`Five-thousand-pound lethal weapon`: Court hears how truck was used to try to hit Ahmaud Arbery By Reuters

By Jonathan Allen and Rich McKay

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (Reuters) -One of the three men charged with murdering Ahmaud Arbery tried to hit the man repeatedly with his pickup truck as he attempted to force the Black jogger to stop during a chase through a mostly white neighborhood in southern Georgia, jurors heard on Friday.

Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis McMichael, 35, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, have pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, aggravated assault and false imprisonment for shooting Arbery dead in February 2020. They said they thought Arbery might have been fleeing a crime and were trying to detain him.

Bryan tried to hit Arbery four times with his truck as he attempted to force him off the road into a ditch in a suburb just outside the coastal city of Brunswick (NYSE:), prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said in her opening statement.

At one point, Bryan got so close that they found Arbery’s handprint and fibers from his white T-shirt on the truck, she told the court. Dunikoski repeatedly called the truck a “five-thousand-pound lethal weapon” used to assault Arbery.

“Ladies and gentleman, at this point in time, Mr. Arbery is under attack by all three of these men,” she said.

Dunikoski said the defendants had wrongly assumed the worst about Arbery, thinking he was fleeing from a crime.

“A very wise person once said, ‘Don’t assume the worst of another person’s intentions,” she said.

The men’s defense lawyers saying they were justified in trying to detain Arbery under a citizen’s arrest law that was codified during the Civil War. That law was later repealed amid outrage over the killing, which spurred nationwide protests after cellphone video emerged more than two months later.

“All three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions,” Dunikoski said as she showed videos of Arbery’s final minutes. “They made decisions in their driveways based on those assumptions that took a young man’s life, and that is why we are here.”

She told the mostly white jury in Glynn County Superior Court they would see Arbery’s Nike (NYSE:) running shoes, their tread almost entirely worn away because he was such an avid runner.

A few minutes before he was killed, he was running “really fast” past the McMichaels’ house, where the elder McMichael was out in his driveway fixing cushions for his boat, Dunikoski said.

McMichael ran inside his house to get his handgun while hailing his son, who grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun. The two got in a pickup truck and began chasing Arbery, trying to ask him what he was running from.

“I assumed something was up,” Travis McMichael later told police when explaining why he chased Arbery, Dunikoski told the jury.

Bryan soon saw the chase from his own driveway and got in his own pickup truck to join in.

Dunikoski said the defendants had deadly intent, pointing to something the elder McMichael told police he shouted at Arbery: “Stop or I’ll blow your fucking head off!” He also told police they had trapped Arbery “like a rat.”

Arbery’s father left the courtroom before Bryan’s cellphone video of the shooting was played, which shows the younger McMichael pointing his shotgun at Arbery, who runs towards it before the fatal shots are fired. Arbery’s mother sobbed into a man’s shoulder in the courtroom gallery.

The defendants’ lawyers say the younger McMichael opened fire in self-defense.