‘This Was a Lynching’: Social Media Reacts with Grief and Outrage Over New Video of Black Man Shot While Jogging

Tommy ChristopherMay 6th, 2020, 9:52 am
 

Prominent figures on social media reacted with grief and outrage to sickening video that has emerged of the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man, after being chased down by two white men in Georgia.

The crime occurred February 23 when by their own account, former police officer Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael saw Arbery jogging and chased him down in their pickup truck. They claimed to police that they wanted to question Arbery about recent burglaries in the area because they thought he resembled a “suspect” in the break-ins. They claimed Arbery “violently attacked” when they confronted him with firearms.

Arbery family attorney S. Lee Merritt appeared on CNN over the weekend and refuted several possible defenses of the actions:

Two other district attorneys had recused themselves over possible conflicts of interest, one of whom wrote that Travis McMichael acted out of self-defense and their actions fell within Georgia’s citizen arrest laws.

Merritt, the family’s attorney, told CNN on Sunday, “The decision to rely on the citizen’s arrest statute is really a recent invention, prior to that they just simply said it was self-defense.” Merritt says now the men are trying to use the law to say they were trying to stop a crime.

“According to that law, you actually have to be observing the crime or be in the immediate knowledge of the crime,” Merritt said. “The only thing they have ever said is … that Ahmaud stopped by a house that was under construction and he looked through the window. We don’t know if that happened or not, but even if that did happen that is not a felony that would invoke the citizen’s arrest statute that would make this allowable.”

Merritt also said in a letter that he believes the video posted online is one which the district attorney’s office has possession of, and to which it denied him access.

The case is now being recommended for a grand jury, a process that is currently suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The emergence of the video — shown above and described here — has prompted grief and outrage from figures on social media, many of whom describe the shattering images as a “lynching.”

The video is posted above.

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