You have to really stick with this article to the very end but if you do you’ll discover there’s a pretty compelling case that Manuel Teran aka Tortugita fired a gun at police officers prior to being shot dead. The reporter has apparently been working on this story since June and the first 80% of it is written in such a way that it seems to be casting doubt on the police version of events.

The only eyewitnesses to the shooting that day were the officers. And it took nine months for the prosecutor to release a report concluding the police killing of Teran was “objectively reasonable” and that “no criminal charges will be brought against any officers.” And with that, the prosecutor’s case is officially closed. But Teran’s family continues to fight to have all the evidence released. “We have waited eight months for the truth. We are in pain. We want to hear the interviews. We want our experts to review the lab tests. We want our questions answered,” the family said in a statement. “This report does not answer our questions. How long must we wait?”

I’m sure the family is in pain as any family would be but at this point there really aren’t many outstanding questions about what happened back in January. What no one denies now is that Teran bought a gun in September 2020 and brought it with him into the forest:

After graduating from high school, Teran went to Florida State University, where they founded an environmentalist club. They talked to Daniel about the cruelty of factory farming and volunteered as a cook for Food Not Bombs, providing free vegan and vegetarian meals.

It was around this time, in the fall of 2020, that, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) says, Teran legally bought the handgun it alleged they later used to shoot a state trooper. They bought it for “community defense,” activists told The Guardian. The transaction form I obtained through a public-records request says that Teran bought a 9 mm pistol in September 2020…

Teran often talked to others in the forest about revolutionary movements — including those of Palestinians and the Zapatistas, an Indigenous movement in Mexico — and said they believed in peaceful protest. Their pacifist convictions are tough to square with the conclusions in the prosecutor’s report.

We do learn from this story that Teran was involved in another standoff with police in December, just a few weeks prior to the shooting. In that case he also had pepper balls fired at him and refused to obey orders from police to come down from a tree.

According to Atlanta Police Department reports I obtained through a public-records request, officers entered the forest and encountered three demonstrators in three separate treehouses who refused to come down. One answered “No” when asked to surrender. Another repeatedly said, “Fuck the police.” The third danced to music inside their treehouse. To force their surrender, police shot pepper balls — in one case deliberately hitting a demonstrator. Police arrested all three people, according to the reports.

People close to Teran say they were also in a tree-sit during the raid — but they managed to escape from police.

Lyman says Teran told him that they’d recorded a video posted on the Defend the Atlanta Forest Instagram account. The video, filmed from inside a treehouse, shows police firing a less-lethal gun in the direction of the person filming.

Teran was not arrested in that incident because he waited the police out, but after that experience he was shaken. He left the forest and stayed with friends in Atlanta for a week. But by Jan. 17, the day before the shooting, he was back in the forest. He stayed in an abandoned camp called BIPOC camp. That morning he encountered another protester looking for a place to sleep and told them, “Hey, this isn’t a space for white people.” Again, he was the only person there and had no legal right to be there but he was still segregating the forest by race.

Finally, at the very end of the story, we get the facts pulled from the prosecutor’s report:

Most of the reports say Teran was warned that a less-lethal weapon would be shot if they didn’t leave the tent. All the reports say the first weapon fired was the pepper-ball gun. Then, the officers say, gunshots came from inside the tent.

Officers say they moved out of the way, and in the scramble, Lamb tripped and fell. He wasn’t shot, but other officers thought he had been. Parrish was hit by a bullet below his armor plate and above his belt on his right side, and in the prosecutor’s report he says he saw a hole in the side of the tent where the bullet passed through. He says he dropped to a knee, drew his pistol, and fired back into the tent — shooting until he saw smoke coming from the front of the tent…

Parrish was rushed out of the forest. Afterward, the officers found Teran inside the tent — dead. Parrish survived, and the bullet removed from where it was lodged adjacent to his spine was later tested and determined to have come from Teran’s Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol, which was found inside their tent, according to the prosecutor’s report.

Teran refused to come out of his tent. Police fired pepper balls into the tent. Teran fired his gun and struck one of the officers. Officers fired back and killed him. No one else fired a gun at police that day and no one else was shot by police.