DeKalb County, GA – The parents of slain forest defender Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Paez Terán filed a civil rights lawsuit Tuesday against three Georgia law enforcement officers they say are most responsible for the death of their child in January 2023.
Nearly two years after police killed Terán, and a year after the state refused to bring charges against any of the state troopers responsible, Tortuguita’s parents are still seeking answers and accountability for the death of their 26-year-old child.
Belkis Terán and Joel Paez, Tortuguita’s mother and father, are suing Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Ryan Long as well as Georgia State Patrol troopers Mark Lamb and Bryland Myers in federal court claiming that the raid that led to their child’s killing violated Tortuguita’s civil rights.
“Why did this happen to my child?” Belkis Terán asked at a press conference Tuesday. “Though now we know, it did not just happen to my child… This violence is happening to a community. This destruction is happening to our rights. Our rights to oppose a wrong decision. To stand up for the forest,” Terán added.
The suit claims that Long, who was in part responsible for orchestrating the multi-agency raid against the encampment, ordered troopers under his command to arrest protesters for criminal trespass despite knowing that the encampment was on public land which hadn’t been closed or posted against trespassing.
That order, according to the complaint, led to troopers Lamb and Myers illegally seizing Terán and using excessive force, violating Tortuguita’s Fourth Amendment rights and ultimately killing them.
The family also alleges that the raid itself, which happened on public land separate from the construction site of Cop City, violated Tortuguita’s First Amendment rights to protest the facility’s construction, which is an act of political speech, the lawsuit says.
The family did not name the other state troopers who shot their child – Ronaldo Kegel, Jerry Parrish, Jonathan Salcedo, and Royce Zah – in the lawsuit because they believe they were just as endangered as Tortuguita was by Long’s orders and the other troopers’ actions, attorney Jeff Filipovits said.
The raid came amid a fever pitch of rhetoric demonizing those opposed to Cop City as terrorists. In the lead up to the lethal raid, police began charging activists as domestic terrorists, and falsely claiming that the Department of Homeland Security had classified movement participants as “domestic violent extremists.”
Paez Terán was an active participant in the movement against Cop City, an 85-acre police training campus currently in the final phases of construction near Atlanta. Determined to see the large training facility stopped, they joined an ongoing forest occupation near the construction site in 2022.
On the morning of Jan. 18 2023, heavily armed police from different state and local agencies raided the encampment, arresting protesters and trashing camps. When Georgia State Patrol troopers reached the tent Paez Terán was sleeping in, there was a brief standoff before troopers shot pepper balls into their tent.
Moments later troopers opened fire on Tortuguita, shooting them 14 times and leaving them dead with 57 bullet wounds.
Manuel’s family still hasn’t gotten clarity on the circumstances surrounding their child’s death nearly two years after the fatal shooting.
Lawyers with Spears & Filipovits, the firm representing the family, hope that the civil suit will uncover some of the yet unknown details of the raid that ended in police killing the forest defender.
“The story of Manuel’s death is still being written,” Attorney Brian Spears said at Tuesday’s press conference. “The objective of this lawsuit is to learn the truth about who planned the raid and to hold them responsible.”
Despite pleas to elected officials and the GBI, the state has refused to release any details of their investigation to Tortuguita’s family.
Calls for an independent investigation into the shooting rose in the immediate aftermath of the killing. While the family was able to secure an independent autopsy, to date there hasn’t been an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding Terán’s killing.
The only investigation conducted was carried out by the GBI, the same entity that organized the raid and the same body that oversees the Georgia State Patrol.