On January 18, 2023, during a multi-agency raid to clear the forest encampments, Georgia State Patrol troopers shot and killed Manuel "Tortuguita" Paez Terán, a 26-year-old Indigenous Venezuelan environmental activist, in their tent. The state said Tortuguita fired first, wounding a trooper; there was no body-camera footage of the shooting itself. The family's independent autopsy found some fifty-seven gunshot wounds and concluded Tortuguita was likely sitting cross-legged with hands raised; the county autopsy documented gunshot residue findings the family's experts said were consistent with that position.

An investigation controlled by the state ended in October 2023 with a special prosecutor declining all charges against the troopers. Tortuguita became the American environmental movement's first activist killed by police during a forest defense — a death that internationalized the Stop Cop City struggle, drew condemnation from UN human-rights experts, and hardened the movement's conviction that the domestic-terrorism prosecutions and the raid that killed their friend were parts of a single policy: the forest would be cleared, whatever the law had to be made to say.