Travis McMichael was convicted of the malice murder of Ahmaud Arbery, who died on February 23, 2020, in Satilla Shores, an unincorporated neighborhood just outside Brunswick, in coastal Glynn County, Georgia. For more than ten weeks no one was arrested. When the state finally acted, a Glynn County jury found him guilty on all nine counts of his indictment, and a federal jury in Brunswick later convicted him, his father, Gregory McMichael, and a neighbor, William Bryan, of interfering with Arbery's civil rights because of his race and of attempted kidnapping. He is serving life without parole from the state court and life plus ten years from the federal court. His federal convictions are final. His state convictions still wait on a ruling on motions for a new trial that were argued in October 2024.
The case turned on two questions that took years to settle in court. The first was why three white men had decided that a young Black man passing through their neighborhood was a criminal to be stopped. The second was why the people charged with enforcing the law had not acted on what they knew for more than two months.
Ahmaud Arbery grew up in Brunswick, the youngest of three children. Family and friends called him "Maud" or "Quez." He played football from early childhood, first in flag and pee-wee leagues and then at Brunswick High School, where he grew about six inches after his freshman year and became a starting outside linebacker. Teammates voted him the most improved player. In his senior season he made 77 tackles and wore No. 21 in tribute to a player he admired. He graduated with the class of 2012. No college offered him a football scholarship, and he spent about a year and a half at a technical college in Americus, Georgia, before coming back to Brunswick. He told people he meant to become an electrician, as several of his uncles were, and at the state trial prosecutors told the jury he had enrolled in a technical program to study for that trade.
Friends remembered a wide smile, a natural leader on the field and a young man who never backed away from contact. He followed basketball closely enough to study one star's statistics. The men who later forced the case back into the open were largely his old football family: a cousin who had played beside him, his best friend, and an assistant coach from Brunswick High.
The Eleventh Circuit, reviewing the federal trial evidence in 2025, set out the court's account of that Sunday afternoon in plain terms. Arbery, who was Black, passed through Satilla Shores, a neighborhood with no gate. Over the preceding four months he had been recorded several times walking around a property under construction there, and he stopped at it again that day. A neighbor who saw him called the police non-emergency line. Arbery moved on, and Gregory McMichael, a retired law enforcement officer who lived in the neighborhood with his son Travis, recognized him from footage of the construction site he had been shown. The father called to his son, and the two set out after Arbery. Bryan, a neighbor who did not know Arbery or why he was being followed, joined them on his own instinct that Arbery had done something wrong.
What followed lasted only minutes and ended with Travis McMichael killing Arbery on a public road in Satilla Shores. Bryan recorded the final seconds.
The court was precise about what the evidence did not show. Arbery's visits to the property under construction were not criminal trespass under Georgia law, because he had never been told to leave or given notice that entry was forbidden. Nothing he did there disturbed anything, and the evidence linked him to none of the thefts that neighbors had been discussing online. The same surveillance cameras had recorded a white man and woman walking through the same unfinished building, and at the time of Arbery's death the police were still trying to identify them.
Officers arrived within minutes. Travis McMichael, his father and Bryan spoke freely, telling them they had suspected Arbery of a crime, that he would not stop and that Travis had acted after Arbery lunged at him. No one was arrested. That afternoon all three gave similar interviews at the police station, and all three were allowed to leave.
The case then passed from one prosecutor to the next. Gregory McMichael had worked for years as an investigator in the office of the district attorney for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, retiring in 2019, and on February 27, 2020, that district attorney recused her office. The case went to the district attorney of the Waycross Judicial Circuit, who had already given police his view that the killing was justified and who cited Georgia's citizen's arrest law to support it. In early April, after Arbery's family asked him to step aside because his son worked in the Brunswick prosecutor's office, where Gregory McMichael had also worked, he recused himself as well. On April 13, 2020, the state attorney general's office assigned the case to the district attorney of the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.
Arbery's friends were not waiting. On April 3 a cousin of the assistant coach led an online livestream calling for a real investigation, and the next day Arbery's best friend started a Facebook page under the slogan "I Run With Maud." A cousin contacted a reporter he knew at a national newspaper, which published a detailed account of the case on April 26. Former Brunswick teammates who had gone on to play in the National Football League spread the campaign, and a coalition of professional players wrote a letter, signed by nearly a hundred athletes, asking for a federal investigation.
On May 5, 2020, the third prosecutor announced that he would ask a grand jury to consider charges, a step that pandemic court closures would have delayed until mid-June at the earliest. Hours later Bryan's recording surfaced online. Protests began in Brunswick, and that evening the Glynn County police asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for help.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation moved quickly. On May 6 its agents went through the files and concluded that there was probable cause to arrest both McMichaels. On May 7, 2020, the bureau arrested Travis McMichael and his father and charged each with murder and aggravated assault. The next day the bureau's director told reporters there was sufficient probable cause for felony murder and that further arrests were possible. A judge denied bond to both men at their first court appearance.
The state's handling of the case was itself now under scrutiny. On May 10 the attorney general asked the U.S. Department of Justice to look into the killing. On May 11, when the third district attorney stepped aside, the attorney general appointed the district attorney of Cobb County, in metropolitan Atlanta, to prosecute. On May 12 he asked the bureau to examine how the Brunswick and Waycross prosecutors' offices had dealt with the case. On May 21 the bureau arrested Bryan and charged him with felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. Five days later the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the FBI and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia announced that they were weighing federal hate-crime charges.
At a preliminary hearing on June 4, 2020, the lead state agent laid out the evidence, and on June 24 a Glynn County grand jury indicted all three men on nine counts, among them malice murder. In November 2020 the trial judge again denied bond to both McMichaels and explained the decision in a written ruling the following month. That same November, Glynn County voters turned the Brunswick district attorney out of office, and the Cobb County district attorney lost her own election. Her successor kept the case, and a senior prosecutor from the Cobb County office tried it.
On April 28, 2021, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Georgia returned a second indictment. Each of the three men was charged with one count of interference with rights under 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2)(B) and one count of attempted kidnapping under 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1). The McMichaels were each charged with a further count under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c), with an added allegation against Travis McMichael alone. The indictment alleged that the men used force and threats of force to intimidate and interfere with Arbery's right to use a public road because of his race, that the interference resulted in his death, and that they tried to seize and confine him. The FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation carried out the federal investigation. All three pleaded not guilty in May 2021.
The federal charges filled a gap in state law. Georgia had no hate-crime statute when Arbery died, and the one the legislature passed later in 2020 did not reach a killing that came before it.
Four months after the federal indictment, the state's own inquiry produced a result. On September 2, 2021, a Glynn County grand jury indicted the former Brunswick district attorney on one felony count of violation of oath of a public officer and one misdemeanor count of obstruction of a police officer. The indictment alleged that she had shown favor to Gregory McMichael and had directed officers not to arrest Travis McMichael. She denied wrongdoing. When her case was finally tried, in February 2025, the trial judge acquitted her of the obstruction count on February 3 after the state rested, and on February 5 dismissed the oath count on the ground that the indictment was fatally flawed. No court found that she had committed either offense.
Jury selection began in Glynn County Superior Court on October 18, 2021, from a pool of a thousand summoned residents. Twelve jurors were seated on November 3, eleven white and one Black, and opening statements began on November 5.
The state's case did not rest on race. The prosecution told the jury there was no evidence that Arbery had committed any crime in Satilla Shores, that the man who began the pursuit had quickly changed his account of why he suspected Arbery, and that the three men had no lawful basis to stop him. The defense argued that the McMichaels had been attempting a legal citizen's arrest of a man they believed to be a burglar, and that Travis McMichael had acted in self-defense. He was the only one of the three to testify. On direct examination he called the encounter a "life-or-death situation." Under cross-examination he agreed that Arbery had not spoken to him or threatened him before the confrontation began.
The jury deliberated for about ten hours over two days. On the afternoon of November 24, 2021, the day before Thanksgiving, it returned its verdicts. Travis McMichael was found guilty on every count: malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. His father was acquitted of malice murder and convicted on the other eight counts. Bryan was acquitted of malice murder, one count of felony murder and one count of aggravated assault, and convicted on the remaining six.
Murder carries a mandatory life sentence in Georgia unless the state seeks the death penalty, which it did not. The only real question at sentencing was parole. On January 7, 2022, the state asked for life without parole for both McMichaels and life with the possibility of parole for Bryan, and the court imposed exactly that. Travis McMichael and his father each received life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 20 years. Bryan received life with the possibility of parole after at least 30 years. Travis McMichael's lawyers conceded at the hearing that the decisions to arm himself and pursue Arbery had been reckless, while maintaining that he acted only in self-defense. Defense lawyers announced that they would appeal.
Before the federal trial, Justice Department prosecutors and lawyers for both McMichaels reached plea agreements. Under them, the father and son would have pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime, admitted a racist motive, given up their right to appeal the federal sentence, and received 30-year federal terms, with a request that they serve their time in federal rather than Georgia custody. Arbery's parents objected, arguing that federal prison conditions would be less harsh than state ones.
On January 31, 2022, the federal judge refused to accept the agreements, explaining that they would have locked her into a specific sentence. She gave the men time to decide whether to plead without the agreement or go to trial. On February 4 Travis McMichael stood before her at a short hearing and said, "I withdraw the plea." His father had already backed away the night before.
Jury selection began on February 7, 2022, from a pool the court had widened to 43 Georgia counties. To prove interference with rights under Section 245, the government had to show that each defendant acted because of Arbery's race and because he was using a facility provided or administered by a state or one of its subdivisions, here the public roads of Satilla Shores. The race element shaped the whole trial. The government's case relied on private messages and social media posts in which each man had used racial slurs and expressed contempt for Black people, and on posts expressing approval of vigilante justice. A magistrate judge had ruled before trial that the material was plainly relevant to motive, and no defendant challenged its admission on appeal.
The roads were a narrower fight. A manager from the Glynn County Department of Public Works testified that the Satilla Shores roads appeared on the county's list of public roads, that the county answered residents' service requests for them and budgeted public money to pave them, and that it did none of those things for private roads. The county had declined formal title to the roads in 1958, but the official told the jury he had no doubt that the county maintained them.
The jury deliberated for about four hours. On February 22, 2022, it convicted all three men of interference with rights and attempted kidnapping, and convicted both McMichaels on the Section 924(c) count. At sentencing on August 8, 2022, in Brunswick, the court sentenced Travis McMichael to life in prison plus ten years, his father to life plus seven years and Bryan to 35 years, with each man's attempted kidnapping term of 20 years running concurrently. The court ordered the federal sentences to run concurrently with the state ones, and because the state had prosecuted first, the men would serve their time in Georgia custody. Travis McMichael declined to address the court. Through his lawyer he asked to be sent to a federal prison, saying he would not be safe in a Georgia one. The judge said she had no authority to order the state to surrender him to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and would not be inclined to do so if she had.
Travis McMichael and his father filed notice of appeal in March 2022. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit heard argument in Atlanta on March 27, 2024. Travis McMichael's lawyer did not dispute the jury's finding that he acted because of Arbery's race. She argued instead that the government had not proved the Satilla Shores roads were public, relying on the county's 1958 refusal of title, and that the attempted kidnapping count failed because the government had not proved that the men sought a ransom or other benefit or used an instrumentality of interstate commerce. The government answered that the county maintained the roads, that the benefit the men sought was the satisfaction of their own vigilante desires, and that other appeals courts had treated any vehicle used in a kidnapping as an instrumentality of interstate commerce.
The panel ruled on November 14, 2025, and affirmed every conviction. On the race element, raised only by the father and Bryan, it held that the evidence of long-standing prejudice was sufficient for the jury to find that race was a but-for cause of what each man did. On the roads, it held that Section 245 does not require a state or county to hold formal title to a facility. A facility the county maintains in a condition suitable for public use is one it "provides or administers," and the evidence that Glynn County did exactly that for the Satilla Shores roads was enough. It rejected a hearsay objection Travis McMichael raised to a neighborhood social media post about the roads, finding no effect on the outcome. On the kidnapping count, it declined to consider the benefit argument as Travis McMichael had presented it, since he had only adopted his co-defendants' briefing. It then held that automobiles are, in themselves, instrumentalities of interstate commerce, so that the government did not have to show interstate travel, and that any error in admitting a manufacturing record with a misdated certificate was harmless.
The decision was not unanimous on that last point. The third judge, a district judge sitting by designation, joined the rest of the opinion but dissented on the kidnapping ruling. In her view, treating every automobile as an instrumentality of interstate commerce stretched federal jurisdiction too far and raised constitutional concerns about the balance between state and federal prosecution, where the men had driven only on local roads in a residential neighborhood. She would have reversed the attempted kidnapping convictions. The interference with rights convictions were upheld by all three judges.
The Eleventh Circuit denied rehearing on February 5, 2026. Travis McMichael then petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States, filing on May 5, 2026. After three extensions, the solicitor general filed the government's brief in opposition on September 11. The petition went to the justices' conference of October 16, and on October 19, 2026, the Court denied it. His federal convictions and sentence are final.
The state convictions took a separate path. In Georgia a defendant's appeal of a murder conviction waits until the trial court rules on a motion for a new trial, and on October 24, 2024, all three men returned to Glynn County Superior Court to argue theirs before the judge who had presided at the trial.
Travis McMichael's lawyer argued that the verdict had been tainted by outside influences and extraneous prejudicial information, and that the jury's only Black member had concealed a bias in favor of the Arbery family during jury selection. The claim rested on an interview the juror had given a defense investigator in June 2022 and on his having bought food near a rally for Arbery outside the courthouse. Questioned on the stand, the juror said he had not discussed the case or broken any rule and denied any bias. "I felt sorry for the family," he testified. "After court started, I felt sorry for both sides." Bryan's lawyer argued that his trial counsel had been ineffective, and the defense also challenged the trial judge's refusal to admit evidence about Arbery's past conduct, which had been excluded before trial because none of the men knew him. The judge did not rule from the bench and gave the parties about a month to file written briefs. One of the defense lawyers said afterward that he expected to lose and was building a record for a later appeal.
As of November 2026, the court had not ruled on those motions. Until the trial court decides them and any appeal to the Supreme Court of Georgia runs its course, the state convictions are not final.
Travis McMichael is serving his sentences in the Georgia state prison system. His father and Bryan are held in other Georgia prisons. Because the state and federal terms run together and the state term is life without parole, the federal appeal could never have brought his release, and its failure leaves him with two life sentences from two sovereigns. The only proceeding still open is the motion for a new trial in Glynn County.
Two Georgia laws framed the state case. The first was the citizen's arrest statute, enacted in 1863, which broadly allowed private people to detain someone suspected of a crime and which the second prosecutor had cited when he concluded the killing was justified. At trial the McMichaels relied on it, and the jury rejected the defense. On May 10, 2021, the governor signed House Bill 479, which repealed the 1863 law. Bystanders and witnesses generally lost any right to detain a person, deadly force to detain someone became lawful only in self-defense, in defense of a home or to prevent a forcible felony, and limited powers remained for store employees, licensed security guards and private detectives. Georgia's stand-your-ground law was left in place.
The second was the murder statute. Georgia law makes life imprisonment mandatory for murder unless the state seeks death, and gives the trial judge the choice between life with and without parole. That is why the state sentencing hearing turned on parole alone.
The federal prosecution rested on Section 245 of Title 18, a civil rights statute that reaches anyone who by force or threat of force willfully injures, intimidates or interferes with a person because of race, color, religion or national origin and because that person is using a facility provided or administered by a state or its subdivisions. The Eleventh Circuit read "because of" to require but-for causation, a reading neither side contested, and the jury was instructed the same way.
No court has disturbed any verdict against Travis McMichael. The disputes that remain are legal ones. In the state case, his motion for a new trial claims that a juror concealed a bias and that outside information reached the jury; the juror denied it under oath, and the court had not ruled as of November 2026. In the federal case, one member of the appeals panel would have reversed the attempted kidnapping conviction on jurisdictional grounds, but the majority's ruling stands and the Supreme Court declined to review it. The separate charges against the former Brunswick district attorney ended in an acquittal on one count and a dismissal on the other, and no court found that she obstructed the investigation.
February 23, 2020: Ahmaud Arbery is killed in Satilla Shores, outside Brunswick, Georgia; no arrests are made.
February 27, 2020: The Brunswick Judicial Circuit district attorney recuses her office.
Early April 2020: The Waycross Judicial Circuit district attorney recuses himself.
April 13, 2020: The case goes to the Atlantic Judicial Circuit district attorney.
May 5, 2020: Bryan's recording surfaces; the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is asked to take over.
May 7, 2020: Travis and Gregory McMichael are arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault.
May 11, 2020: The Cobb County district attorney is appointed to prosecute.
May 21, 2020: William Bryan is arrested.
June 24, 2020: A Glynn County grand jury indicts all three men on nine counts.
April 28, 2021: A federal grand jury indicts all three men.
May 10, 2021: Georgia repeals its 1863 citizen's arrest law.
September 2, 2021: The former Brunswick district attorney is indicted.
October 18, 2021: Jury selection begins in the state trial.
November 24, 2021: Travis McMichael is convicted on all nine state counts.
January 7, 2022: He is sentenced to life without parole plus 20 years.
January 31, 2022: The federal judge rejects the plea agreements.
February 4, 2022: He withdraws his guilty plea.
February 22, 2022: The federal jury convicts all three men.
August 8, 2022: He is sentenced to life plus ten years on the federal counts.
March 27, 2024: The Eleventh Circuit hears argument.
October 24, 2024: Motions for a new trial are argued in Glynn County Superior Court.
February 3 and 5, 2025: The former district attorney is acquitted on one count and the other is dismissed.
November 14, 2025: The Eleventh Circuit affirms the federal convictions.
February 5, 2026: Rehearing is denied.
October 19, 2026: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.