How a local radio station and newspaper, and The New York Times, enabled prosecution of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery

The convictions of three white men for last year's murder of Ahmad Arbery, a Black man in coastal Georgia, probably wouldn't have happened unless a lawyer for defendant Greg McMichael, trying to quash rumors about the killing, hadn't taken a cellphone video of it to local radio station WGIG.

"Instead, the video published online by the radio station surfaced questions nationwide about racial profiling and the lack of criminal charges," Meryl Kornfield reports for The Washington Post, recounting early reporting by the Brunswick News, Georgia Public Broadcasting and WSB-TV. 

University of Maryland sociology professor Rashawn Ray told Kornfield, "I think part of what the McMichaels were trying to leverage was what their defense attorneys were trying to allege: That the mere presence, the mere physical body of Ahmaud Arbery as a Black person just running through the street, should pose a big enough threat to justify their use of force."

Brunswick News reporter Larry Hobbs told Kornfield that he had doubts about the incident from the start, and "said police wouldn’t answer his questions or even tell him Arbery’s name, which he discovered by calling the coroner. He published four stories before he obtained the police report, based almost entirely on an interview with Greg McMichael, who said he told his son to grab his gun when he saw a Black man running. . . . Prosecutors were also not forthcoming."

"Jackie Johnson, the Brunswick district attorney who was later indicted over her handling of the investigation and was voted out of office," gave the case to Waycross DA George Barnhill, who justified the shooting as a lawful "citizen’s arrest" but told Hobbs he was still investigating, Kornfield reports.

“The main thing I did was just not let go of it,” Hobbs said. “I didn’t do any great writing. I didn’t do any investigative reporting. I’m a small-town newspaper. We don’t really have time to invest. I come in every day and there’s an empty newspaper I have to do my part to fill up.”

Kornfield writes, "The New York Times reported reported on the shooting, bringing national exposure and emerging details of the video that would later be released. Still, Hobbs has been credited for his dogged reporting, as he stayed on the case, covering the trial every day until he wrote Wednesday’s story of the conviction."

Hobbs told Kornfield, “In times of reckoning, we’ve come up wanting so many times, especially people from my demographic. The South got it right today.”