Watching the defense opening statements, I was glad that they drew attention to something which has always seemed very telling to me: the fact that Arbery never spoke a word to the McMichaels.
We heard about how he was offered an opportunity to talk / explain himself with two men who were, at that time, not obviously armed and who were both seated in the cabin of the truck at that time as well.
They were saying "Wait, we want to talk to you. Where are you coming from? What were you doing?" etc.
We've been fed this nonsense narrative for coming up on two years now, that Arbery was simply out for a jog and, though he may have innocently been looking around an open construction site, he had no reason to think he'd done anything wrong, and no reason to have any understanding of what these white guys in the truck could possibly want. That he was completely justified in being afraid of them and assuming the worst about their motives.
All 100% nonsense, as I always knew it was.
Arbery's silence, running patterns, and eventual attack on Travis McMichael all speak clearly to the same conclusion: he viewed himself as a criminal who had been caught in the act, and had gone into desperation mode where he didn't even think there was any point trying to talk his way out of it, bluff his way out of it, or face the police under the assumption that they really didn't have much on him.
He may have drastically over-estimated his legal peril. Maybe he thought more was captured on those security cameras than actually was. Maybe he knew he had stolen things in that house, and didn't realize the cameras hadn't picked that up or that it couldn't be proven by other means. Who knows?
What's clear is that he felt his best option was not only to run at max speed and try to evade these guys, to do anything he could to avoid still being there when the cops showed up, but that this even extended to deciding his best bet was to try to grab their firearms and likely kill them with it.
A lot of people will have a hard time believing that. How could someone possibly get into that mindset, and take those kind of actions, based on a situation where they probably weren't even facing much consequence when the cops did show up?
Well, if you honestly can't imagine it, you're probably suffering from too large of an IQ gap between yourself and Arbery, and having difficulty putting yourself into the headspace of a habitual, impulsive criminal.
It's exactly the same kind of "thought process" that leads to other criminals shooting a cop who pulls them over, initiating a manhunt where the entire police infrastructure is coming after them, rather than facing the music. The same mindset that leads other criminals to murder an entire family for a couple of dollars, etc.
Look up some of the studies on criminals and their thought process. It's damned hard to imagine if you're an intellectual sort, but there really are people running around our society who operate almost entirely on impulse, and often violent impulse.
No sane society would seek to imprison three concerned, good neighbors looking out for their neighborhood because they defended their life against such a person after confronting them during criminal activity.
This is "Key to the city" territory, not "murder trial" territory.
