Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael were arrested in connection with the killing of Mr. Arbery, which had led to protests in Georgia.
The two white men who were seen on a widely shared video as one of them fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, were arrested and charged on Thursday in connection with the shooting — two days after the graphic footage became public and more than two months after the killing itself.
The men, Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, were each charged with murder and aggravated assault and booked into a jail in coastal Glynn County, Ga., where the killing took place, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.
The details of Mr. Arbery’s killing — and the fact that no one had been arrested in the months since it happened — led to a wave of outrage nationwide from figures as diverse as former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the basketball star LeBron James and Russell Moore, a prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Public pressure for an arrest intensified on Tuesday with the release of the video that showed Mr. Arbery running toward a truck, engaging in a struggle with a man holding a shotgun, and then falling to the ground.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, in a news release, stated that it was Travis McMichael who shot and killed Mr. Arbery on Feb. 23.
A police report said the McMichaels had grabbed two guns and followed Mr. Arbery in a truck after he ran past them. Gregory McMichael later told the police that Mr. Arbery looked like the suspect in a string of nearby break-ins.
The video of the shooting, taken from inside a vehicle, shows Mr. Arbery running along a shaded two-lane residential road when he comes upon a white truck, with a man standing beside its open driver’s-side door. Another man is in the bed of the pickup. Mr. Arbery runs around the truck and disappears briefly from view. Muffled shouting can be heard before Mr. Arbery emerges, tussling with the man outside the truck as three shotgun blasts echo.
The case is the latest in the United States to raise concerns about racial inequities in the justice system. Documents obtained by The New York Times show that a Georgia prosecutor who had the case for weeks before recusing himself over a conflict of interest had advised the Glynn County Police Department that there was “insufficient probable cause” to issue arrest warrants for the McMichaels.
The prosecutor, George E. Barnhill of Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, noted that the McMichaels were carrying their weapons legally under Georgia law. He also cited the state’s citizen’s arrest statute, and the statute on self-defense.
Mr. Barnhill argued that Mr. Arbery, who appeared to be unarmed, had initiated the fight with Travis McMichael, and was thus “allowed to use deadly force to protect himself.”
Gregory McMichael is a former officer with the Glynn County Police Department, and until his retirement last year, he spent many years as an investigator in the local district attorney’s office.
In a letter to the Police Department, Mr. Barnhill described a video made by a third man who had joined the McMichaels in “hot pursuit” of Mr. Arbery. An anonymous witness leaked a 36-second video including the moment of Arbery’s death. The outrage surrounding the viral video of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery being shot just outside Brunswick, Georgia, is what prompted prosecutors to request a grand jury to consider charges, according to many social justice activists.
Trump and Pence will be tested daily after contact with infected aide.
President Trump said on Thursday that he and Vice President Mike Pence, as well as members of the White House staff, would be tested every day for the coronavirus after a military aide who has had contact with the president was found to have the virus.
Asked by reporters about the aide, whom a senior administration official described as a personal valet to the president, Mr. Trump played down the matter. “I’ve had very little contact, personal contact, with this gentleman,” he said. But he added that he and other officials and staff members at the White House would be tested more frequently.
A White House spokesman said Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence had both tested negative for the virus since their exposure to the military aide. But the episode raised new questions about how well-protected Mr. Trump and other top officials are as they work at the White House, typically without wearing masks, particularly in advance of a meeting on Friday with World War II veterans.
Eight of the veterans — each older than 95, an age group at high statistical risk for serious illness from the coronavirus — were scheduled to take part in a photo-op at the White House and an event at the World War II Memorial nearby to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the German surrender, known as V-E Day. The granddaughter of one of the veterans said she thought asking the veterans to travel across the country was “very irresponsible.”
Justice Dept. Drops Case Against Michael Flynn
The extraordinary move came after the former national security adviser had fought the case in court for months, a reversal after pleading guilty twice and cooperating with investigators.
After an extraordinary public campaign by President Trump and his allies, the Justice Department dropped its criminal case on Thursday against Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser.
Mr. Flynn had previously pleaded guilty twice to lying to F.B.I. agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition in late 2016.
The move was the latest example of Attorney General William P. Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation. Documents that Mr. Flynn’s lawyers cited as evidence of prosecutorial misconduct were turned over as part of a review by an outside prosecutor whom Mr. Barr assigned to re-examine the case. Mr. Barr has cast doubt not only on some of the prosecutions in the investigation but also on its premise, assigning another independent prosecutor to scrutinize its origins.
The decision for the government to throw out a case after a defendant had already pleaded guilty was also highly unusual. Former prosecutors struggled to point to any precedent and portrayed the Justice Department’s justification as dubious.
By abandoning the case, the department undid what had been one of the first significant acts of the special counsel investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference — the prosecution of a retired top Army general turned national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.
Scrutiny of Social Distancing Policing as 35 of 40 Arrested Are Black
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the police had enforced rules properly, but other officials expressed concern about tactics similar to unfair “stop and frisk” practices.
A police officer enforcing social distancing rules broke up a group of people on a stoop during a nighttime cookout in East New York, Brooklyn, punching one man in the face. Another dispute between officers and residents of the same predominantly black neighborhood over the guidelines led to a man being knocked unconscious. Days later, three men were arrested after taking part in a sprawling vigil at the Queensbridge Houses for a rapper who was said to have died of the coronavirus.
Tensions are increasingly flaring in black and Hispanic neighborhoods over officers’ enforcement of social distancing rules, leading some prominent elected officials to charge that the New York Police Department is engaging in a racist double standard as it struggles to shift to a public health role in the coronavirus crisis.
The arrests of black and Hispanic residents, several of them filmed and posted online, occurred on the same balmy days that other photographs circulated showing police officers handing out masks to mostly white visitors at parks in Lower Manhattan, Williamsburg and Long Island City. Video captured crowds of sunbathers, many without masks, sitting close together at a park on a Manhattan pier, uninterrupted by the police.
On Thursday night, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office became the first prosecutor in the city to release statistics on social distancing enforcement. In the borough, the police arrested 40 people for social distancing violations from March 17 through May 4, the district attorney’s office said.
Of those arrested, 35 people were black, four were Hispanic and one was white.
More than a third of the arrests were made in the predominantly black neighborhood of Brownsville. No arrests were made in the more white Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has long denounced the unconstitutional “stop and frisk” practices of the Bloomberg administration, has found himself in recent days forced to explain why enforcement of social distancing in predominantly minority neighborhoods is different than “stop and frisk.”
At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. de Blasio called the comparison false, saying that the two approaches had nothing in common.
“What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. “This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”
After this story was published on Thursday night, Mr. de Blasio cited it on Twitter, describing summonses and arrests as a tool for “saving lives.” But he added: “The disparity in the numbers does NOT reflect our values. We HAVE TO do better and we WILL.”
N.Y. health care workers have fewer virus antibodies than average people, study finds.
Health care workers in downstate New York who were tested for antibodies to the virus were less likely to test positive than the general population, Mr. Cuomo said on Thursday.
Antibody tests of 27,000 workers at 25 hospitals and other facilities found that 12 percent of the health care workers based in New York City had the antibodies, Mr. Cuomo said. Tests of customers at New York City supermarkets found rates of nearly 20 percent, the governor said.
In Westchester County, just north of the city, the results were similar: 14 percent of supermarket customers tested positive, compared with 7 percent of health care workers.
Mr. Cuomo attributed the findings to health care workers following protocols for using masks, gloves and sanitizer more closely than regular citizens.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, the president of New York City Health and Hospitals, which will oversee the city’s contact tracing efforts.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
De Blasio Strips Control of Virus Tracing From Health Department
Leading health officials expressed serious concerns over the transfer of contact tracing to the agency that runs public hospitals, a departure from current and past practice.
New York City will soon assemble an army of more than 1,000 disease detectives to trace the contacts of every person who tests positive for the coronavirus, an approach seen as crucial to quelling the outbreak and paving the way to reopen the hobbled city.
But that effort will not be led by the city’s renowned Health Department, which for decades has conducted contact tracing for diseases such as tuberculosis, H.I.V. and Ebola, city officials said on Thursday.
Instead, in a sharp departure from current and past practice, the city is going to put the vast new public health apparatus in the hands of its public hospital system, Health and Hospitals, city officials acknowledged after being approached by The New York Times about the changes.
The decision, which Mayor Bill de Blasio is preparing to announce as early as Friday, puzzled current and former health officials, who questioned the wisdom of changing what has worked before, especially during a pandemic.
The department conducted tracing of coronavirus cases at the start of the outbreak, and had been doing so again recently, in preparation for the city’s expansion.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, a former city health commissioner under Mr. de Blasio and now the director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, said that the three key elements of handling the coronavirus — testing, tracing and quarantine — have long been performed by the Health Department.
“These are core functions of public health agencies around the world, including New York City, which has decades of experience,” Dr. Bassett said in an email. “To confront Covid-19, it makes sense to build on this expertise.”
Dr. Mitchell Katz, the head of Health and Hospitals, said that the move was made because his agency, a public benefit corporation rather than a city department, could more quickly hire contact tracers and enter into contracts for testing and other needed services.
But he said the tracing itself would be supervised by a team of roughly 50 Health Department experts who will be detailed to Health and Hospitals to run the operation.
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former New York City health commissioner, said that the city’s Health Department is the “greatest in the world” and that “if any health department can excel at contact tracing, New York City can.”
