Family sues over Ga. troopers’ fatal shooting of ‘Cop City’ activist

DECATUR, Ga. - The parents of an environmental activist who Georgia state troopers fatally shot near the site of a planned police training center are suing three officers they say carried out a raid that led to the death.

Manuel Paez Terán’s family says state troopers used excessive force against the 26-year-old when they fired pepper balls into the protester’s tent after Paez Terán refused to leave on the morning of Jan. 18, 2023.

Authorities said Paez Terán then shot at the troopers from inside the tent, wounding one of them and prompting the troopers to return fire, killing the activist.

Authorities were conducting what officials described as a “clearing operation” against those who for months had been camping in the woods near the DeKalb County construction site to protest what critics call “Cop City.”

The suit accuses the defendants of violating the First Amendment to free speech and the Fourth Amendment to protect Americans from unreasonable searches or seizures.

The lawsuit comes after a special prosecutor said no charges would be brought against the troopers involved in the incident. According to the October 2023 report, several troopers told Terán to come out of the tent, eventually using a pepper ball launcher. That’s when Terán allegedly shot through the tent four times using a 9 mm pistol, hitting and injuring a trooper.

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“The story of Manuel’s death is still being written,” attorney Brian Spears said at a news conference Tuesday morning in Decatur, a few miles from where the training center is nearing completion. “The objective of this lawsuit is to learn the truth about who planned the raid and to hold them responsible.”

Paez Terán had moved to Georgia from Florida in 2022 to activists who had been camping in the woods and calling themselves “forest defenders.”

The lawsuit says GBI Special Agent Ryan Long planned a “raid” that targeted protesters for expressing their political beliefs, violating their First Amendment rights.

The protesters were camped out legally on public land, not on the construction site itself, the family’s lawyers said, and Long was wrong to instruct officers to arrest campers for “criminal tres,” thereby violating their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The lawsuit said that when Paez Terán “stated the desire to remain in the forest,” Trooper Mark Lamb ordered Trooper Bryland Myers to fire pepper balls into the activist’s tent, trapping the protester in an enclosed space with chemicals and making Paez Terán “reasonably believe that they were going to die.”

Lamb and Myers were among the six troopers who fired their guns at the activist after Paez Terán fired at them, officials have said.

Attorney Jeff Filipovits of Spears & Filipovits said the raid followed months of police agencies demonizing Cop City protesters as “terrorists” and was “retaliation for engaging in political speech that was disfavored by law enforcement.”

“This was a public forest, not the site of the construction,” said Filipovits. “They went in there and they cleared it out. No warning — you’re under arrest. So that, to us, is unacceptable.”

Belkis Terán , Manuel’s mother, called for a full investigation into the killing.

“Why did this happen to my child?” she asked. “Though now we know, it did not just happen to my child. ... This violence is happening to a community. This destruction is happening to our rights. Our rights to oppose a wrong decision. To stand up for the forest. Or even just meditate in a forest.”

A GBI spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.

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