The former police detective whose actions in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia were defended as a citizen’s arrest was stripped of his law enforcement certification and power to arrest a year before the deadly encounter, according to personnel records acquired by The Washington Post.
Gregory McMichael’s certification was suspended in February 2019 after repeated failures to complete required training, according to documents from the Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office, including a warning in 2014 that McMichael had neglected to finish mandatory firearms and use-of-force courses.
McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34,
were arrested last week and charged with murder and aggravated assault in Arbery’s death, more than two months after the fatal shooting. Arbery’s family says the 25-year-old black man was out for a jog when he was chased by the McMichaels, who are white and were armed.
Gregory McMichael told police they believed Arbery was involved in local burglaries. A video shows a man who is believed to be Arbery entering a house under construction moments before the shooting, though the property owner says nothing was taken.
The case, which reignited national conversations about policing and race after
a video of Arbery’s death went viral, has been passed to
four different prosecutors. Two recused themselves because of past professional connections with the elder McMichael, who worked for the Glynn County Police Department and the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, both of which have jurisdiction over the neighborhood where Arbery was killed.
One of those prosecutors, George E. Barnhill of the Waycross Judicial Circuit, took an unusual step while recusing himself, writing a letter to the local police department arguing that the McMichaels’ actions were lawful under Georgia’s citizen’s arrest and self-defense statutes because they thought Arbery was a burglary suspect.
Person believed to be Ahmaud Arbery seen entering building before shooting
Elizabeth Graddy, an attorney for property owner Larry English, released a video clip believed to show Ahmaud Arbery before he was killed on Feb. 23. (Attorney for Larry English)
Before Barnhill’s recusal, Jackie Johnson, district attorney for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit,
recused herself in February because McMichael had been an investigator in her office from 1995 through 2019.
Two Glynn County commissioners have said that Johnson’s office told police investigators to refrain from arresting the McMichaels in the hours after Arbery was killed, an allegation Johnson has denied.
Gregory McMichael’s personnel documents provide an incomplete account of his employment history with Glynn County, but they indicate that he was stripped of his powers to arrest people on at least two occasions: once beginning in January 2006 — because of an undisclosed infraction the previous year — and again in February 2019, when the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council (POST) issued a suspension order for “failure to maintain training for the year 2018.”
McMichael retired in June, four months after the suspension of his law enforcement certification. He is being held at the Glynn County Detention Center, along with his son, and could not be reached for comment.
His attorneys, Frank and Laura Hogue, did not provide comment on McMichael’s personnel records. But they released a statement Thursday saying there has been “a rush to judgment” about Arbery’s death.
