On January 18, 2023 at approximately 9:00 a.m., during a multi-agency raid on the Stop Cop City forest encampment in the South River Forest of DeKalb County, Georgia, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán — a 26-year-old Venezuelan-born Indigenous nonbinary forest defender known as Tortuguita ("Little Turtle") — was shot 57 times by Georgia State Patrol officers.

The DeKalb County Medical Examiner's independent autopsy found that Tortuguita was in a meditative cross-legged posture with their hands raised at the moment of the killing. The state of Georgia has refused to file charges against any of the officers involved. No body-camera footage exists from the killing because the Georgia State Patrol officers were not equipped with cameras.

We ask the U.S. Department of Justice to open a full civil-rights investigation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 241-242 — the same statutes used to prosecute police killings in landmark federal civil-rights cases — into the killing of Tortuguita.