Arbery’s killers sent many racist messages, FBI analyst says; one defendant spoke of violence against Black people
Hannah Knowles, David Nakamura, Margaret Coker - 2h ago
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/arbery-s-killers-sent-many-racist-messages-fbi-analyst-says-one-defendant-spoke-of-violence-against-black-people/ar-AATWzb9?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531
One of the three White men convicted in Ahmaud Arbery’s murder did not want his daughter dating a Black man and called him the n-word in a text message, according to the FBI.
Another shared a meme that claimed “White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the U.S.” The third, Travis McMichael, who fatally shot Arbery in February, 2020, spoke about killing Black people and wrote in a message that he loved his job because “zero n-rs work with me."
“We used to walk around committing hate crimes all day," he wrote in another text conversation a few months before the shooting.
The second day of testimony in the federal hate-crimes trial over Arbery’s death opened Wednesday with an FBI analyst detailing dozens of racist social media posts and messages allegedly sent by the three men who chased and killed Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in their coastal Georgia neighborhood in early 2020.
Prosecutors are seeking to prove that Travis McMichael, his father Greg McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan attacked Arbery out of racial bias. All three men were convicted of murder last fall and sentenced to life in prison, with Bryan eligible for parole after 30 years.
Their murder trial, in state court before a nearly all-White jury, avoided direct allegations of racism, even though the killing of Arbery helped spark nationwide social-justice protests. The federal trial, in contrast, focuses squarely on whether the McMichaels and Bryan targeted Arbery because he was Black, and is the first trial stemming from several high-profile killings of Black people in 2020 to do so.
Arbery hate-crimes trial: What you need to know
Arbery’s family has said he was out for a jog in the Satilla Shores neighborhood when the defendants chased him down in pickup trucks and confronted him. Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery and claimed self-defense, an argument that a local district attorney quickly accepted before Bryan’s video of the shooting went viral and forced new scrutiny. Arbery did not have a weapon.
FBI intelligence analyst Amy Vaughan testified Wednesday about investigators’ review of the defendants’ phone messages and social media. She spent most of her time on Travis McMichael, 36, walking the jury through a litany of conversations in which he denigrated Black people, often while calling them the n-word. McMichael associated Black people with criminality, spoke explicitly about committing violence against them and blamed them when he struggled to get a commercial driver’s license, accusing them of “running the show,” Vaughan testified.
“I say shoot all of them,” he commented on a video that showed a group of mostly Black teenagers attacking a White teenager. He also appeared to advocate running over protesters in response to a video of a car hitting Black women. When someone sent McMichael a video in which a Black man plays a prank on a White man, he used a racial epithet in saying he’d kill the prankster.
Turning to Bryan, 52, Vaughan testified that text messages showed Bryan’s running joke with a friend about serving as “grand marshal” of a parade on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. “I think the joke is that he would never do that,” she told the jury. While texting about the holiday, Vaughn added, Bryan referred to Black people using multiple racial slurs and referenced a “monkey parade."
Four days before Arbery was shot, the prosecutor said, Bryan used the n-word to refer to his daughter’s boyfriend, who was Black.
Greg McMichael was less active than his son on Facebook, Vaughan said, and law enforcement agents were unable to break through the encryption on his phone to see his messages. But they gleaned some information from online backups of the device and found the elder McMichael sometimes posted memes on Facebook, including the one that said White Irish slaves were treated worse than other enslaved groups. “When was the last time you heard an Irishman b—-ing about how the world owes them a living?” the meme continued, according to Vaughan.