Two of the three white men convicted of murdering Ahead Arbery repeatedly used racial slurs in text messages and social media posts.
An FBI analyst testified during the three convicted murderers’ ongoing federal hate crime trial that two of the three men made racist and violent comments in their communications in the months and years before murdering then-25-years-old Arbery. The third man’s phone messages could not be read because it was encrypted.
FBI intelligence analyst Amy Vaughan led the jury through more than two dozen conversations that the two men had with others. Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan exchanged texts and Facebook conversations with friends in which they used racial slurs.
Greg McMichael, Travis’s father, had a phone that could not be accessed and therefore his messages could not be analyzed.
Travis McMichael frequently used the N-word to describe Black people. In one conversation with a friend over Facebook, he shared a video of a Black boy dancing on a TV show with a white supremacist song playing over it. In another exchange, he claimed Black people “ruin everything,” and, using racial slurs, said he was glad he wasn’t black.
In other posts, Travis used violent language, talking about violence against Black people, and implying his own inclinations towards racist violence and doing so without remorse.
Travis claimed he shot Arbery in self-defense. But in this trial, conversations lauding vigilantism painted a very different violent and racist reality.
Arbery was murdered by Travis McMichael in February 2020. The two McMichaels armed themselves and used a pickup truck to chase down Arbery while he was outside jogging through their Georgia neighborhood. Bryan, their neighbor, joined them in his truck and recorded it all on his phone. Video footage shows Travis shooting Arbery with a shotgun.
No arrests were made for two months when the video leaked online.
All three men were convicted of murder last fall in a Georgia state court.
This is a second trial in a US district court on the charges of hate crimes. They are charged with violating Arbery’s civil rights and accused of targeting him specifically due to race.
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