In February 2020, three white men chased Ahmaud Arbery through a residential neighborhood in Georgia for five minutes, then gunned him down because they claimed to believe he was burglarizing houses in the area. But a local police officer testified Friday that he simply would have given Arbery, who had walked through a construction site months earlier, a warning for trespassing.

Robert Rash, a Glynn County police officer, testified during the murder trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael and William Bryan that he had spoken to Larry English, the owner of the unfinished home where the construction site was, multiple times. English sent Rash videos of Arbery at the site through text messages, starting on Oct. 25, 2019. The final text was sent on Feb. 23, 2020, the day Arbery was fatally shot.

Rash said there were two outdoor cameras at the property: One was directed at the front corner of the house and one was on the dock.

Rashs testimony came one day after the prosecution played a recorded deposition of English detailing his 911 calls about seeing a man at the unfinished house in the months before Arbery was killed. English never reported anything stolen.

Arberys identity was unknown to Rash at the time. He told prosecutors he was looking for the man at the property and that Georgia police have a standard protocol for people caught trespassing, which is a misdemeanor under state law.

Rash told prosecutor Linda Dunikoski that he would have told Arbery to leave and never come back and that it would ultimately have been up to English whether Arbery would have been arrested on charges of trespassing.