Arbery’s killers sent racist messages, and one called his daughter’s Black boyfriend a slur, FBI analyst says

One of the three White men convicted in Ahmaud Arbery’s murder did not want his daughter dating a Black man and called him the n-word in a text message, according to the FBI.

Another shared a meme that claimed “White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the U.S.” The third, Travis McMichael, who fatally shot Arbery in February, 2020, wrote in a message that he loved his job because “zero n-----rs work with me.”

The second day of testimony in the federal hate-crimes trial over Arbery’s death opened Wednesday with a litany of racist social media posts and messages allegedly sent by the three men who chased and killed Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man. Prosecutors are seeking to prove that Travis McMichael; his father, Greg McMichael; and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan attacked Arbery out of racial bias.

Family have said that Arbery was out for a jog when the defendants chased him down in pickup trucks and confronted him in the Satilla Shores neighborhood of coastal Georgia.

Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery and claimed self-defense, an argument that prosecutors quickly accepted before Bryan’s video of the shooting went viral and forced new scrutiny. Arbery did not have a weapon. All three men were convicted of murder last fall in a state trial before a nearly all-White jury.

That trial largely avoided direct allegations of racism. The federal trial, in contrast, focuses squarely on racial bias and whether the McMichaels and Bryan targeted Arbery because he was Black.

FBI intelligence analyst Amy Vaughan testified Wednesday about investigators’ review of the defendants messages and social media. Law enforcement agents were unable to break the encryption on Greg McMichael’s phone, she said. But they searched phones for the other defendants and gleaned some additional information from online backups.

Vaughan first focused on Travis McMichael, 36, walking the jury through conversation after conversation in which he denigrated Black people with slurs. McMichael blamed “f-----g n-----s running the show” when he struggled to get his commercial driver’s license, she said. He also seemed to text appreciatively about a blackface Halloween costume meant to resemble Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager whose killing in 2012 helped to spark the Black Lives Matter movement. Vaughan said Travis McMichael also sent a friend a video clip of a Black child on a TV segment, dubbed over with a song titled “Alabama N----r.”

Turning to Bryan, 52, Vaughan testified that text messages showed Bryan’s running joke with a friend about serving as “grand marshal” of a parade on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “I think the joke is that he would never do that,” she told the jury. While texting about the holiday, Vaughn added, Bryan referred to Black people using the n-word and the slur “bootlip” and also referenced a “monkey parade.”

Four days before Arbery was shot, she said, Bryan wrote of his daughter’s new Black boyfriend: “Yeah she has her n----r now.”

Greg McMichael was less active than his son on Facebook, Vaughan said, but sometimes posted memes, including the one that said White Irish slaves were treated worse than other enslaved groups. “When was the last time you heard an Irishman b----ing about how the world owes them a living?” the meme went on, according to Vaughan.

The McMichaels and Bryan are already sentenced to life in prison on the state murder charges. But many still see the federal hate-crimes trial as a high-stakes opportunity to directly confront the accusations of racism that have permeated the case. Other recent trials stemming from high-profile slayings of Black Americans, including the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, have not broached race as a motive.

The McMichaels have said they pursued Arbery not because of his race but because they suspected him of break-ins and potentially theft. Arbery had entered an under-construction home in their area a few times in the months leading up to the shooting. But surveillance footage did not show Arbery taking anything from the property, which police told the McMichaels before the shooting on Feb. 23, 2020.

Bryan said he saw the McMichaels pursuing Arbery that day and joined in his own pickup truck, figuring that the young man had “done something wrong.”

In their opening statements on Monday, defense lawyers for the McMichaels acknowledged that their clients said reprehensible things about Black people, but noted for jurors that their words were not illegal. Bryan’s lawyer said the jurors would see “different levels” of racism and argued that “Roddie is not a man who sees the entire world through the prism of race.”

On the first day of government witness testimony on Tuesday, the jury heard from Satilla Shores residents who lived near the scene of the shooting.

Matthew Albenze, a longtime neighborhood resident, said he had called police on a previous day after seeing Arbery in an under-construction house. But Albenze testified that he had called a non-emergency police line and that he did not think Arbery, whom he did not know, was doing anything other than looking around.

Another resident, who is White, said he is a frequent runner who often jogged in the neighborhood without arousing suspicion from his neighbors.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday also called Richard Dial, an investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who was assigned to the case and testified to the findings of the state probe in the shooting.

Dial and the other witnesses said there was no evidence that the McMichaels sought to provide aid or comfort to Arbery as he lay bleeding to death on the pavement. Cross-examining Dial, defense lawyers sought to establish that there had been reports of stolen items, including guns, in the neighborhood in the weeks leading up to the shooting, and that neighbors had discussed those incidents on social media.

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Coker reported from Brunswick, Ga.