A US prosecutor says Ahmaud Arbery was shot dead by three white men “not because he was a threat.”
Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski made the comments during her closing argument in the case of the killing of the African American.
“They shot and killed him. Not because he was a threat to them. But because he wouldn’t stop and talk to them,” Dunikoski said, according to The Associated Press.
She further suggested that the attack by Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and William Bryan had been premeditated.
“All three of these defendants made assumptions about what was going on that day,” she said. “And they made their decision to attack Ahmaud Arbery in their driveways, because he was a Black man running down the street.”
Arbery, 25, was out for a jog in the US state of Georgia in February last year, when he was chased down by a truck and fatally shot.
Dunikoski also referred to a racial slur used by Travis McMichael after fatally shooting the Black man.
“So what’s going on here? You know what’s really going on here… Mr. Arbery was under attack,” she said. They were going to make him — absolutely make him — stop. ‘We’re going to point a shotgun at you! That will make him stop.’”
The prosecutor further asserted that there was no evidence of any robbery by Arbery as has been claimed by the defendants.
“Is he this giant burglar who just happened to never show up with a bag, or any means to steal anything, all right, or is he a looky-loo?” she said.
The Arbery case has been one of the many, fueling mass protests across the United States against police abuse of the Black community.
Civil rights advocates have denounced Arbery’s tragic death as another instance of white perpetrators killing a Black man and trying to go unpunished.