BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The video attached to this story is from the three year anniversary of Arbery's death in February.
Ahmaud Arbery would have been 29 years old Monday.
He was just 25 when three white men, later convicted of federal hate crimes, hunted down and killed him because he was Black. He was going for a jog in Satilla Shores, a subdivision in Brunswick, Georgia.
A video of Arbery's killing surfaced after his killing, creating a rallying cry for his killers to face justice. If not for the video and the demand for accountability, it's possible there would never have been a case at all.
In January 2022, a judge sentenced his killers to life in prison for his murder. Then in August 2022, two of the men, Greg McMichael and Travis McMichael, were given additional life sentences without parole for committing a federal hate crime. The third man, William "Roddie" Bryan, who filmed the slaying on his cell phone, was given an additional 35 years.
It's a moment that Arbery's family said changed the world; a show that those who came together to insist Arbery's killers faced accountability had delivered him justice.
"He made history," his mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said after his killers were found guilty. "For the next 50 years, everybody will know who Ahmaud Arbery is: a young Black man who was just running, dreaming and lost his life because he was a Black man dreaming."
As pointed out by his family in court, Arbery's killers will be in jail longer than he ever got to live. But they hope his legacy will last far longer.
February 23, the day Arbery died, was declared in Georgia as Ahmaud Arbery Day.
On that day in 2022, a Brunswick park was named for Arbery.
The Glynn County commission has laid plans to improve the park and craft it into a memorial for Arbery. The plan includes replacing existing playground equipment, a new picnic pavilion, and a "reflection area."
In August 2022, a street in downtown Brunswick was named for Arbery. Cooper Jones's attorney, Lee Merritt, said this was an act of goodwill by Glynn County officials, and a step toward healing.
"It means that they want to preserve his legacy, but it’s also an acknowledgement that the city had a role in this both as victim and victimizer because it was Glynn County officers... who empowered these men, these vigilantes, in the first place, so to see the city begin to take steps to try to rectify that means the world to me."
Arbery is remembered in the hearts of those who knew him lovable, kind -- a man with a lifetime of possibility laid in front of him.
The last step in Arbery's case still remains, over three years later. Former Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney, Jackie Johnson, was charged with meddling in the investigation into Arbery's death. Johnson's trial date has not been set.
