On a Thursday around noon last month, Joel Paez heard a knock on the door at his house in Chicago. Paez, who works from home managing a domestic violence intervention program, opened the door to see an officer from the Chicago police department.
The officer asked Paez if he had a relative in Atlanta. Surprised, the Venezuelan-born social worker said, “Yes. My son.” The officer took out a pad, wrote down a phone number from Georgia, ripped out the sheet of paper and handed it to Paez. “Call this number, please,” the officer said. Then he pointed to the body cam on his chest, and said: “This is being recorded.” And he left.
Within minutes, Belkis Terán, Paez’s ex-wife and the mother of Manuel Paez Terán, called from Panama with the news: police had shot and killed their son the day before, on 18 January, after finding the 26-year-old activist camped in a forest south-east of Atlanta in Georgia.
The activist, who went by the name Tortuguita, was one of dozens trying to protect the South River Forest from a $90m (£75m), 85-acre (34-hectare) police and fire department training center planned for the site and, separately, a private developer’s land swap. The project is known as Cop City. Officials said Tortuguita fired at a Georgia state patrol trooper first, wounding the officer.
The death – and the broader fight over Cop City – have drawn interest from around the US and all over the world. Now Tortuguita’s family is demanding answers to the many questions they have about the shooting and the circumstances around it, not least the lack of body-cam footage.
On Thursday night in Atlanta, Paez said: “They didn’t use body cams when they killed my son – but they did use them when they came to inform me about killing my son.”
Paez was referring to what is probably the biggest obstacle facing the family and others when it comes to discovering what happened on the morning of 18 January, when dozens of officers from multiple city, county, state and possibly federal agencies swarmed the forest. There is no body-cam recording of the shooting, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), which took part in the sweep and is also tasked with investigating Tortuguita’s death.
Paez, Terán and Manuel’s brother Daniel find themselves in a spotlight that comes with Tortuguita becoming what experts say is the first environmental activist killed while protesting in US history. Shortly after arriving from Panama last week, Manuel’s mother said she hoped to “help everyone who loved Manuel to heal” during her stay in the city.
At a press conference the family held in front of a historic courthouse in Decatur, flanked by their attorneys, Paez recounted how he would counsel Manuel to “get a life and have a family”, and that they would “agree to disagree” about Manuel’s involvement in projects such as defending the forest or helping to rebuild houses after Hurricane Nicole swept through in Florida. “I would say, ‘Manuel, you cannot worry about the whole world. You’re not Greta Thunberg.’ I was wrong,” Paez said.
But while there is no footage of the shooting, police videos of other parts of the operation to clear the forest were released on Wednesday night. Yet, activists say, these videos pose more questions for the police. They include the sounds of the actual shooting, with dozens of shots fired in quick succession, leading one officer in a nearby location to say: “Is this target practice?”
There were also sections of the videos appearing to show officers indicating that the wounded officer had been shot by another officer, and not Paez Terán. In one, an officer says, “Man … you fucked your own officer up?” This led the GBI and Atlanta police department to issue statements on Thursday asserting that the videos prove nothing. “Speculation” on the part of an officer, as captured on the body cam, “is not evidence,” the GBI said.
Jeff Filipovits, one of the attorneys representing the family, also issued a statement: “The videos … show the clearing of the forest was a paramilitary operation that set the stage for the excessive use of force.” The attorney said he had received no reply from the GBI to a letter requesting a face-to-face meeting with the family. A GBI spokesperson declined to comment on the letter.
Paez said that the police videos were like “having three pieces in a puzzle of 1,000 pieces. What am I going to do with those three pieces?”
Meanwhile, the family had spent several days getting to know the forest that Tortuguita had spent months defending. Called Weelaunee by the activists – a Muscogee (Creek) name for the forest – Terán spent one afternoon visiting a southern red oak tree that Tortuguita had climbed only a month before being killed, in an effort to save the tree from being knocked down in December.
Several other trees with treehouses the activists built have now been felled during the sweeps that have been occurring for months. Tortuguita was able to protect the red oak, known by those staying in the forest as Frog Palace, that winter day, but the tree was toppled days later. On an unusually warm afternoon this week, Terán slumped on to the tree’s trunk, dwarfed by its size as it lay on an embankment.
“There’s a sadness in the whole forest,” Terán said, adding that she felt her son’s spirit wherever she stepped.
She picked up several stones and put them in her pocket, because that was something her son had done since they were a child.
One night, Terán found herself in an East Atlanta Village outdoor market where Native rapper Nataanii Means had arrived from New Mexico to perform in homage to Tortuguita. “For our relatives in the forest … I’m honored to be here and a shoutout to [Tortuguita], to his spirit in the next life,” said Means, the son of Russell Means, the acclaimed Native activist and actor.
Once Paez, Manuel’s brother Daniel, and in-laws and friends had arrived in Atlanta, the family experienced several false starts in attempting to locate where Tortuguita had been camping the morning they were killed. Finally, on Tuesday, the family found the site, a gathering of several tents with food, books, and medical and other supplies on tables between them.
Terán drew close to a bright red Samsonite suitcase lying open under a dark brown tarp. “That’s Manuel’s,” she said. She bent over to sort through a pile of clothes. “I gave him that tie, and that hat, from Sweden, and those shoes,” she said.
Members of the family came over. Paez and Daniel each touched and stared at objects belonging to Tortuguita – T-shirts, boots, a shovel, a pickax – as if seeking answers to what had happened under the tarp.
After a few moments, Paez closed the suitcase, stood it up and beckoned the small group to gather in a circle and pray.
“Son”, he said in Spanish, “you forgot your suitcase. But you won’t be needing it in the journey you’re on … I’m sorry I didn’t always understand you, or what you were doing. But now I do.”
