BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Two months before Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot in Glynn County, Ga., a police officer there sent a text to a property owner who was worried about recurring trespassing incidents, a lawyer for the homeowner said on Friday.
The officer provided the phone number of a nearby resident, telling the owner to call it the next time his motion-sensing security cameras whirred into action.
That resident, Gregory McMichael, a retired investigator in the local district attorney’s office, never received a call from the owner asking for help. But this month, Mr. McMichael and his son were arrested on murder charges after they chased and then confronted Mr. Arbery, who was black, through the streets of their Southeast Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23. The McMichaels are white, and the killing has unleashed a firestorm of protests nationwide.
Charlie Bailey, a former senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., said it was highly irregular for a police agency to recommend that a person who was not active in law enforcement to respond to a potential crime.
“I’ve never heard, in my time as a prosecutor, of police enlisting a civilian to do something that the police are sworn to do,” said Mr. Bailey, a former Democratic candidate for state attorney general. “You’re not supposed to have civilians acting as police.”
Moments before the McMichaels chased Mr. Arbery, he had been seen on camera inside the property owner’s house, which was under construction. Mr. McMichael, 64, later told the police that he chased Mr. Arbery, 25, because he thought Mr. Arbery was the suspect in a string of break-ins in the area.
After taking down their account of the shooting death, officers released Mr. McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael, 34. They were arrested more than two months later, after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case.
The new detail of the text message from a police officer, first reported on Friday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was confirmed by J. Elizabeth Graddy, the lawyer for the property owner, Larry English. Ms. Graddy provided a screenshot of a text message sent to her client on Dec. 20, three days after one of a flurry of trespassing incidents on Mr. English’s property in the Glynn County neighborhood of Satilla Shores.
The text message she provided was sent to Mr. English by an “Officer Rash,” and identified Gregory McMichael, who was a Glynn County police officer in the 1980s, as retired law enforcement. He included Mr. McMichael’s phone number, explaining that Mr. McMichael “said please call him day or night when you get action on your camera.”
Ms. Graddy identified the texter as an officer in the Glynn County police force, but said she did not know his first name. Neither Mr. McMichael, who is being held without bond, nor a spokesman for the department could be reached for comment on Friday night.
The revelation is certain to bring more scrutiny upon the local police force, which appears to have bungled the shooting investigation and has a record of past troubles, including claims of cover-ups and other misconduct. The state attorney general has asked the Justice Department to initiate a sweeping investigation into the case.
On Friday night, S. Lee Merritt, a lawyer for Mr. Arbery’s family, called for the officer who sent the text and “all participating parties” to be arrested. “We believe this communication deputized a group of untrained men in the Satilla Shores community to hunt down suspected trespassers, causing the events of Feb. 23, 2020,” he said, referring to the killing.
Mr. English’s video cameras recorded people walking onto his property over several months. Several of the videos appear to show the same young African-American man. Lawyers for Mr. Arbery did not confirm that he was the man in any of the recordings, with the exception of a surveillance video taken in the moments before he was killed.
Ms. Graddy noted that no property was taken in any of the incidents captured on video. She said that Mr. English, who has been battling a serious illness, did not notice that the officer had sent him the December message until Friday.
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