“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’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.
Members of the jury — eight White people, three Black people and one Hispanic person — leaned forward and watched intently as the evidence was presented. Leigh McMichael, Travis’s mother and Greg’s wife, sat in the courtroom without a visible reaction.
The McMichaels have said they pursued Arbery not because of his race but because they suspected him of break-ins and potentially theft. Arbery had entered an under-construction home in their area a few times in the months leading up to the shooting, and did so again on the day he was shot, Feb. 23, 2020. But police had told Gregory McMichael — a former police officer and investigator with the district attorney’s office — and his son that surveillance footage did not show Arbery taking anything from the property on those earlier visits.
Bryan said he saw the McMichaels pursuing Arbery on Feb. 23 and joined the chase in his own pickup truck, figuring that the young man had “done something wrong.” Arbery had not taken anything from the house that day, either, authories say.
In their opening statements on Monday, defense lawyers for the McMichaels acknowledged that their clients have said reprehensible things about Black people, but noted for jurors that such words are not illegal. Bryan’s lawyer said the jurors would see “different levels” of racism and argued that “Roddie is not a man who sees the entire world through the prism of race.”
On Tuesday, the first day of government witness testimony, the jury heard from Satilla Shores residents who lived near the scene of the shooting and did not see Arbery as a threat.
Matthew Albenze, a longtime neighborhood resident, said he had called police on a previous day after seeing Arbery in an under-construction house. But Albenze testified that he had called a non-emergency police line and that he did not think Arbery, whom he did not know, was doing anything other than looking around.
Another resident, who is White, said he is a frequent runner who often jogged in the neighborhood without arousing suspicion from his neighbors.
Prosecutors also called Richard Dial, an investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who was assigned to the case and testified to the findings of the state probe in the shooting.
Dial and the other witnesses said there was no evidence that the McMichaels sought to provide aid or comfort to Arbery as he lay bleeding to death on the pavement. Cross-examining Dial, defense lawyers sought to establish that there had been reports of stolen items, including guns, in the neighborhood in the weeks leading up to the shooting, and that neighbors had discussed those incidents on social media.
Coker reported from Brunswick, Ga.