What led to Ahmaud Arbery's killing
Larry English helped spread the idea of a Black marauder in the neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery was killed. Now it's up to a jury to decide whether that fear in some way justified his killing.
With the jury in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers having heard the deposition of Larry English yesterday, I'm publishing this excerpt from a book I’ve begun that touches on the case. The McMichaels’s defense is arguing that, because English didn’t give explicit permission to protect his property, the McMichaels pursued Arbery with no prior knowledge that people had been snooping around on English’s property. Put simply: they went after Arbery because he was Black.
I had several conversations with English, two of which stretched to more than an hour. The following reporting is a result of those conversations.
***
The first number at the top of Larry English’s background report was the right one, and he answered. In a good ol’ boy drawl, English had an apologetic tone, but he immediately started in on Ahmaud Arbery, saying there were things I didn’t know about the case, that the story was more complicated than people had said and had been reported. He alluded that there was something bad that Arbery did that justified father and son Travis and Greg McMichael killing him. He started telling me about the videos he had that showed a Black man on his property late at night, something no one else knew at the time, just days after the video of Ahmaud’s killing was released. English was building his home in the McMichaels’s Satilla Shores neighborhood and had put security cameras around the structure to catch intruders who might be looking to steal construction materials. It was Ahmaud who was the Black man seen on the videos roaming around at night, he said. (No one has ever proved this and the family contested it to me directly.) But there wasn’t a doubt in English’s mind. He couldn’t explain how he knew it was Arbery — the man in the videos had much longer hair than the publicly available photos of Arbery from his high school days — but English just knew.
English had several of these videos of the supposed Black marauder. He started off our conversation with his unreported facts, the things he said I didn’t know about the case. He told me about the videos of this man wandering around his property late at night. I convinced him to text me the videos, telling him that if it was Ahmaud on his property it might help English’s actions in the public’s eye. His property had motion-detector cameras that would automatically send the clips to his phone any time the cameras were tripped. All of the videos were at night, but none of them showed the man taking anything. None showed the man doing anything other than walking around English’s property — a home under construction and open to the world — even in the clip of Ahmaud there on the day he was killed. After I received the video of Ahmaud inside the home that day, I drove to Brunswick and asked his aunt, mother and step-father whether they believed it was him. They said they couldn’t say, although the footage clearly showed it was Ahmaud, looking inside the home before running away. Shortly after, he passed the McMichaels who began their pursuit.
At the time I couldn’t believe how open English was with me about everything. Looking back it makes sense: he believed he had done nothing wrong by helping to spread the idea of a Black man prowling Satilla Shores late at night. In his mind, he was just protecting his property and being a good neighbor. But there was another reason why English was so willing to talk to me: he didn’t understand the rules. The rules — as unwritten as they are — dictate you should never tell a reporter something you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the newspaper. Most people know this and act accordingly. The more savvy among us — politicians, celebrities, law enforcement, and news-centric freaks of all occupations — have all sorts of other rules that we operate under: off-the-record, on background, on deep background, between-you-and-me conversations of vague off-the-recordness at bars of walnut in New York and DC and humbler formica bar tops in dives all across the country. English didn’t know any of this because he’s a small-town good ol’ boy who’d probably never spoken to a reporter in his life. (Honestly, it’s a much more peaceful existence to not exist in this world.)
That night, as I waited for English to send me the videos, I knew I had something that no one else in the world had, but I had mixed feelings about what do with it. At first, it seemed this new information was damning for Ahmaud: there would probably never be a way for anyone to confirm that it was him in the videos, but the fact that he was seen — in daylight — on English’s property the day he was killed damn near proved it was him in the other clips, I thought. The McMichaels, then, rightfully concerned that someone was trespassing on their neighbor’s property — even if they hadn’t seen the other videos and had simply been inoculated with fear by the game of telephone pulsing through the neighborhood — then saw Ahmaud run by. Induced by this fear, concern, paranoia, vigilantism or stupidity, whatever you want to call it, they grabbed their guns and pursued. The McMichaels may have thought they had a right to pursue Ahmaud because they were essentially performing a citizen’s arrest on someone who had been committing a crime. This is the same incorrect conclusion that District Attorney George Barnhill reached in deciding not to push for the arrest of the McMichaels. But Barnhill, a country lawyer clearly out of his depth, apparently didn’t take into account the fact that under Georgia law you’re only allowed to perform a citizen’s arrest if the suspect is committing a felony. And trespassing on an open construction site is most certainly not a felony.
Still, the videos presented a more complex picture of the case than had been reported — or that anyone other than English, the McMichaels, the neighborhood and, now, I, knew about it.
***
English and I spoke again a few days later. I spent some time convincing him to let me publish his videos and thoughts — something I didn’t need to do because he’d spoken to me under no conditions, but something that I nonetheless felt morally obligated to do considering his childlike misunderstanding of what it actually means to speak to a reporter. I told English that publishing the videos alongside a mea culpa would only help him. I believed him when he said he felt bad for Ahmaud, and that he never wanted him dead or even harmed. When he said he wanted to apologize “to his mama,” it felt genuine.
I fought like hell with my editor to get the videos out. I felt they provided important context for what seemed to me to be a much more complex story than anyone else was reporting. But my editor insisted against it, and he was right. English had been selectively choosing the videos he wanted me to see and withholding the ones he didn’t. I’d been duped. If it’s even possible for me to be more of a cynic, English made it so.
In the end I got “beat,” as we say in the news business. Some TV station in Jacksonville published the videos, but they got duped too. A short time later, videos of random White people walking on to English’s property came out, prompting a bunch of questions I was never able to ask him. Did you send these videos to your neighbors? Were you concerned about the White people on your property, or just the random Black guy? Why the fuck didn’t you share those videos with me? I couldn’t ask English those questions. As he warned in our last conversation, his wife had become wise to our talks and had designs on ending our brief and strange relationship. English lawyered up, smartly for him but not so great for me. He stopped answering my calls and texts.
I now know that English, who insisted that fateful day we first spoke that he had never met or even spoken to the McMichaels, that he had been given Greg’s cell phone number by a cop after calling the police about the intruder and was told to contact Greg if there were anymore sightings of the unwelcome visitor. (English said in his deposition that he never spoke to the McMichaels.) The terror flowing through the neighborhood wasn’t the result of a slew of burglaries, as the McMichaels had insisted and that the police reported to the public and the media. Instead, there had been only one theft in the months preceding Ahmaud’s killing, and that was when someone stole a handgun from Travis’ unlocked pickup truck with its Gadsden flag sticker and its “Don’t Tread on Me” logo, and the old Georgia flag with the stars and bars in the top left corner as its front license plate.
English lied. The McMichaels lied. The cops lied. Barnhill and the police messed up. And Arbery, silenced on the ground, could not tell the truth.
My story about the complexities of this case was a bust, but I eventually learned a more important truth. English had knocked down the first domino in the Arbery case, sharing the videos of him on his property with a neighbor. The rest of the dominoes that began to fall after that — a game of telephone around the neighborhood about a non-existent Black marauder; the McMichaels’ paranoia or racism metastasizing into armed conflict — killed Ahmaud Arbery with the McMichaels as the willing trigger-men.
Arbery's mile long criminal record that you neglected to mention (and which refutes your entire rant) https://www.glynncounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/69162/114-Notice-of-Intent