A jury was seated on Wednesday in the murder trial of three Georgia men accused in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020. A pool of about 1,000 potential jurors over the course of nearly three weeks was whittled down by the Glynn County Superior Court; of the 12 jurors and four alternates, one was a person of color; five were men and 11 women.
Prosecutors accused defense attorneys of racial bias and asked Judge Timothy Walmsley to reinstate eight Black potential jurors that the defense had struck from the final jury. Arbery was black and the three men accused of killing him were white. Greg McMichael, his son, Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan each face charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment for the shooting death of Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020.
Video footage from Bryan’s vehicle showed Arbery, 25, being boxed in by two pickup trucks driven by the defendants as he was jogging through a Brunswick neighborhood less than 2 miles from his home. Travis McMichael then appears to get out of his vehicle and shoot Arbery three times with a shotgun. The elder McMichael told police they pursued Arbery after suspecting he’d committed a series of break-ins in the neighborhood, though there hadn’t been a string of break-ins reported in the area in weeks. All three men pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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