On January 18, Georgia State Patrol troopers murdered Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a nonbinary Afro-Venezuelan activist who went by the name “Tortuguita.” An independent autopsy concluded that Tortuguita had been shot more than a dozen times while they were sitting cross-legged with their hands up and their palms facing their body. Months later, the state’s autopsy established the precise number of shots, fifty-seven, and confirmed another key finding from the independent autopsy: Tortuguita had not fired a gun, as officers claimed. Their death was ruled a homicide.

Tortuguita’s killing is the most horrifying event to come out of the state’s suppression of the Stop Cop City movement, which has occupied the Weelaunee Forest in southeast Atlanta since late 2021 to protest a $90 million police training facility and a new movie studio, Blackhall, the city plans to build there. The facility earned the nickname “Cop City” because it is set to include a mock city block, where police could hone militarized tactics to deploy against a city that activists say is already the nation’s most surveilled.

As of this summer, the state has charged forty-two protesters with domestic terrorism and three Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers with money laundering. In most cases, the evidence was comically flimsy: the protesters had mud on their clothes, apparently proof that they had vandalized construction equipment, and the solidarity fund had provided reimbursements for “totes,” “forest cleanup,” and “yard signs,” supposedly code for unspecified illegal items.