Autopsy strengthens case that ‘Cop City’ activist didn’t fire first before being gunned down by police

Police claim activist fired first

The official autopsy of a Georgia environmental protester who was killed by police found no evidence the individual fired on officers, as police claim.

On Wednesday, the DeKalb County Medical Examiner released its report on the death of Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Teran, an activist who was shot by a SWAT team in January as police cleared out an encampment of demonstrators opposing a controversial $90m police training centre in the Atlanta area dubbed “Cop City” by critics.

The autopsy found no gunpowder residue on Teran’s hands, an indicator used to show someone recently fired a gun. The probe did find that Teran was shot 57 times by police, with wounds to the body, hands, torso, legs, and head.

Activist Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Paez Teran, who was killed by Atlanta-area police in January (Courtesy of family / Stop Cop City)

The DeKalb County Medical Examiner declined to draw the same conclusion as a private autopsy, which found the activist died with his hands raised, writing "there are too many variables with respect to movement of the decedent and the shooters to draw definitive conclusions concerning Mr. Teran’s body position."

Teran’s family said they were devastated by the autopsy.

“Manuel was camping on publicly-owned land that was not even on the future site of ‘Cop City,’” the activist’s father Joel Paez said in a statement to WABE. “Law enforcement went in with weapons and shot pepper balls. They created a violent situation and were ready to kill anyone who resisted. Now they will not even meet with us to explain what happened.”

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation hasn’t released its full investigative report about the shooting to the public, but has given its findings to a special prosecutor in the Mountain City District Attorney’s Office for next steps.

No body camera footage of the deadly encounter exists, though police body camera footage from agents nearby captures officers speculating that the shooting may have been a friendly fire incident.

Police maintain Teran fired first, and that a gun found in the slain activist’s possession matched bullet wounds on the wounded officers, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

As The Independent has reported, activists have spent years trying to oppose the training centre, which is slated to be built in a large forested area in a working-class Black neighbourhood outside of Atlanta.

Critics argue the training facility, which is set to feature massive mock city blocks and buildings for military-style police training, will cause pollution and further police violence.

“This project, from their own words, they’re planning on practicing high-speed car chases, bomb deployments. There’s going to be a shooting range. They’re going to be training on how to bust though peple’s doors,” Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders, a grassroots organisation in Atlanta that opposes Cop City, told The Independent.

“They’re training on how to arrest and imprison and brutalise people. It’s not an accident that this has taken place in the aftermath of 2020. It was introduced in 2021. We had uprisings to resist the exact police repression that has been going on.”