Ahmaud Arbery's mother files civil rights lawsuit 1 year after his death
![A mural honoring Ahmaud Arbery.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/fRV8LbedMG7K3x8iS4jRZ9-415-80.jpg)
On the anniversary of her son's death, Wanda Cooper, the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the three men accused of killing him, plus police officers and other officials who did not immediately file charges in the case.
Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was shot and killed on Feb. 23, 2020, while jogging through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Gregory McMichael, a former Glynn County police officer and investigator with the Glynn County district attorney's office, and his adult son, Travis McMichael, were charged with murder and aggravated assault.
Police say a third man, William "Roddie" Bryan, was with the McMichaels when they chased down Arbery, and recorded the incident on his phone; he has been charged with felony murder. The McMichaels claimed they thought Arbery was behind recent burglaries in the neighborhood, and they weren't arrested until two months after the shooting, once the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local authorities.
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Cooper's lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. Southern District of Georgia, accuses the defendants of pursuing Arbery because "he was a Black man," arguing they were "motivated to deprive Ahmaud Arbery of equal protection of the law and his rights by bias, animus, [and] discrimination." The lawsuit also alleges that the Glynn County Police Department and local prosecutors were part of a "deliberate effort to cover up Ahmaud's murder."
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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