Everyone Knew Who Shot Ahmaud Arbery. Why Did the Killers Walk Free?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

It has been six months since Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man, was shot by three white men while he was out for a Sunday jog near his childhood home. The video of the killing, taken by one of the men who participated in it, could be said to have kindled the blaze that ignited after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. There was no mystery to be solved in Arbery’s killing. It happened in broad daylight, and the men who did it were on the scene when police arrived. But the killers walked free, and no one was arrested for seventy-four days—until after the video was made public and caused a scandal. What, exactly, were prosecutors thinking? Caroline Lester spoke with Arbery’s mother, a local reporter, lawyers, and a district attorney to understand what happened in those seventy-four days. His case, she finds, highlights a fundamental problem for criminal-justice reform: we may change the laws that govern policing, but those laws have to be vigorously enforced. And district attorneys may have little incentive to do so.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
0:14.4	When we look back at everything that's gone on in 2020, our heads will fill with images, empty city streets, a field hospital set up in Central Park,
0:22.6	and the image of George Floyd's death at the knee of a policeman, which I think will remember
0:27.6	as a turning point in America's reckoning with race.
0:30.6	But just weeks before George Floyd, there was another unwatchable, haunting video,
0:36.6	which might have kindled the fire that soon blazed
0:38.8	up across the country. That video showed a young black man named Ahmaud Arbery, gunned down by
0:45.5	white men. One of those men took the video, and no one was arrested for the crime for
0:51.1	two and a half months. Why? How? On the six-month anniversary of
0:58.1	Ahmaud Arbery's death, producer Caroline Lester takes a very close look at what happened in the
1:03.6	aftermath. The Brunswick News is a daily paper covering Southeast Georgia. Larry Hobbs is a reporter for the paper. He's got the
1:13.7	police beat. I was home, and in this day and age of journalism, and especially in a small
1:19.2	community like this, I picked it up on Facebook. There's a group here that runs
1:23.4	Golden Al-Scanter updates, and somebody's listening to the scanner almost all the time.
1:29.1	And they picked up on the scanner that a person was shot, possibly killed, in Satilla Shores.
1:36.0	I remember that I was lying on the couch and I got this call for my unknown number.
1:41.9	Wanda Cooper Jones is Ahmaud Arbery's mother.
1:44.9	I knew something had happened in Brunswick really bad.
1:48.4	And then I'm just holding the phone waiting for him to tell me which one of the kids is it?
1:54.0	Is it Marcus or is it Amad?
1:56.2	I got in touch with the police PIO.
	...

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