you?” Cuomo asked.
“I just want people to know that he was a very good young man, and he loved the people, and I just want people to remember him as a good-hearted young man,” Mr. Arbery said, adding that his late son “was the type of young man, if he had one dollar, and you needed that one dollar, he would give it to you. That’s just how good his heart was.”
Mr. Arbery went on to say that “to see him just get lynched like that by a racial mob, it’s just devastating to our family.”
“These are heavy words for you to use,” Cuomo said, and asked “Why do you see it as a lynching by a racial mob?”
Mr. Arbery then described the actions of the two men who were arrested for the crime — 64-year-old Gregory McMichael and his 34-year-old son, Travis McMichael — as depicted in the leaked video:
When you come at a young man, when you jump on the back of a pickup truck with a shotgun, a pump shotgun and a .357 Magnum in a pickup truck like some racial movie, and you follow him like he was an animal, and gun him down like he was an animal, and all he’s doing is running, he tried to avoid them, and he just tried to stay out y’all’s way, y’all just kept on pursuing him and blocking him in with that truck, and he didn’t have no chance. All he did was just try to defend himself, he didn’t have no way, three men with guns, an unarmed black African-American man, didn’t give him no chance. Because of the color of his skin.
“That’s why I want these men to stay in jail, I don’t want them to bond out, I just want them to get life sentence, we just don’t believe in killing,” Mr. Arbery added. “I just want them to suffer like how my family is suffering. I want them to see my son’s face every day they do time. I want them to see his face. I just want them to just suffer hard. Because I just don’t believe in no death, I just want you to stay locked up.”
“It’s a really interesting degree of mercy, when you’re feeling your worst, that even now you don’t want to see death for the men who did this. You just want them to be punished,” Cuomo said.
Watch above via CNN.
