Text Messages Lead To Ahmaud Arbery Death

New text messages suggest police may have “informally deputized” one of the suspects in Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death, while protesters call for Georgia prosecutors to resign for mishandling the investigation.

Arbery, 25, raced across a street in Brunswick when he was fatally shot on Feb. 23. Greg and Travis McMichael, father and son, were arrested two months later after the video, allegedly leaked by Greg himself, showing the altercation leading to Arbery ‘s murder, respectively.

Arbery is African-American, and the McMichaels are white. Both men were charged with murder  as well as aggravated assault on Arbery.
Text messages, first obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, show an exchange between police and a citizen regarding a private building site located one block from where Arbery was shot. It is the same building site where Arbery had been seen before his death on surveillance video.

In December, Larry English, who owns the building site, contacted police about trespassers on the property. English maintained a camera movement-activated system that sent alerts and a video clip whenever the cameras were activated. Officer Robert Rash of the Glynn County Police Department replied to the issue on December 20, indicating that Greg McMichael might assist.

“Your neighbor at XX Satilla Drive is Greg McMichael. Greg is retired Law Enforcement and also a Retired Investigator from the DA’s office,” the text from Officer Rash read. “He said please call him day or night when you get action on your camera.”

McMichael retired from the Brunswick District Attorney’s office last year as an investigator.
WSB-TV Channel 2 Action News investigated the texts separately, speaking to English lawyer J. Graddy, Elizabeth. He reported that on December 20 English had sent the text message, but he had not seen it before recently, indicating that English had not requested McMichael to patrol the property for him.

LaGrance Police Chief Lou Dekmar, a former chief of the International Association of Police Chiefs, voiced outrage that officers were obviously discharging what was a lawful police call to an citizen.

“I’m not aware of any accepted policy for referring someone that requires a police response to delegate that response to a former law enforcement officer who happens to live in the neighborhood,” said Dekmar.

Dekmar further noted that it gives the perception that McMichael had a relationship with the local law enforcement community tasked with investigating the shooting.

“We believe this communication deputized a group of untrained men in the Satilla Shores community to hunt down suspected trespassers, causing the events of Feb. 23, 2020,”.