President Trump on Friday said a video that appears to show the killing of an unarmed black man in Georgia by two armed white men is “very, very disturbing.”
Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was reportedly jogging in a neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, on Feb. 23 when two men allegedly followed him in a truck and confronted him.
“I saw the tape and it’s very, very disturbing, the tape,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.” “I got to see it, it’s very disturbing.”
“I looked at a picture of that young man. He was in a tuxedo … I will say that that looks like a really good young guy,” Trump said. “It’s a very disturbing situation to me and my heart goes out to the parents and the family and the friends, but yet we have to take it, law enforcement is going to look at it.”
Trump said the “good governor” of Georgia, Brian Kemp, will handle the situation. “He is going to do what’s right. It’s a heartbreaking thing. That was very rough, rough stuff.”
“Justice getting done is the thing that solves that [racial] problem. Again, it is in the hands of the governor and I’m sure he’ll do the right thing,” he said.
“I mean, to anybody that watched it, certainly it was a disturbing or troubling video no question about that,” Trump said. “But they have very good law enforcement in the state of Georgia and I’m sure they are going to come up with exactly what happened. It’s a sad thing. Very sad thing. I hate to see that.”
Travis McMichael, 34, and his father, Gregory, 64 — a former police officer — were arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) Thursday night and charged with murdering Arbery.
Arbery, a former football player, was reportedly jogging in the daytime in the Satilla Shores neighborhood when the McMichaels confronted him, according to the GBI.
The 32-second video (WARNING: GRAPHIC) recently posted online — allegedly shot from behind by a friend of the McMichaels — shows a black man jogging down a residential street. In front of him is a pickup truck with two white men. The man veers off the road to go around the truck on the shoulder, and the camera loses sight of all three.
When the camera returns to the scene, the black man is near the front of the truck and a gunshot is heard. The jogger and one of the men are seen struggling over a long gun, a shotgun or a rifle. They move out of the frame again and another gunshot is heard. When they both come back into frame, the long-barreled gun is being held to the jogger’s midsection and a third shot rings out.
Seconds later, the jogger collapsed in the road.
The elder McMichael, a former Glynn County police officer and a former investigator with the local district attorney’s office who retired last May, has said he thought Arbery looked like a robbery suspect in the neighborhood.
Lee Merritt, the attorney for Arbery’s family, appeared on CNN and cited 911 calls from the afternoon of the shooting, when the 911 operator asked one of the McMichaels what Arbery was doing that appeared criminal. “They didn’t give any answer for that, they said, ‘He’s a black man running down our road,'” Merritt said.
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