Ahmaud Arbery’s mother wants the ultimate punishment for her son’s killers.
“I want all hands involved in my son’s murder, to be prosecuted to the highest,” Wanda Cooper-Jones told TMZ on Tuesday. “Coming from my point of view, my son died, so they should die as well.”
Arbery, 25, was gunned down while jogging unarmed in Brunswick, Ga., by Gregory McMichael and his son Travis on Feb. 23. The men walked free until May 7, days after a 36-second graphic video of the killing went viral. Two local prosecutors recused themselves from the case, citing ties to the elder McMichael, who was formerly a police officer and an investigator for the district attorney’s office. The two men were charged with murder and aggravated assault.
Last week, Anquan Boldin of the Players Coalition released a statement calling on Attorney General William Barr to take up the case, saying that Arbery’s only crime was running while black.
The Arbery case has drawn comparisons to the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, a teenager killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman.
Georgia has had the death penalty since 1973. Since that time, 76 people have been executed, the most recent being Donnie Clevelad Lance, 66, who was put to death by lethal injection on Jan. 29 this year for the 1997 killing of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Currently there are 40 men and one woman on death row in the state.
On Monday, Arbery’s cousin, Tracy Walker, a safety for the Detroit Lions, described growing up with Ahmaud. “He wasn’t a hateful person. He was not. I can’t name one person he had a beef with growing up,” Walker told ESPN. “Everybody loved Ahmaud because he was just a clown, a funny guy.”
“We want justice for Ahmaud,” Walker said. “We want the proper justice.”
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