The First Environmental Protester Killed by Police in the History of the United States
We Came to the Forest host Matt Shaer on a shocking shooting near the Atlanta training facility known as Cop City
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts.
We Came to the Forest is a co-production from Wondery, Campside Media, and Tenderfoot TV. Listen now on Apple Podcasts or ad-free with a Wondery+ subscription.
This much, at least, was undisputed: In January of 2023, during a morning raid on a public park near Atlanta, a group of Georgia law enforcement officers encircled a tent belonging to 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran.
Tortuguita, who used “they/them” pronouns, was a young protester camping near the grounds of the police training facility known to critics as “Cop City.”
Also undisputed was that in the ensuing struggle, Tortuguita suffered 57 bullet wounds. They were pronounced dead at the scene –– the first environmental protester to be killed by police in the history of the United States.
But as producer Tommy Andres and I discovered when we started reporting our new podcast, “We Came to the Forest,” almost everything else related to the shooting was in dispute.
According to their supporters, Tortuguita was effectively assassinated for their role in the ongoing resistance to the training center.
According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), which scrutinizes all police-involved shootings in the state, Tortuguita was the aggressor: The GBI claimed Tortuguita was given an opportunity to exit their tent peacefully. Instead, they fired a 9-millimeter pistol through the fabric of the structure, injuring a nearby officer. State Troopers responded in self-defense.
Which narrative was more accurate?
To help answer the question, one of the first things Tommy and I did was to submit a request for the official GBI file on the shooting. We had some reason to expect the agency would give us a green light: In the case of most police shootings in the U.S., the investigating agency eventually releases all videos and photographs from the confrontation, along with autopsy and ballistic reports.
This allows the press and the public to decide for itself the truth of what occurred. It’s a process, integral to modern democracy, that ensures that no one person, and no one officer, appears above the law.
Moreover, we were asking at the right time: We knew that the GBI had recently cleared the officers involved in Tortuguita’s shooting of any criminal malfeasance; all six men had been allowed to return to work. The investigation was fully closed.
But the GBI responded to our initial emails with a rapid and flat denial. In doing so, agency attorneys and spokespeople advanced a breathtakingly novel legal argument that linked Tortuguita, who was deceased, to the ongoing racketeering case against 61 members of the “Stop Cop City” movement.
Because Tortuguita was also an alleged member of the same movement, the GBI maintained, it could not possibly release the full file on the raid until the RICO prosecution was closed. In the meantime, it would continue to direct the public to a brief summary of its investigation.
And yet the summary was only that –– a summary, full of second-hand information that was hard to substantiate without access to the original sources. For example, the document summarized the point-of-view of the involved officers, but did not provide transcripts of the actual testimony.
Elsewhere, it referenced a bullet allegedly fired by Tortuguita, and recovered from the injured officer, but included no ballistics data that would support the contention it came from Tortuguita’s gun. Similarly, the document had no information on the layout of the crime scene or the types of weapons used by the officers –– evidence that would help determine if friendly fire played a role in the incident.
Tommy and I were at a stalemate: The GBI was refusing to budge. So we decided to take legal action. With the help of a veteran First Amendment attorney, Joy Ramsingh, we filed a lawsuit, arguing that simply alleging a connection between the RICO case and Tortuguita’s shooting was not enough to justify holding back access to the full file. (If it was, any law enforcement agency in the country could claim such links, and many police shootings would remain under wraps.)
In response, the GBI’s attorneys repeatedly attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed, using increasingly circular rationale: They said they couldn’t be “expected to determine, much less demonstrate, whether and which investigative records” from the shooting would be useful to the state lawyers prosecuting the RICO case.
And yet in the same breath they maintained certainty that such a connection existed.
Ultimately, late last year, as we were finishing the final episodes of “We Came to the Forest,” an Atlanta-area judge denied the GBI’s last attempt to have the case dismissed. The agency would have to either give us the files we were seeking or go to a bench trial.
And then the development we’d been waiting for: We received the files, in full. And as we’d always hoped, they provided a far fuller picture of what actually happened to Tortuguita in January of 2023, in those Georgia woods. They answered nearly all the questions we’d harbored about the shooting –– and a few more we’d never thought to ask.
But I’ll stop there. The rest? It’s in the podcast.
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Matt