“Probable cause was clear to our agents pretty quickly.”
“This should have occurred the day it happened,” said one of Arbery’s friends to the AP after the news came down last night. “There’s no way without the video this would have occurred.”
That’s half-right. There’s no way this would have occurred without the video leaking. Remember, local cops and the DA’s office had the footage the whole time. It’s just that they somehow failed to see that the McMichaels were the aggressors in the confrontation until the clip went public and the rest of the world had to politely point it out to them.
In a way, it’s worse than that. The video may have actually gotten the McMichaels off the hook initially. The raw facts of the case are very bad for them: An unarmed man lay dead in the road after the McMichaels, brandishing guns, and a friend went looking for him. That’s alarming and suspicious, worthy of a skeptical investigative eye.
But the now-recused DA looked at the same clip you and I watched and thought, “Oh, I see. Arbery, who was chased down by two vehicles and then confronted by men with firearms, was the aggressor here.”
In a better world he’d be charged with something too.
Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, were arrested on Thursday evening and were booked into the Glynn County Jail.
“Based on our involvement in this case…within 36 hours we secured warrants, that speaks volumes for itself to the probable cause in this case,” said GBI’s Director Vic Reynolds at a press conference on Friday morning…
“I don’t think I’ll ever be in a mental state where I can actually watch the video. I had others that watched it that shared what they saw and that just was enough,” Wanda Cooper-Jones told ABC News in an interview that aired Thursday morning on “Good Morning America.”
The GBI wasn’t brought into the case until Tuesday, when the new DA in charge requested their help. It took them less than two days to find probable cause after local cops couldn’t find any in two months. “Probable cause was clear to our agents pretty quickly,” said the head of the GBI, pointedly. “I’m very comfortable in telling you there’s more than sufficient probable cause in charging felony murder.” Whether they would have moved as nimbly without the public outcry over the video is a separate question. Presumably they wouldn’t have been involved at all.
