Murder of a black jogger in Georgia | A second trial opens, focused on the issue of racism

(Washington) A slew of shocking insults echoed Monday in a federal court in the southern United States, where the trial for “racist crimes” began of three white men who, in February 2020, had hunted down and killed a young black jogger.

Travis McMichael, 36, his father Gregory McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, have already been convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery and sentenced to life in prison by a Georgia state court .

If the first trial had only touched on the racist dimension of the drama, federal prosecutors immediately got to the heart of the matter on Monday.

“None of this would have happened if Ahmaud had been white,” said prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein, quoted in local media. The defendants targeted him “because of his skin color”, she continued.

To support her accusations, she reported, apologetically, particularly violent racist insults uttered by the accused. According to her, the McMichael son notably called African Americans “criminals”, “monkeys”, “savages and subhuman”. She read a message in which he said he was happy to have a very white workplace and used an even more offensive insult.

William Bryan had used the same word to complain about his daughter dating a black man, she added.

“This is not the trial of racist insults”, but it explains what was the state of mind of the defendants when they launched the pursuit of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, she still told the jury, which includes eight white, three black and one Hispanic.

That day, the 25-year-old was jogging in Brunswick, a coastal town in Georgia, when he was chased by the three men, armed and aboard two pickup trucks. After a few minutes of chase, Travis McMichael had shot him.

For more than two months, the police had made no arrests and it took the broadcast of a video of the tragedy, relayed massively on the internet, for the investigation to start. Ahmaud Arbery then became an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement (black lives matter) during the major anti-racist demonstrations in the summer of 2020.

During their first trial, the three men claimed to have taken the young African-American for an active burglar in the neighborhood and wanted to arrest him.

As the federal trial approached, father and son McMichael had reached a plea bargain with prosecutors, admitting for the first time to harboring racial bias. But the agreement, which would have allowed them to be transferred to a federal prison, was invalidated by a judge.