Regarding that "tool, possibly a hammer".
A brief digression. There is the letter of the law, and there is the way juries actually behave, and how real people judge things. By the letter of the law, the possible existence of a hammer makes no difference, nor does surveillance video from previous days. It just doesn't matter. You still have a case where people with no legal authority threatened someone and, as a direct result of that threat, someone ended up dead. By the letter of the law, they lose (absent some unforeseen new evidence that may be presented at a future time.)
And yet, most people, and possibly a jury, would look differently on the case if they discovered that Mr. Arbery was not in fact out on his daily jog when accosted by crazy people with guns. If they found out that Mr. Arbery was actually out stealing other people's stuff, or if he had been in the habit of doing so and he was running away to avoid prosecution, the sympathy level would go way up, even if by the letter of the law, it didn't matter.
I took a look at the video. I see something in the street. It's on the right side. At that point, Mr. Arbery was running on the left side of the road. The thing doesn't look much like a tool, much less a hammer. It certainly isn't recognizable as such, and he doesn't appear to have dropped anything. However, I'm sure internet sleuths will, in the next few days, examine and enlarge and process and do all sorts of things to help us determine whether or not he was carrying a hammer and dropped it during the pursuit.
My own inner narrative is still that there was a jogger, and some local yahoos saw a running black man and assumed it was the same black man that had once appeared on some surveillance video doing nothing suspicious at all except being black, and the yahoos decided they were the same guy, responsible for burglaries that never actually happened, and the rest is recorded on the video. That's what I think happened, but I remain open to other possibilities if evidence is presented. If evidence were presented that shows he was a thief, even if it was of tools at a construction site, I would be a lot more sympathetic toward the accused men.
ETA: And speaking of hypotheticals and maybes, we don't actually know that Mr. Arbery was even at the construction site. We know that a witness reported him there, but that's not the same thing. It's possible that the witness wasn't very close, saw the man obscured by the construction site, and assumed that he had gone onto those grounds. I'm sure internet sleuths will also check out that possibility. (I don't mean to be derisive of "internet sleuths". I could see myself doing that sort of thing, and I have in the past. Right at the moment, I'm not inclined to do it, but the weekend is coming up, so that could change.)
