May 15, 2020 | 8:51pm
Gregory McMichael and Ahmaud Arbery
Glynn County Detention Center via AP; Family handout
Viral video of the shooting of unarmed Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery was first leaked to the press at the request of the dad now accused of his murder — because he thought it would make him and his son look better.
The ironic shocker — that it was ex-cop Gregory McMichael who leaked the very video that would expose the Arbery shooting to the world, leading to father-son murder charges — was reported Friday by WSB-TV in Atlanta.
The video shows McMichael standing in the back of a pickup truck as his son, Greg, confronts and opens fire on the jogger with a shotgun.
The McMichaels are white, and Arbery was black, and yet the dad, an ex-cop, leaked the video to a radio station two months after the shooting because he thought it would ease racial tensions in the South Georgia community of Satilla Shores, WSBS-TV reported.
The stunning plot twist was revealed Friday by Alan Tucker, a Brunswick attorney who had informally consulted with the suspects, and who was previously known to have been the source of the video.
Tucker told WSBS-TV that leaking the video, which had been shot from a second vehicle by a pal of the father and son, was Greg McMichael’s idea.
The lawyer said Greg McMichael brought the video, and others, to his office for help getting it downloaded so it could be sent to local radio station WGIG in Brunswick.
Tucker, too, thought leaking the video would ease racial tensions.
“I didn’t want the neighborhood to become a Ferguson,” Tucker told WSB-TV.
As it turned out, the ease-tensions strategy backfired monumentally.
The video prompted a national outcry online and at rallies, and pressure for a prosecution contributed to the father and son being arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault.
