The hate crime trial against three men who were already convicted for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery began on Monday.
The three men were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in November for chasing down and shooting Arbery who was on a run in a Georgia neighborhood in 2020. They all pleaded not guilty to hate crime charges of targeting Arbery because he was black.
The jury, which is made up of eight white, three black and one Hispanic juror was presented with evidence of the men using racial slurs to describe black people as far back as 2019.
The FBI’s investigation found messages on the phone of Travis McMichael, 35, who shot Arbery. He asked a friend where they “ended up last night,” to which the friend responded, “n—-s everywhere.”
“Damn. They ruin everything,” McMichael replied. “That’s why I love what I do. Not a n—r [sic] in sight.”
Ha ha ha,” the friend, H.B. said. “What do you do?”
McMichael replied that he was a “government contractor driving boats for Navy & Marines. Love it. Zero n—-s work with me.”
The list of offenses continued, proving that McMichael used derogatory language to describe black people regularly. He even went so far as to refer to black people as “subhuman savages” in a Facebook post.
When a friend mentioned an incident of a firework blowing up in a black person’s face, McMichael responded that he wished the firework blew “that n—-r’s head off.” He also wrote that he would “kill that f—-g n—-r.”
William “Roddie” Bryan, who filmed the shooting, also had a history of using racist verbiage and calling black people “n—-rs.”
The trial is expected to take around seven to 12 days.
