The story of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery’s murder in southeastern Georgia may well have been just a whisper in the wind without a couple of key points of connection and a reporter’s determination to pursue a tip.
Ahmaud Arbery
By now, almost everyone who follows the news has heard about Arbery being chased while jogging, then cornered, shot and killed by an overzealous father-son team who suspected Arbery of being a burglar.
Richard Fausset, a New York Times correspondent based in Atlanta, broke the story on April 26. The story appeared under the headling “Two weapons, a Chase, a Killing and No Charges.”
It is a story that is telling and troubling — telling in that it evokes memories of lynchings and other extra-judicial killings of unarmed black people in the Deep South and troubling in that such unprovoked killings continue to happen.
Thanks to Fausset’s story, however, this particular killing might not be whitewashed. The story was picked up by other media and caused such an uproar that the case, which a compromised district attorney had written off as justifiable homicide, was re-examined. Now, the killers — Gregory McMichael, a former police officer and retired prosecutor’s investigator, and his son Travis — are in jail, charged with murder.
A grand jury is expected to be impaneled to hear the case when it is again safe (because of the COVID-19 pandemic) to convene a grand jury.
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As I said at the outset, the Arbery story is very troubling, and you can read it on the link above and can learn more about it by listening to Monday’s edition of “The Daily,” a popular New York Times podcast.
My primary interest here today, however, is to lay out how Fausset got onto the story — and how it could have easily slipped away if either Fausset or the person who brought the story to his attention had not taken action.
There were two key steps that led to Fausset pursuing the story.
The first step was recounted in a new Times email feature called The Morning. Dave Leonhardt, who compiles The Morning, said that more than a month after Arbery’s death, an actor and writer named JL Josiah Watts sent an email to a Times food writer named Kim Severson, who is also based in Atlanta. Watts and Severson had met several years ago while Severson was reporting a story.
Watts told Severson about his cousin having been chased, shot and killed by two white men and that neither had been arrested. “This is like something from the ’50s,” Watts wrote. “I’m very angry.”
The second key step in the story was Severson forwarding Watts’ email to Fausset and telling him it sounded like something that should be investigated.
On “The Daily,” Fausset told host Michael Barbaro about getting the email and temporarily setting it aside because he was busy covering the coronavirus.
Fausset said…
Richard Fausset
“I learned about this story in early April. I was up to my eyeballs in coverage of the coronavirus, along with my other colleagues on the national desk. And on April 2, my colleague Kim Severson, the food writer for The Times here in Atlanta and a dear friend of mine, sent me a very brief note, and it said, ‘Look, you are busy. But this one’s looking pretty troubling.’
“She included a link to a story in the Brunswick News, down in Brunswick, Georgia. It looked to be a story of two armed white men who were chasing an unarmed black man by the name of Ahmaud Arbery through their neighborhood and that that chase ended with a confrontation and with the black man being killed…Although the shooting occurred on Feb. 23, here we are in April, and no one had been arrested for it.
“It was very disturbing and it seemed like there were a lot of unanswered questions, and I really didn’t know if I could answer them. I had to set it aside for a while because we had this avalanche of news rolling in. So, 10 or 11 days after getting this initial email from Kim, I started filing a flurry of open records requests.”
After getting several documents — one of which was particularly eye opening — he and his editors decided he would make the 4 1/2 hour drive from Atlanta to Brunswick, on the Atlantic Coast, for a one-day reporting trip. Most Times correspondents are not traveling during the pandemic, but the editors agreed to the trip on the condition that Fausset not spend the night in a hotel.
Fausset describes his reception, and how the story unfolded, on “The Daily.” I hope you will take time to listen; it’s well worth your time.
For the journalistic standpoint, what this boils down to is diligence and good instincts.
If Severson, the food writer, had not passed on the tip…If Fausset had not filed the tip away vowing to come back to it…If he had not made the effort to get those public documents…If his editors had rejected the idea of a nine-hour round trip to a small coastal town…Ahmaud Arbery might have remained just a name on a headstone and a tragic loss to his family and friends.
Whatever happens from here, we can thank Kim Severson, Richard Fausset and New York Times editors for bringing this important story to the nation’s attention.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
One of the things that makes this newsworthy is that it is uncommon and that alone should tell us that the narrative that America is a horribly racist country is false. Are there bigots? Absolutely. There are racists, there are religious bigots, gender based bigot, ethnic bigots, they come in all stripes, but the fact that almost any white on black crime becomes a major story should tell us we’re in the territory of man bites dog stories.
What I’m waiting for is the outrage over the thousands of black on black murders committed each year by largely young black men who have been deprived of traditional rights of passage by misguided government programs that devastated the black family and left young men with out decent role models. In essence, victims, like the Indians before them, of welfare colonialism.
To be sure, I am troubled by what I am hearing about the prosecutorial side in this case, but I also feel that the statement on the NY Times website that your link sent me to is somewhat misleading, that being the one about arrests in the case having only taken place after a video of the confrontation was released “months later.” The passage of just two months’ worth of time hardly justifies “months later.” It reminds me of NPR’s all too frequent use of the word “decades” when they are trying to convince their listeners that a lot of time has gone by between Point A and Point B in history. Hey, how about just doing your math, NPR, and telling your listeners exactly how much time in years has elapsed between one happening and the next? But I digress. Yes, it’s pretty sad when someone who is recusing themselves from a case tells their replacement not to file any charges against the suspects. This Deep South crime sure brings to mind that old song from the ’70s or ’80s “That’s the Night That the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” or something like that. In any event, good reporting here, Jim, and good reporting by the reporter who went after the story.