BRUNSWICK — A former Glynn County police investigator told Travis McMichael he was allowed to go home hours after the white man chased down Ahmaud Arbery and shot him dead in the road, a coastal Georgia jury heard Wednesday.
Testimony began in the trial of former District Attorney Jackie Johnson, who is accused of hindering the law enforcement investigation into the Black man’s 2020 murder.
Credit: Terry Dickson/ The Brunswick News
Credit: Terry Dickson/ The Brunswick News
The first witness called by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office was Roderic Nohilly, a Glynn County deputy who previously worked for the county’s police department. He said on the stand that he arrived at the Satilla Shores neighborhood about 30 minutes after Arbery’s killing and saw his body lying in the road.
Nohilly would later interview McMichael at police headquarters before cutting him loose that afternoon.
“You’re going home today, just so you know,” Nohilly told McMichael in a recorded interview nearly three hours after the shooting. “I talked to the other investigators. It is what it is, right? You’re not being charged with anything today.”
Nohilly was also seen in a recording telling McMichael’s father, Greg McMichael, that he needed to get counseling for his son.
“He’s gonna need to talk to somebody.” Nohilly told the elder McMichael, who he knew. “Do you have a pastor or somebody he can talk to? … He’s definitely affected by this.”
Greg McMichael told Nohilly he had already called Johnson, who was his former boss at the local district attorney’s office.
“I mean she may recuse herself and have somebody else look at it,” Greg McMichael said. “That’s the way you do it, you know?”
The McMichaels were convicted of murder in 2021, along with their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, who joined in the chase and filmed Arbery’s deadly shooting. All three were convicted of hate crime charges in a second trial held the following year after federal prosecutors successfully argued the men targeted Arbery because of his race.
The McMichaels initially told police they chased after Arbery because they suspected he was a thief, and that he was killed during a struggle over Travis McMichael’s shotgun. Arbery had been seen on surveillance video inside a vacant home under construction in their neighborhood, but there’s no evidence he ever took anything.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Nohilly said on the stand that he saw a segment of the cellphone video of Arbery’s shooting, but didn’t watch the entire thing. None of the men involved in Arbery’s killing were handcuffed at the police station, he said. Greg McMichael, who worked for the Glynn County Police Department before joining Johnson’s office, was allowed to drive himself to the station for questioning and waited in the lobby.
It wasn’t until the viral cellphone video of Arbery’s killing was leaked online more than 70 days later that the GBI arrested the McMichaels and Bryan and charged them with murder.
Nohilly said Wednesday that he was not the lead investigator on the case and deferred to others in his department.
“I was just following their lead at that point,” he said, noting he never talked to Johnson about the case.
“You don’t have any reason to believe, sitting here today, that Jackie Johnson stopped any arrests, do you?” Johnson’s defense attorney, Jason Clark, asked during cross-examination.
“I don’t have any knowledge of that,” he said.
Johnson’s defense team contends she never hindered the police investigation into Arbery’s killing and that she recused herself after learning the case involved a former employee.
Her attorney, Brian Steel, said Tuesday she never saw the video of Arbery’s killing until it was leaked online in May 2020. Up until then, he said, Johnson had been told Arbery was killed during a burglary gone wrong.
“She said, ‘This is murder! This is not a home invasion. That’s a lie. How are they not arrested?’” Steel said.
Deputy Attorney General John Fowler has painted Johnson’s trial as “a case about victim’s rights” and has accused the former DA of putting the “interest of her former chief investigator ahead of the victim.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Johnson’s indictment alleges she showed “favor and affection” toward Greg McMichael. She is also accused of directing two Glynn County police officers not to arrest Travis McMichael in the aftermath of Arbery’s shooting.
Fowler’s second witness was Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones. She, too, had been told by Glynn County police that her son was killed during a burglary.
Through tears, she recalled getting a call from Glynn County police officer Stephan Lowery about 6:30 p.m. the night her son was killed.
Credit: Terry Dickson/ The Brunswick News
Credit: Terry Dickson/ The Brunswick News
Cooper Jones said she was out of town visiting her mother when her world was turned upside down.
“The officer shared that Ahmaud was committing a burglary,” Cooper Jones said. “He was confronted (by) the homeowner. There was a struggle over the firearm and Ahmaud was shot and killed.”
She said something about the officer’s explanation didn’t sit right with her. But she was too devastated by the loss of her “baby boy.”
“Now I look back, I probably should have been asking questions then,” she said. “But I didn’t know I had reasons to ask questions at all.”
She said she repeatedly called the district attorney’s office and the police department, but couldn’t get any answers about her son’s killing.
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
”Somebody should have called me to let me know what was going on. That would have helped tremendously,” Cooper Jones said. “My family was living in the dark for 73 days without an arrest.”
She would later learn her son hadn’t committed a burglary at all, and “that he was actually killed in the street.”
Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, explained the state changed the way it handles recusals involving Georgia’s DAs and solicitors general in July 2022.
“At the time, a DA or solicitor would recuse and it would go to the AG’s office to assign another prosecutor,” Skandalakis said on the stand. Now, his office is responsible for that.
He noted, during questioning by Steel, that district attorneys also do not decide whether to arrest someone. That responsibility, he said, lies with the police.
”If there’s no arrest, there’s nothing for the prosecutor to do other than to wait for the entire file to be completed and then review that file,” he said.
Skandalakis also testified that Johnson hadn’t mentioned George Barnhill, the neighboring district attorney she had called in to take a look at the case, in her recusal letter to the attorney general. After an initial consultation with police, Barnhill had determined no crime was committed.
If a prosecutor has already made a determination like that in a case, they shouldn’t be appointed to replace a district attorney who’s being recused because of a conflict, Skandalakis testified.
“What if the conflicted district attorney did not know about the determination?” Steel asked on cross-examination.
“There’s nothing illegal about it,” Skandalakis said. “How would she know? There’s nothing to tell.”
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