“Tortuguita” Teran, known by his friends in the green movement, was shot and killed by dozens of police officers three months ago in a forested public park to be razed and turned into a police training center called Cop City. He was one of many forest defenders, and his friends stated he was sitting cross-legged with his hands in the air at the time of his death. Teran was Venezuelan and was a student in Florida.
From The Guardian:
Official autopsy results for Manuel Paez Terán, an environmental activist police shot and killed three months ago during a raid in a Georgia public park near the planned site of a police and fire department training center, do little to advance the state’s version of events, including the notion that the activist shot first, wounding an officer.
Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, was one of the “forest defenders” camped throughout the public park less than a mile away from the planned center, known as “Cop City”, when dozens of officers entered the South River Forest south-east of Atlanta, Georgia, on 18 January.
The incident was the first time in US history that police have shot and killed an environmental activist while protesting, galvanizing a surging movement to protect the forest and oppose the training center and transforming Paez Terán into an international figure.
Teran was not only shot, but it appears he was intentionally left to suffer agony before he died.
From Grist:
Last month, an independent autopsy commissioned by the Terán family alleged that Tortuguita had been shot while sitting cross-legged with their hands raised. The county’s autopsy does not corroborate that account, as the medical examiner determined there were “too many variables...to draw definitive conclusions concerning [Tortuguita]’s body position.”
What the report does definitively say, though, is that the activist’s body was riddled with “at least 57 gunshot wounds.” They were shot in the head, torso, hands, legs, right foot, side, back, and genitals at indeterminate range. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as “multiple gunshot wounds.”
Most of those wounds were not immediately lethal or incapacitating on their own, per the report. Patterns of bleeding suggest “the deceased was alive with some element of pulse and blood pressure when the wounds were inflicted.” A shot to the head, and a handful of other gunshots, would’ve “caused [them] to become immediately unconscious or incapacitated,” and so the report notes these wounds were probably not the first inflicted.
The police shot their officer and blamed it on the young man, who maybe weighed 150 pounds soaking wet. The brown foreigner guy gets murdered; strange that.
GBI has said there is no body camera footage of the event itself. But Atlanta police did release body cam footage from nearby police officers recorded at the time of Paez Terán’s killing. In the video, numerous gunshots are audible in quick succession, followed by indiscernible shouting. The cop whose camera is recording jokingly asks, “Is this target practice?” Another officer responds, “Those are real shots fired.” More shouting follows. The recording captures police speculating that the gunshots were “suppressed.” In the video, a cop audibly says “you fucked your own officer up,” raising additional questions about the police story that Tortuguita shot the wounded officer. However, law enforcement has stood by their original accounting of Tortuguita’s death.
Over forty protestors have been charged with terrorism over Cop City protests. If convicted of the charge, they each would get 35 years in prison.