Wanda Cooper-Jones said she doesn’t think she will ever be able to watch a cellphone video that shows her son being shot and killed.
In an interview that aired Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Cooper-Jones said she can’t bring herself to watch the 28-second video that shows her son Ahmaud Arbery, 25, jogging around a Georgia neighborhood on a sunny afternoon on Feb. 23 before being shot.
"I don't think I'll ever be in a mental state where I can actually watch the video. I had others that watched it that shared what they saw and that just was enough,” she said. “I'm managing, it's really hard. It's really been hard.”
Cooper-Jones described her son as humble, kind, well-mannered and loved by his family and friends.
"Ahmaud didn't deserve to go the way that he went," she said.
The video of the February incident surfaced on the internet this week and has caused national outrage. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations announced Wednesday that it was opening its own investigation into the shooting.
Gregory McMichael, 64, and his adult son, Travis, who are both white, told police they grabbed their guns and hopped in their truck to chase Arbery after they saw him running in their neighborhood. They told police they thought he was responsible for several recent burglaries, ABC News reports.
The father claimed his son got out of the truck holding a shotgun and was attacked by Arbery, according to a police report obtained by ABC News.
The two men fought over the firearm before Arbery was shot, as seen in the cellphone video, which was allegedly taken by a bystander.
Arbery, who lived in Brunswick, one town over from the McMichaels, was pronounced dead at the scene by the Glynn County coroner. No weapons were found on him, according to the police report.
Nearly three months after the incident, no arrests have been made and no charges have been filed in the case.
Cooper-Jones said she believes authorities haven't made any arrests because Gregory McMichael worked as an investigator in the Brunswick district attorney’s office before recently retiring.
"I think that they don't feel like he was wrong because he was one of them," she said.
After the video went viral on social media Tuesday, protesters marched through the neighborhood where Arbery was killed.
S. Lee Merritt, one of the attorneys representing Arbery's family, told ABC News they demand answers and want the McMichaels to be arrested.
"Prosecutors will need a grand jury in order to formally indict these men, but that has nothing to do with actually going out and arresting the men seen on camera murdering a 25-year-old unarmed black man," Merritt told GMA. "The prosecutors actually have the option, if they so chose to, to directly indictment and skip the entire grand jury process. “It's something that happens all the time in our legal system, and this would certainly be an appropriate moment."
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