Biography
Savannah Patterson is the secretary of the Network for Strong Communities, the nonprofit that operates the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. She was arrested with her co-organizers Marlon Kautz and Adele MacLean during the May 31, 2023 SWAT raid on their shared home and charged with 15 counts of money laundering and charity fraud over the Solidarity Fund's bail-fund operations. She was held at the Atlanta City Detention Center for approximately two days before bond was set and she was released. She was subsequently named in the August 2023 Stop Cop City RICO indictment. The money laundering counts were dismissed in September 2024; the RICO prosecution remains pending.
On January 18, 2023, during a multi-agency raid on the Stop Cop City forest encampment in the South River Forest near Atlanta, Georgia State Patrol officers shot and killed 26-year-old forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita). The killing — the first known police killing of an environmental activist on U.S. soil during a protest — accelerated and radicalized the multi-year movement against the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a 171-acre, $90+ million police and fire training facility in the South River Forest known to opponents as 'Cop City.'
Georgia and DeKalb County prosecutors responded with the most aggressive use of state-level domestic-terrorism and RICO statutes against a U.S. protest movement in modern history: 42 forest defenders were charged under Georgia's domestic-terrorism statute (originally enacted in 2017 in response to white-supremacist mass shootings) for activities ranging from camping in the forest to attending a March 2023 music festival a mile from the construction site. On August 29, 2023, an Atlanta grand jury returned a single 109-page RICO indictment against 61 of these defendants — the largest RICO indictment of a U.S. social movement in decades. Three Atlanta Solidarity Fund leaders were also indicted on 15 counts each of money laundering and charity fraud (charges later dropped in September 2024). The RICO case has remained largely stalled in pretrial proceedings; this database entry is for one of the small number of defendants who were denied bond or otherwise held in custody for meaningful periods before posting bail.
