Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on Sunday called the shooting death of an unarmed African American jogger a “lynching” and said arrests of two accused men would not have been made if there was not video of the incident.
“It’s heartbreaking that it’s 2020 and this was a lynching of an African American man,” Bottoms said of Ahmaud Arbery’s death on CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
Although Gregory McMichael has claimed Arbery looked like a suspect in a string of recent burglaries, Glynn County Police Lt. Cheri Bashlor told CNN last week just one automobile burglary in the neighborhood was reported when a 9 mm pistol was stolen January 1 from an unlocked truck outside the McMichaels’ home.
CNN has not verified who recorded the video — taken by someone in a vehicle that pulls up behind a pickup truck stopped in the road — but it captured events that match numerous accounts of the shooting.
President Donald Trump on Friday called video of the shooting “very disturbing.”