BRUNSWICK, Georgia  (AP) — One of the three white men standing trial for the death of Ahmaud Arbery said they had the 25-year-old Black man “trapped like a rat” before he was fatally shot, a police investigator testified Wednesday.

Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves and chased Arbery in a pickup truck after they spotted him running in their neighbourhood on February 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the pursuit in his own truck and took cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery three times at close range with a shotgun.

More than two months passed before the three men were arrested on charges of murder and other crimes, after the graphic video leaked online and deepened a national reckoning over racial injustice.

Glynn County police Seargeant Roderic Nohilly told the jury Wednesday he spoke with Greg McMichael at police headquarters a few hours after the shooting and that McMichael told him Arbery “wasn’t out for no Sunday jog. He was getting the hell out of there.”

The father told Nohilly he recognised Arbery because he had been recorded by security cameras a few times inside a neighbouring home under construction. Greg McMichael said they gave chase to try to stop Arbery from escaping the subdivision.

“He was trapped like a rat,” Greg McMichael said, according to a transcript of their recorded interview Nohilly read in court. “I think he was wanting to flee and he realised that something, you know, he was not going to get away.”

Defense attorneys say the McMichaels and Bryan were legally justified in chasing and trying to detain Arbery because they reasonably thought he was a burglar. Greg McMichael told police his son, Travis McMichael, fired in self-defense as Arbery attacked with his fists and tried to grab his shotgun.

Prosecutors say the McMichaels and Bryan chased Arbery for five minutes before he was shot in the street after running past the McMichaels’ idling truck.

Reverend Al Sharpton who spoke with reporters Wednesday outside the Glynn County courthouse as he held the hands of Arbery’s parents, criticised the disproportionately white makeup of the jury.

Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley allowed the jury to be sworn in last week after prosecutors objected, saying several Black potential jurors were excluded because of their race, leaving only one Black juror on the panel of 12. The county where the trial is being held is nearly 27 percent Black.

“It’s an insult to the intelligence of the American people,” Sharpton said. “If you can count to 12 and only get to one that’s Black, you know something’s wrong.”