He added: “I think inactive was a fair summary.” “It was still open but not getting much traction,” Lowrey said. But Lowrey said he hadn’t closed the case when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took it over in May. Glynn County police made no arrests in Arbery’s shooting. “No, that wasn’t the way I interpreted it at the time,” said Lowrey, who agreed that local police considered Bryan a witness to the shooting. Might have took him out and not get him shot.”īryan’s attorney, Kevin Gough, asked the investigator if he thought Bryan committed aggravated assault or any other “serious violent felony” with his truck. “I didn’t hit him,” Bryan said, according to an interview transcript Lowrey read in court. Bryan said Arbery had tried to open the door, but he denied striking the running man. He said police found Arbery’s fingerprints by the truck’s driver-side door, next to a dent in the body. He told police he didn’t recognize any of them, or know what prompted the chase, but still joined in after calling out: “Y’all got him?”īryan said he used his truck several times to cut off Arbery and edge him off the road, testified Stephan Lowrey, the lead Glynn County police investigator on the case. Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski has described him as an “avid runner” who lived about 2 miles from the Satilla Shores neighborhood where he was slain.īryan, 52, was on his front porch when he saw Arbery run past with the McMichaels’ truck close behind. Prosecutors say the McMichaels and Bryan chased Arbery for five minutes before he was shot in the street after running past the McMichaels’ idling truck. I mean this guy was, he was in good shape.” “We had chased him around the neighborhood a bit, but he wasn’t winded at all. “He had an opportunity to flee further, you know,” Greg McMichael told Nohilly. Greg McMichael told police Travis McMichael, 35, fired in self-defense as Arbery attacked with his fists and tried to grab his son’s shotgun. “I think he was wanting to flee and he realized that something, you know, he was not going to get away.”ĭefense attorneys say the McMichaels and Bryan were legally justified in chasing and trying to detain Arbery because they reasonably thought he was a burglar.
“He was trapped like a rat,” Greg McMichael said, according to a transcript of their recorded interview Nohilly read in court. Greg McMichael said they gave chase to try to stop Arbery from escaping the subdivision. The father told Nohilly he recognized Arbery because he had been recorded by security cameras a few times inside a neighboring home under construction. He said Greg McMichael, 65, told him Arbery “wasn’t out for no Sunday jog. Roderic Nohilly told the jury Wednesday he spoke with Greg McMichael at police headquarters a few hours after the shooting.