ATLANTA _ In the months before the Feb. 23 shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, residents in the Satilla Shores neighborhood outside Brunswick reported thefts, trespassing and activity they deemed suspicious to police and posted to the neighborhood's Facebook page and Nextdoor App a description of a man who had been entering a home under construction, according to police records. The social media posts sometimes included security camera footage of the man inside the house.
On the night of Feb. 11, Travis McMichael was driving his red pickup truck past the construction site when he spotted someone he deemed suspicious, according to a 911 call of the incident obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"I was leaving the neighborhood and I just caught a guy running into a house being built," McMichael told the 911 operator. "When I turned around, he took off running into the house."
McMichael, 34, and his father, Gregory, 64 are charged with felony murder and aggravated assault for the shooting death of Arbery that occurred 12 days later.
Arbery, who was 25, liked to jog in the area, his family has said. Security camera footage recorded the day of the shooting shows a person believed to be Arbery entering the construction site and leaving, minutes before the encounter with Travis and Gregory McMichaels that left Arbery dead.
"Our office has reviewed the surveillance video which appears to show a person, believed to be Ahmaud Arbery, entering a property under construction," a statement from the legal team representing his family said after the security footage was made public in May. "This video is consistent with the evidence already known to us. Ahmaud Arbery was out for a jog. He stopped by a property under construction where he engaged in no illegal activity and remained for only a brief period."
Arbery was black. The McMichaelses are white.
During the Feb. 11 call to 911, Travis McMichael told the dispatcher he had seen a man at the construction site and was backing up his truck to check on things.
"I've never seen this guy before in the neighborhood," he told the operator. He was breathing heavily during the call; the dispatcher asked if he was OK.
"Yeah, it just startled me," McMichael responded. "When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don't know if he's armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was."
McMichael, who told the operator he was in his truck, across the street from the construction site, said as many as four neighbors were out that night looking for the man. Neighbor Diego Perez said he was armed when he left his home and walked up Satilla Drive that night. Gregory McMichael joined the search and also was armed, Perez said.
The 911 call, placed at 7:27 p.m., summoned police to the construction site on Satilla Drive.
"We've been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately," Travis McMichael told the operator, adding that his gun had been stolen from his truck in January. His home is a few doors down from the one under construction.
McMichael described the man as having short hair and standing about 6 feet tall, wearing red shorts and a white shirt.
The police report from the incident said the owner of the home under construction, Larry English, had an ongoing issue with trespassing on the property. The report said English lived nearly two hours away but he had installed security cameras that alerted him whenever someone entered the home. The description in the report of the person in the security camera footage described a black man of slender build, standing about 6 feet tall.
English's security cameras pinged his phone on Feb. 11, the police report said, the same night Travis McMichael dialed 911. Security camera footage shows someone walking through the house and looking around. English said nothing was taken from the home.
