“Over the last few months, I have repeatedly wondered what happened to Ahmaud in the last minutes of his life,” she said. “I often avoided video, but today I decided it was time to watch the video.”
The graphic video was footage of Glynn County Police officer William Duggan testifying on Friday that he responded to the scene after finishing work off duty because he was nearby.
Duggan testified that he found a black man lying on the sidewalk when he arrived at the scene and several other people nearby, whom he later identified as defendants. In the footage, Duggan approaches Arbery, who lies motionless face down on the street.
The footage shows Duggan turning Arbery on his back, his shirt and shorts saturated with blood.
“There’s nothing I can do for this gentleman,” Duggan is heard before taking off his gloves and wiping his hands with a towel. Shortly afterwards, ambulances and firefighters arrived, the video shows.
During the cross-examination of Jason Sheffield, Travis McMichael’s attorney, a police officer confirmed that Arbery’s eyes also did not move when he arrived at the scene.
“Today has been a very difficult day for the family,” Lee Merritt, Arbery’s family lawyer, told a news conference in court. “Today we saw a very vivid video, we saw some very violent scenes.”
The lawyer added that “the hardest and most exciting part” is that the defenders “did everything they could to put Ahmaud Arbery’s victim before trial. To criminalize his very existence.”
But in her recital, prosecutor Linda Dunikoski had previously claimed that defendants tracked down Arbery, squeezed him into a corner and fatally shot him without evidence or knowledge that he had done anything wrong.
“All three defendants did everything they did based on the allegations,” she said. “Not on facts, not on evidence – on assumptions. And on their driveways, they made decisions based on those assumptions that took the young man’s life.”
CNN’s Alta Spells and Devon M. Sayers contributed to this report.
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