That left the attorneys for the men to struggle to explain away their statements. And I don’t mean using the magic words ‘citizen’s arrest.’ I mean no one’s saying, ‘We saw the guy commit a burglary and we were going to hold on to him so we could turn him over to police because he committed this crime,’“ Atlanta defense attorney Page Pate said.

“Nobody was talking about a citizen’s arrest. The statements allowed prosecutor Linda Dunikoski to methodically pick apart the defense’s arguments. “I figured he had done something wrong,” Bryan said. In an interview with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Bryan said he wanted to take a photo of Arbery to show police, but couldn’t point to any crimes Arbery had committed. He told police he didn’t recognize any of them, or know what prompted the chase, but still joined in after calling out: “Y’all got him?” They told police they weren’t sure exactly what Arbery had done wrong, which would later be a big blow to their defense that they were making a citizen’s arrest.īryan was on his front porch when he saw Arbery run past with the McMichaels’ truck close behind. The shooter, Travis McMichael, his dad, Greg McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan all spoke extensively and candidly with Glynn County investigators just hours after Arbery was killed in their Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood in February 2020. If they had never talked to police and they said we saw him taking something from the property and running - there’s an OK shot the jury might have acquitted them,“ said appellate attorney Andrew Fleischman, who followed the trial from Atlanta.

“It’s those statements that screwed the defense more than the video. Statements like that allowed prosecutors to give context to the short video that didn’t show the entire shooting and had little of the five minutes that the men chased Arbery. Greg McMichael, who was in the bed of a pickup truck when his son killed Arbery, told police the Black man 'was trapped like a rat' and he told Arbery: “Stop, or I’ll blow your f-ing head off!”

The video of Ahmaud Arbery’s shotgun death was a shocking piece of evidence that suddenly brought the Black man’s killing into the national consciousness.īut the murder convictions of the three white men who chased him may have been secured by their own words to investigators the day of the shooting.

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