The three men convicted of murder in Ahmaud Arbery’s fatal shooting were found guilty of federal hate crimes Tuesday for violating Arbery’s civil rights and targeting him because he was Black.
The jury reached its decision after several hours of deliberation on the charges against father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan.
During the trial, prosecutors showed roughly two dozen text messages and social media posts in which Travis McMichael and Bryan used racist slurs and made derogatory comments about Black people. The FBI wasn’t able to access Greg McMichael’s phone because it was encrypted.
The McMichaels grabbed guns and jumped in a pickup truck to pursue Arbery after seeing him running in their neighborhood outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick in February 2020. Bryan joined the pursuit in his own pickup and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery. The killing became part of a larger national reckoning on racial injustice after the graphic video leaked online two months later.
The McMichaels and Bryan pleaded not guilty to the hate crime charges. Defense attorneys contended the three didn’t chase and kill Arbery because of his race but acted on the earnest, though erroneous, suspicion that Arbery had committed crimes in their neighborhood.
The panel of eight white people, three Black people and one Hispanic person received the case Monday following a weeklong trial in U.S. District Court in the port city of Brunswick. The jurors adjourned for the night after about three hours of deliberations, and resumed deliberations at 9 a.m. Tuesday morning.
The trial closed Monday with prosecutors saying 25-year-old Arbery’s slaying on a residential street was motivated by “pent-up racial anger,” revealed by the defendants’ electronic messages as well as by witnesses who testified to hearing them make racist tirades and insults.
“All three defendants told you loud and clear, in their own words, how they feel about African Americans,” prosecutor Tara Lyons told the jury Monday.
Defense attorneys insisted that past racist statements by their clients offered no proof they violated Arbery’s civil rights and targeted him because he’s Black. They urged the jury to set aside their emotions.
“It’s natural for you to want retribution or revenge,” said Pete Theodocion, representing William “Roddie” Bryan. “But we have to elevate ourselves … even if it’s the tough thing.”
The basic facts aren’t disputed. The slaying of Arbery nearly two years ago, on Feb. 23, 2020, was captured in a graphic cellphone video that sparked widespread outrage. Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves after spotting Arbery running past their home and chased him in a pickup truck. Bryan joined his neighbors in his own truck and recorded the video of Travis McMichael firing at point-blank range.
Police found Arbery had no weapon and no stolen items. Prosecutors said he was merely out jogging.
Travis McMichael’s attorney, Amy Lee Copeland, told the jury that prosecutors presented no evidence that he “ever spoke to anyone about Mr. Arbery’s death in racial terms.” She said her client opened fire in self-defense after Arbery tried to take away his shotgun.
Greg McMichael’s attorney, A.J. Balbo, argued that his client initiated the chase not because Arbery was a Black man, but because he was “THE man” the McMichaels had seen in security camera videos taken from a nearby house under construction.
The McMichaels and Bryan, convicted of murder last fall in a Georgia state court, pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.
FBI agents uncovered roughly two dozen racist text messages and social media posts from the McMichaels and Bryan in the years and months preceding the shooting.
For instance, in 2018, Travis McMichael commented on a Facebook video of a Black man playing a prank on a white person: “I’d kill that f—-ing n—-r.”
Some witnesses testified they heard the McMichaels’ racist statements firsthand. A woman who served under Travis McMichael in the U.S. Coast Guard a decade ago said he called her “n——r lover,” after learning she’d dated a Black man. Another woman testified Greg McMichael had ranted angrily in 2015 when she remarked on the death of civil rights activist Julian Bond, saying, “All those Blacks are nothing but trouble.”
The three white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery acted out of “racial anger” when they chased down the young Black man as they saw him jogging through their Georgia community, a federal prosecutor told jurors at the defendants’ hate-crimes trial Monday.
Defense lawyers argued that their clients, despite a lengthy record of bigoted social discourse shown in court, pursued Arbery because they were suspicious of his conduct, not because of his race.
Judge Lisa Wood sent the predominantly white jury out to deliberate Monday afternoon after they listened to hours of closing arguments in a case probing whether vigilantism directed against a Black person in this case crossed the boundary of racially motivated violence as defined by U.S. law.
The defendants – Travis McMichael, 36; his father, Gregory McMichael, 66; and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52 – have already been convicted of murder in state court and sentenced to life in prison in an earlier trial that largely skirted racial issues and focused on proving a homicide case.
Arbery, 25, was out for an afternoon jog on Feb. 23, 2020, when the McMichaels spotted him running by their home, grabbed their guns and jumped in their pickup truck to follow him. Bryan joined the chase in his own truck before Aubrey was cornered and confronted face to face by the younger McMichael, who fired three shotgun blasts at Aubrey at close range, killing him.
Arbery’s name became entwined with a host of others invoked in protests that swept the country after an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, was killed by a white police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck until he could no longer breathe in May 2020.
The federal prosecution of Arbery’s killers marks the first instance in which those convicted of such a high-profile murder are facing a jury in a hate-crimes trial.
Christopher Perras, a special litigator for the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in his summation Monday that Arbery was singled out by the defendants because of the color of his skin.
“They were motivated by racial assumption, racial resentment and racial anger,” Perras said, referring to the defendants. “They saw a Black man in their neighborhood and they thought the worst of him.”
Perras cited trial testimony showing the defendants had a long history of making overtly, sometimes violently racist comments about Black people in text messages, social media and conversations with others.
The proceedings were attending on Monday by several members of Arbery’s family, including his parents, Marcus Arbery Sr., and Wanda Coooper-Jones.
Defense attorneys countered that their clients believed they recognized Arbery from previous videos taken by a neighbor showing a person lurking on four occasions around a vacant house under construction amid a series of property thefts in the community.
“If you ask, ‘Would these defendants have grabbed guns and done this to a white guy?’ and the answer is yes,” said defense lawyer Amy Lee Copeland, representing Travis McMichael, the man who fired the three shotgun blasts that killed Arbery.
She and fellow defense lawyers said the record of past derogatory statements made by her clients about Black people failed to prove their actions on the day of Arbery’s killing were racially motivated.
Copeland said prosecutors presented no evidence that her client “ever spoke to anyone about Mr. Arbery in racial terms” or used a racial slur on the day of the killing. And she added that the government never connected McMichael to any white supremacist or hate groups.
A.J. Balbo, the attorney Gregory McMichael, argued that the defendants were motivated by a desire to protect their neighborhood.
Pete Theodocion, Bryan’s attorney, argued the evidence of racism was merely “circumstantial.”
“Yes, the N-word six times is six times too many, but it is not evidence (of a hate crime),” he told jurors.
All three men are charged with depriving Arbery of his civil rights by attacking him because of his race, as well as with attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels are additionally charged with a federal firearms offense.
The hate-crimes felony, the most serious of the charges, carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Both McMichaels had agreed last month to plead guilty to the federal hate-crimes offense, and the son acknowledged in court that he singled out Arbery because of his “race and color.”
But Judge Wood rejected the plea bargain because it bound her to a 30-year sentence that prosecutors had agreed would be served in a federal lockup before the men were returned to the Georgia prison system, widely perceived as a tougher environment for inmates compared with federal penitentiaries.
The plea deals were then withdrawn, and all three defendants proceeded to trial.
Another surge in hate crimes and incidents aimed at Asian Americans, ranging from verbal harassment to violent assaults, has that community searching for ways to stop it.
Among the victims, Michelle Go, 40, was pushed onto the tracks of the New York subway January 15 in an unprovoked deadly attack. A senior manager at a financial consultancy, Go was a Chinese American who had volunteered to help the homeless.
Authorities said her assailant, an African American homeless man, had a history of psychiatric illness. The lethal attack drew international attention.
While many assaults have been captured on video, others go unnoticed. A Chinese immigrant named Michelle, who asked that her full name not be used, was also the target of an unprovoked attack in an upscale neighborhood in Long Beach, California. The event was not recorded and received no news coverage, but it left an indelible mark on Michelle.
On May 2, 2021, “a beautiful morning,” Michelle recalls, she went for her daily walk. A small woman in her early 50s, she passed a Sunday farmers market, busy restaurants and yachts moored in the harbor. She doesn’t remember what happened next, but a bystander who helped her has a clear recollection.
Max Wilson, a student and athlete at San Diego State University, was walking near the water with his father.
“A small Asian woman was just minding her business, walking past a man,” Wilson, 20, recalls. “All of a sudden, we saw him turn around, and he starts punching the back of this poor Asian woman’s head and repeatedly bashing it.” Wilson says he and his father “couldn’t believe their eyes.”
On regaining consciousness, Michelle found herself, bleeding and in shock, on the ground, being helped by bystanders. She later learned she had suffered a concussion — along with injuries to her shoulder, teeth and mouth — and had bruises and cuts from head to ankle.
Wilson followed the man, who grabbed a heavy wooden board from a dumpster and swung it repeatedly, attacking the young man and smashing it against a car, but Wilson overpowered him.
Passers-by found ice for Michelle’s injuries and called an ambulance. Police arrived quickly. Wilson pointed to the man’s hiding place under a dock, and he was arrested.
“There was absolutely no reason for him to target this tiny woman,” Wilson recalls.
Michelle has mostly recovered but is “afraid of going out (and is) extremely vigilant,” she said. She suffers from nightmares, headaches and chronic shoulder pain.
Police and prosecutors have charged the man with assault.
“I have to think it was racially motivated,” Michelle says. She did not know her attacker, she had done nothing to offend him, and non-Asians on the scene were unmolested, she says. Robbery wasn’t a motive because he took none of her belongings.
Attacks such as Michelle’s are on the rise, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics. In 2020, hate crimes against Asian Americans were up, with 279 recorded incidents versus 158 the previous year.
Manjusha Kulkarni of the organization Stop AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Hate notes that “not all law enforcement entities collect the data. They don’t all report it to the FBI.”
FILE – A woman holds a sign and attends a rally to support stop AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) hate at the Logan Square Monument in Chicago, March 20, 2021.
Kulkarni says language barriers keep some immigrants from reporting crimes. Others, without legal status to stay in the country, fear immigration authorities.
Kulkarni, whose organization tracks self-reported hate incidents, says that “90% of what is reported to us are not crimes.” Instead, they are “comments made in the workplace, at school. It can be bullying. It can be harassment,” she says, “and it can be discrimination in retail.”
From March 2020 through September 2021, her organization tracked more than 10,000 self-reported incidents and collaborated on a survey that found 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders had experienced hate incidents in the past year. Whatever their background, “from Vietnamese, Filipinos, even South Asians and Pacific Islanders,” they are often targets of anti-Chinese bias, Kulkarni said.
That happened to Thai American Tanny Jiraprapasuke, who was verbally attacked aboard a Los Angeles metro train in February 2020. The young woman was subjected to a tirade against Chinese immigrants by a man who berated China as the source of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
It was “almost like a performance,” she recalls, with “big gestures. He was standing up, he was yelling.” It soon became clear the rant was directed at her. After 15 minutes, the man eventually disembarked, but the episode has left her shaken.
Prosecution of hate crimes
Authorities can sometimes stiffen penalties by charging perpetrators with hate crimes under federal or state laws. This happened to six men in San Jose, California, in December. Prosecutors said the men had worked together in more than 170 incidents in the San Francisco region, targeting Asians for robbery, burglary or theft.
Yet even when police file assault charges in violent attacks, as in the Long Beach case, prosecutors are reluctant to file hate crime enhancements because the bar is so high, says May Lee, host of the The May Lee Show podcast and an adjunct professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Federal authorities define a hate crime as a crime against a person or property motivated by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity. Yet hate itself is not a crime, notes the FBI website, which says free speech needs to be protected.
Successful hate crime prosecution requires both a crime and a provable motive, and “a lot of DAs (district attorneys) don’t want to even try … because they don’t want to lose,” Lee said.
Culture plays a role in obscuring the extent of the problem, say Asian American analysts. Victims often don’t want to make waves, so they keep quiet. Yet videos of hate incidents keep surfacing “almost every single day,” Lee said.
One of the brutal attacks captured on video showed an 84-year-old Chinese American man being pushed to the ground in San Francisco; the victim suffered serious injuries. Another showed two older women stabbed at a bus stop, and a third depicted the fatal attack in San Francisco of an elderly Thai immigrant.
FILE – Protesters march at a rally against Asian hate crimes past the Los Angeles Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, March 27, 2021.
Some people say Asian Americans are viewed as easy targets. Others look elsewhere for motivation, blaming fear of COVID-19. Some accuse former U.S. President Donald Trump of inflaming hatred through his remarks that China was responsible for the coronavirus, which he called the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” or “Kung Flu.”
Historical roots
Analyst Jessica Lee of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank, sees historical precedents for the hate, saying “anti-Asian violence has really ebbed and flowed.”
At least 17 Chinese immigrants were killed in a racial massacre in Los Angeles’ Chinatown in 1871. Eight men from the mob of 500 white and Hispanic men were convicted of manslaughter, but the convictions were overturned.
Asians have also been singled out for restrictive legislation. Chinese were barred from immigration to the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, initially to limit competition for laboring and mining jobs. The measure passed in 1882 and was extended and in force until 1943.
Beginning the previous year, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, many of them U.S. citizens, were held in internment camps during World War II.
Later, “during the Cold War,” says Jessica Lee, “the FBI targeted Chinese and Chinese American scientists and students and questioned their loyalty to the United States” amid talk of a “yellow peril.”
Kulkarni of Stop AAPI Hate says that’s happening today with the China Initiative, a Department of Justice program aimed at curbing economic espionage by China. The Trump administration launched it in November 2018, and it is still in place.
The DOJ says the initiative is aimed not at Americans but at China, which it says is connected to 60% of trade secret theft cases.
Jessica Lee of the Quincy Institute says the Biden administration’s continuing tensions with China are inadvertently fostering ethnic divisions.
While others dispute a connection between geopolitics and hate crimes, Jessica Lee says racially tinged rhetoric triggers deep-seated prejudices. She said Asian Americans, regarded as “perpetual foreigners,” are vulnerable.
“No matter how many generations of Asian American family you trace back to,” she says, “you will always be seen as a foreigner because you’re not white.”
Kulkarni adds, “Not only are our communities viewed as bringing disease, but they’re also thought of as sly and cunning.”
Heightening racial tensions
Stop AAPI Hate says most perpetrators of self-reported hate incidents against Asian Americans are white, but African Americans and Hispanics are the perpetrators in a number of violent attacks recorded on video. Analysts say this adds to intergroup tensions, even though Blacks and Hispanics are themselves the targets of hate crimes.
“Sadly, even those who don’t subscribe directly to white supremacy still can fall victim to it in terms of their own thinking,” Kulkarni says.
Michelle, the Long Beach attack victim, says her attacker was African American and so was the young man who saved her.
Wilson, the student athlete, is mixed race, with a white father and Black mother. He has lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Beijing, and he and his family speak Mandarin, thanks to his father’s service as a U.S. diplomat in China.
The Wilsons “saved my life,” Michelle says.
The United States is a nation of immigrants, and its 22 million Asian Americans are a diverse group, note researchers at the Pew Research Center.
Hate incidents have Asian Americans searching for solutions, individually and through organizations.
Michelle believes Chinese Americans are scapegoats for frustration with the coronavirus and the economic problems it has brought. The hatred is misdirected, she notes, adding, “I’ve been living here for over 20 years. I’m as American as any other American.”
She is encouraged by those who came to her aid and says Americans must “create a positive culture that unites people.”
Tanny Jiraprapasuke says discussion about China and the coronavirus pandemic sparked the insults directed at her and shows “how words really matter.”
The Quincy Institute’s Jessica Lee says politicians must tamp down rhetoric that may unintentionally inflame racial tensions.
May Lee, of USC, credits social media with exposing a wide-ranging problem and creating incentive for change. She believes schools can do a better job of highlighting Asian American contributions to the American story, and notes that Illinois and New Jersey have mandated Asian American history classes in their public schools. It is a history unknown to many Americans, she adds.
Kulkarni says a national commission to discourage hatred could be modeled on local initiatives. In Los Angeles, the Human Relations Commission works to defuse racial tensions, and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights enforces human rights laws. And there are similar programs in other cities.
All say that recognizing the problem of hatred against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is the first step in addressing it.
