A jury watched video Wednesday of a police investigator telling the man who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery that he wasn't being arrested soon after after he, his father and a neighbor had chased and killed the Black man after spotting him running in their neighborhood.
“You're going home today,” Glynn County police investigator Roderic Nohilly told Travis McMichael roughly two hours after the shooting on Feb. 23, 2020.
The video was played as Nohilly testified as the first witness in the criminal misconduct trial of former District Attorney Jackie Johnson, coastal Glynn County's top prosecutor when Arbery was killed nearly five years ago.
No one was arrested in Arbery's killing until more than two months later, when graphic cellphone video of the shooting leaked online and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local police.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr's office is prosecuting Johnson, who is accused of meddling in the police investigation. The shooter's father, Greg McMichael, had worked for Johnson as an investigator and left a voicemail on her cellphone asking for help an hour after the killing.
The McMichaels told police that they chased Arbery suspecting he was a thief, and that Travis McMichael shot him in self-defense.
Then cellphone video of the shooting leaked online in May 2020. Amid the resulting outcry, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local police. The McMichaels and a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, were soon arrested and later convicted of murder as well as federal hate crimes.
Johnson insists she did nothing wrong and immediately recused her office from handling the shooting because Greg McMichael was a former employee. She reached out to a neighboring district attorney, George E. Barnhill, who advised police the day after that the shooting appeared to be justified.
Prosecutors say Johnson violated her oath of office, a felony, by recommending that the attorney general appoint Barnhill to oversee the investigation into Arbery's death without disclosing that Barnhill had already concluded the shooting wasn't a crime. Her defense team says she made no such recommendation.
Nohilly, the first witness called by prosecutors to the stand in the case, testified Wednesday that the McMichaels didn't appear worried that they might be arrested in the hours after the shooting.
Johnson's defense attorneys seized the opportunity to play the jury video clips that bolstered their argument that police had decided not to arrest the McMichaels and Bryan before any prosecutors got involved.
“I’ve talked to the other investigators,” Nohilly tells Travis McMichael in their recorded interview. "It is what it is, all right? You’re not being charged with anything.”
Nohilly testified that he hadn't spoken with Johnson about the shooting. But he also insisted police were still gathering evidence about Arbery's killing and hadn't concluded Travis McMichael and the others wouldn't be charged eventually.
“I was trying to maintain rapport with him, because the investigation was still right at the beginning,” Nohilly said. “All I had at that point was his statement. I didn’t have the facts.”
A few hours after police interviewed the McMichaels and sent them home, a Glynn County investigator called Arbery's mother to tell her that her 25-year-old son was dead.
Wanda Cooper-Jones cried on the witness stand Wednesday as she recalled being at her mother's house, a three-hour driver from her home in Brunswick, when her cellphone rang. She said she knew it was bad news when the officer told her that he was standing outside her front door.
“The officer shared that Ahmaud was committing a burglary,” Cooper-Jones testified. "He was confronted by the homeowner, there was a struggle over the firearm and Ahmaud was shot and killed.”
The testimony Wednesday suggests that Greg McMichael's account that he and his son had seen security camera videos of Arbery entering a neighboring home under construction and suspected him of stealing initially had a decisive influence on authorities.
Much like Cooper-Jones, Nohilly said he was first told by fellow officers that Arbery was shot while committing a “home invasion.”
Cooper-Jones said police and prosecutors shared little information about her son's killing until after Barnhill stepped aside from the case in April 2020.
Under questioning by one of Johnson's lawyers, Cooper-Jones acknowledged that Johnson at one point met with her slain son's father.
When Cooper-Jones said that she never got such a meeting, defense attorney Keith Adams asked if she had met Johnson outside the courthouse soon after the shooting video became public.
"You were driving by and you called to her, and she came over and gave you a hug,” Adams said.
Cooper-Jones replied: “I don’t think we hugged."
