12 MINUTES AND A LIFE

AHMAUD MARQUEZ ARBERY 8 MAY 1994 – 23 FEBRUARY 2020

Imagine young Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery on the practice field of the Brunswick High Pirates American football team.

The coach has been taunting his defensive players. “Y’all ain’t ready,” he says. “You can’t stop us.” In the next bit of action, Maud – who, at 5ft 10in (178cm) and a shade under 76kg, is small for his defensive linebacker position – bursts between blockers and makes a tackle that echoes across the field. It’s a feat that the teenage Maud intends as a message to his coaches, his teammates and anyone else who still needs to hear it: don’t test my heart.

Some teammates smash their fist to their mouth, saying, “Oooh”. Others slap one another’s pads and point. An assistant coach runs to the aid of the tackled teammate. And the head coach blows his whistle “Why’d you hit him like that?” he shouts. “Save that for Friday.”

That Friday, in Glynn County Stadium (one of the largest high school stadiums in American football-loving Georgia), the Pirates, clad in their white jerseys with blue and gold trim, stampede out of the fog-filled mouth of a blow-up tunnel onto the field. The school band plays, and cheerleaders shake pompoms. There’s a raucous sea of blue and gold in the stands, including plenty of Maud’s people.

Game time: the opposition calls the same play that Maud put the fierce kaput on in practice, and beneath a floodlit glare that’s also a gauntlet, Maud barrels towards the running back and – boom! – makes a hit that sounds like trucks colliding. It’s a noise that resounds into the stands, that just might ring all over Brunswick. The fans send up a mighty roar of appreciation, but Maud merely trots to the sidelines, almost insouciant. Assistant coach Jason Vaughn grabs him by his face mask. “Now, that’s how you hit,” he says, tamping down his astonishment that a boy his size could tackle that hard. But that’s young Maud through and through – undersized in the physical sense, supersized in heart.

SUNDAY 23/02/2020

1.04PM

Time-stamped security footage from an adjacent home shows Maud, who is out for a run in Brunswick’s Satilla Shores area, wandering up a sunny patch of narrow road and stopping on the spotty lawn of a sand-coloured, under-construction bungalow addressed 220 Satilla Drive. There’s a red portable toilet in the front yard. The garage is wide open.

Maud, dressed in low-top Nikes, white T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, loafs on the lawn for a moment before drifting into the building. The security camera records him inside; it’s a skeleton of beams and plywood and stacks of piping and wire. There are boxes of materials scattered about and a small forklift in a corner. Maud doesn’t touch any of those things. He looks around, then gazes beyond the frame of the camera towards the river behind the house. Maybe he conjures an image of a