Police officer tells court it wasn’t ‘safe’ to give medical aid to Ahmaud Arbery as he lay dying
‘Without having any other police units to have my back, there was no way I could switch to do anything medical and still watch after my own safety’
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The first officer to find Ahmaud Arbery has said that he didn’t try to give medical aid to the 25-year-old Black man as he lay dying after being shot because it wouldn’t have been “safe”.
Three white men are on trial for the killing, including for murder and other crimes, after Mr Arbery was pursued and shot when he was jogging in a neighbourhood outside of Brunswick on the Georgia coast on 23 February 2020.
Several jurors were visibly uncomfortable when Glynn County police Sergeant Sheila Ramos showed gruesome images she took after the killing.
Ricky Minshew was a Glynn County police patrol officer at the time. He testified that he arrived at the scene about a minute after the sounds of gunfire were heard. Mr Arbery was on the ground, face down, in a growing pool of blood. He said he heard a sound from Mr Arbery, describing it as a “death rattle,” according to CBS News.
“Without having any other police units to have my back, there was no way I could switch to do anything medical and still watch after my own safety,” Minshew said.
Greg and Travis McMichael, a father and son, grabbed firearms and jumped in their pickup truck when they saw Mr Arbery jogging. Neighbour William “Roddie” Bryan joined, using his phone to film Travis McMichael shooting Mr Arbery.
The first arrests came after two months when the video leaked, leading to national outrage. Local police had to hand over the case to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Both of the McMichaels, as well as Mr Bryan, were then charged.
Defence lawyers have argued that the three men were right to pursue Mr Arbery because he had been recorded by surveillance cameras in a home under construction and that they believed he was a burglar.
The defence team have also claimed that Travis McMichael fired in self-defence when he was allegedly attacked by Mr Arbery.
Mr Arbery’s mother told reporters that she was confused as to why more aid wasn’t given to her son.
“He had a guy lying in the road who was covered in blood,” Wanda Cooper-Jones said. “I can’t understand why he didn’t render aid.”
William Duggan was the second officer to respond to the scene. Body camera footage was shown of the officer rolling Mr Arbery over and applying pressure to his chest.
“I had pressure on, but there was nothing I could do,” Mr Duggan told fellow first responders in the video, adding that Mr Arbery died after around two minutes.
On the panel of 12 jurors, one is Black.
Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley said that “intentional discrimination” by the defence team affected the selection of the jury, but that Georgia law impeded his ability to step in.
Last week, Ms Cooper-Jones cried in the courtroom as she watched the video of her son’s death for the first time.
“I decided it was time to see the video to heal my curiosities,” she said on Friday. “It’s very heartbreaking but I’ve gotten past that part.”
“All three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions — not on fact, not on evidence, on assumptions,” prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said on Friday. “They make decisions in their driveways based on those assumptions that took a young man’s life.”