On February 23rd an innocent black man, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was gunned down by two white men, Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis, 34, in Georgia. There was nothing done about the killing until 74 days after when they were charged with his murder. 

This act caught the media eye fast because of the victim’s race and the time it took to prosecute the suspects. There had been a robbery in the area the same day with a description of Arbery’s appearance, a black man in a white shirt. The two men claimed to be conducting a citizen’s arrest while chasing down Arbery.

William Bryan, a neighbor, filmed the brutal attack while the other men shot at Arbery three times. The suspects told police Arbery had attacked them. Arbery was unarmed at the time. The video isn’t extremely clear and doesn’t show the entire encounter, but it does show one man standing in the back of his pickup truck while the other is firing shots at Arbery. Arbery struggles to fight the son with the gun but ultimately fails. This is where self-defense can be argued, but the two men chased Arbery down and approached him with the gun first. Arbery was on a run while all of this was happening. 

The two men managed to slip under the radar because of the Covid-19 outbreak but other people claim this was just the ignorance of the legal system. There was film evidence and it still took police over two months to conduct an arrest. 

Arbery would have turned 26 this week. A month after this brutal attack, Breonna Taylor, 26, an EMT, was shot dead in her home. The Black Lives Matter and police brutality movements have actively addressed both incidents on social media. As of now the two suspects in the Arbery case are in jail and will appear in court on June 4th.