Ahmaud Arbery was at a crossroads, his troubles largely behind him, those who knew him say. He had enrolled in a Georgia college, preparing to become an electrician, before he was gunned down while he was out for a run.
In this May 17, 2020, photo, Wanda Cooper-Jones stands near the spot where her 25-year-old son Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed while jogging through a Brunswick, Ga., neighborhood. She says her son ran every day to clear his mind.
A makeshift memorial of flowers now rests on the lawn of a house near where he died, along with a plaque reading, “It’s hard to forget someone who gave us so much to remember.” His mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, accepted that he was a young adult living at home, like so many of his contemporaries, taking a breather to chart how he’d one day support himself.So he worked at his father’s car wash and landscaping business, and previously had held a job at McDonald’s.
He took cues from his brother, Marcus Jr., and tried out for the Brunswick Pirates football team. His slender build certainly didn’t make him a shoo-in for linebacker on the junior varsity squad, said Jason Vaughn, his former coach and a U.S. history teacher at the school. In his final game, he intercepted a pass and ran the ball back to score a touchdown. A referee threw a flag on the play, but his mother insisted that his accomplishment still mattered: “I said, ‘Guess what, son? You did it!’ And he was very, very excited about it. That was a very good moment for us.”
Frazier went on to play wide receiver for Middle Tennessee State University’s football team and now holds down an office job and is raising a son in nearby Darien, Georgia. The Arbery family’s attorneys have confirmed that Ahmaud was captured on security cameras entering that home on the day he was killed. The property owner said nothing appeared to have been stolen, however, and surveillance footage also shows other people coming in and out of the construction site on other days, some apparently to access a water source on the property.
Cooper-Jones has said she believes her son was simply out for a jog when he encountered the men who had profiled him as a burglar. Their rush to judgment speaks to a larger problem of bias against young black men and boys, she said.
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