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After three hours of deliberation, the jury has reached a verdict in the hate crimes trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan.
On Tuesday (February 22), the three men were found guilty in federal court of interference with rights – a hate crime – and attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels also each faced a weapons charge.
Travis and Gregory McMichael, along with their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan were sentenced to life in prison last month after a state jury found the men guilty of murdering Arbery on February 23, 2020.
The men weren't arrested for the killing until two months after when a video of them hunting Arbery down and shooting him at point-blank range surfaced online. Prosecutors argued that the three men targeted Ahmaud because of his race.
During opening statements, Assistant US Attorney Bobbi Bernstein revealed texts Travis McMichael –– who pulled the trigger, killing Arbery –– sent to a friend in which he called Black people, "animals, criminals, monkeys, sub-human savages."
"Zero [N-words] work with me," Travis wrote in the message. "They ruined everything. That's why I love what I do now. Not an [N-word] in sight."
After the death of civil rights leader Julian Bond in 2015, a witness says Gregory McMichael said, "I wish he'd been put in the ground years ago. He's nothing but trouble. Those Blacks are nothing but trouble." McMichael was an investigator with the DA's office when he made the remarks.
Additionally, just four days before William Bryan joined his neighbors in chasing Arbery around a Brunswick neighborhood, prosecutors said he used a racial slur to describe the Black man his daughter was dating at the time.
"She's dating a [N-word] now," Bryan wrote in a text, prosecutors said, noting that Bryan repeatedly called the Black man the N-word in the messages and also described him as a monkey.
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