The shooting death of a protestor at the hands of police feels like both an inevitable outcome of this long battle over Atlanta’s South River Forest and a completely preventable tragedy.
by David Peisner
Portrait of Manuel Teran by Gabe Eisen
NOTE: This is an update on David Peisner’s story, “The Forest for the Trees” which was first published on December 13, 2022. To read that story click here.
January 20, 2023
I didn’t know Manuel Teran as Manuel Teran. To me, Manuel was Tortuguita. Like pretty much all the forest defenders I met while reporting on the protest movement that has emerged in opposition to the city’s plan to build a police training facility in a forest in south Atlanta, Teran went by a forest name in order to maintain anonymity. At one point, Teran — who preferred they/them pronouns but was not particularly concerned when an early draft of my story, “The Forest for the Trees,” failed to use them — wanted me to refer to them in the story as “[Redacted],” mostly, it seemed, because they thought it was funny.
But “Tortuguita,” as Teran explained the first time we met, was not just a cute name chosen at random. Spanish for “Little Turtle,” it was a nod to the Colonial-era indigenous military commander of the same name who led Native American forces to one of their most decisive victories against the then-nascent U.S. Army in 1791. Teran was reluctant to publicize this backstory because, as they told me, “That does not make us look like peaceful protesters. We are very peaceful people, I promise.”
Teran was shot and killed on the morning of January 18, in what law enforcement officials described as a firefight during which a Georgia state trooper also sustained a gunshot wound to the abdomen. As of January 19, the trooper is in stable condition. According to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Michael Register, Teran, who was 26, opened fire “without warning” at law enforcement officers and was then shot in self-defense.
In the time since my story was posted last month, the situation in the South River Forest has deteriorated markedly. There were massive raids by law enforcement in mid-December that attempted to clear all of the forest defenders off the land in Intrenchment Creek Park and across the creek, on the site where the city intends to build the training facility for police and firefighters. The police reportedly used tear gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets to help dislodge activists from tree-sits. I visited the forest immediately after these raids, and the encampments had been trashed, structures built by forest defenders had been dismantled, and a community garden had been trampled. Most of the activists had fled the forest, though several were arrested on a host of charges, including, most controversially, domestic terrorism. When I was walking through the forest, I saw a few masked forest defenders who’d surreptitiously returned to the site, but the community they’d built over the previous year was largely in shambles.
In the weeks that followed, construction vehicles tore up the concrete bike and walking path that wove through Intrenchment Creek Park, bulldozed the parking lot, destroyed the gazebo, and pulled down a number of trees. Through all the tumult, there were continued efforts by the activists to return to the forest, and a series of escalating confrontations with law enforcement, up to and including the one that took Teran’s life and injured the state trooper.
At the moment, I have no real information about the series of events that morning that led to Teran’s death. It is certainly possible that it happened exactly as law enforcement has described it, though it’s worth noting that in past killings by police officers — including that of George Floyd — the initial narratives provided by officials have proved to be erroneous. Some may point to the origin of Teran’s forest name as evidence of their violent intent, and I suppose that that could be true, but it would not square with the person I got to know over the past six months.
Of the 40 or so forest defenders I met and spoke with during my reporting, I probably spent more time talking to Teran than anyone else. I did so not because they were a great source, but because they were great company: curious, engaging, earnest, educated, self-aware, well-read, and very funny. They loved to talk, to connect, to debate, and did so joyfully and passionately, without malice.
Teran had first come to the forest months before we met. “I fell in love with the woods and I also fell in love with the community.” The first time we spoke, they admitted that they mostly agreed to talk to me because it was raining and there wasn’t much else to do. “I was bored,” Teran said with a shrug. We talked about politics, about community building, about books, about music, about the environment, about education, about kids. Teran also spoke passionately and repeatedly about the moral and strategic virtues of nonviolent resistance.
“The right kind of resistance is peaceful, because that’s where we win,” they told me. “We’re not going to beat them at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not. We win through nonviolence. That’s really the only way we can win. We don’t want more people to die. We don’t want Atlanta to turn into a war zone.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Teran’s commitment to nonviolence today. Law enforcement and other critics of the forest defenders have continually labeled the movement as “violent,” pointing to multiple acts of arson and property destruction as evidence. There were also incidences of throwing rocks, bottles, and — on one occasion — two largely ineffective Molotov cocktails in the direction of police. Forest defenders will point out that their movement is autonomous and decentralized, meaning that no one is giving orders or laying down rules, so there is no collective responsibility for any individual’s actions. That may be true on a theoretical basis, but in reality few people outside of the forest defenders and their ardent supporters are making that distinction. That said, until the incident that killed Teran and wounded the trooper, none of the so-called violent acts committed by the forest defenders led to any real injuries that I’m aware of. Some may consider property destruction in and of itself to be violent, but there’s been a real blurring of the lines between that looser definition of violence and the one that is aimed at actual people.
Is it possible that Teran was lying to me about their allegiance to peaceful protest? Could they just have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear or what would look good in print? Of course, that could be true. Is it possible that in the time since we had those conversations — time during which Teran witnessed the increasing destruction of the forest — they’d been radicalized and changed their mind about violence? Sure, that’s also a possibility. But I personally saw no evidence of it.
“I’m not an adrenaline junkie,” they told me. “I don’t crave conflict. I’m out here because I love the forest. I love living in the woods. Being a forest hobo is pretty chill. Some folks probably have flashpoint moments where it’s like, ‘Oh, yes, the truck is being lit on fire!’ But not me. I love it when everything is calm.”
Teran struck me as a strategic thinker, and everything they told me about the utility of violence in this scenario remains true to this day. The forest defenders are not going to be successful trying to match the state’s capacity for violence. They simply aren’t. So if, in fact, the law enforcement narrative is true and Teran shot at police first, I find it troubling on so many levels, but I can only understand it as either a nihilistic act of desperation, or some sort of misguided effort to sacrifice themself on the altar of the cause. We’d spoken about how the optics of a protester’s death could be fatally damaging for those who want the police training center built. As I wrote in the original story, “An activist protesting police violence being killed by police is pretty on the nose.”
In a lot of ways, the shooting feels like it was the inevitable climax of an escalating confrontation. But it wasn’t. This really did not need to happen. There were so many opportunities for de-escalation that weren’t taken, so many ways this could have been avoided. During my reporting of this story, I had multiple conversations with people on all sides of this debate about the danger of something like this happening. No one wanted it. Yet here we are. Two people have been shot. One of them is dead. And that’s a tragedy.
On some level, Teran knew the risks they were taking and was smart enough to be frightened. “Am I scared of the state?” they said. “Pretty silly not to be. I’m a brown person. I might be killed by the police for existing in certain spaces.” To cope with that fear, Teran leaned on a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune: “Fear is the mind killer.” “That’s a quote I think about often. I am scared, but you can’t let the fear stop you from doing things, from living, from existing, from resisting.”
It’s hard not to read those words with a dark, fatalistic hue now, but when they were said, the weather was warmer, the mood was lighter, and these deadly serious questions felt largely academic. Now they’re not.
So what happens next? There will hopefully be a thorough investigation. More information about what happened down in the forest will come out. But what does this mean for the police training center, for Intrenchment Creek Park, for the larger vision of the South River Forest? In one conversation we had while sitting in the gazebo several months ago, Teran gamed out hypothetical scenarios that feel downright prophetic in retrospect.
“They could come in and completely destroy the place, raze it, arrest everybody that they find, kill anybody who resists arrest — they could do that, and then days later, there would be a shitload of people back here. For every head they cut off, there would be more who would come back to avenge the arrested, to avenge the …” Teran stopped before finishing that last thought and started again. “What I’m saying is, if they do a huge crackdown and completely try to crush the movement, they’ll succeed at hurting some people, they’ll succeed at destroying some infrastructure, but they’re not going to succeed at stopping the movement. That’s just going to strengthen the movement. It will draw a lot of attention to the movement. If enough people decide to do this with nonviolent action, you can overwhelm the infrastructure [of the state]. That’s something they fear more than violence in the streets. Because violence in the streets, they’ll win. They have the guns for it. We don’t.”
The Native American leader Little Turtle who inspired Teran’s pseudonym lived long enough to die of old age at his son-in-law’s house. Tortuguita didn’t get that chance, and even though I only knew them for a short time, even though I never even knew their real name, that makes me sad. It’s a fucking cliché to say that someone died fighting for something they believed in, but Teran certainly did that even if I’d rather it hadn’t happened. As an eco-anarchist and a hardcore abolitionist, they knew the scope of the fight they’d taken on.
“The abolitionist mission isn’t done until every prison is empty,” Teran told me. “When there are no more cops, when the land has been given back, that’s when it’s over.” I must’ve shaken my head a little at the grandiosity of this statement because Teran immediately broke into a sheepish smile. “I don’t expect to live to see that day, necessarily. I mean, hope so. But I smoke.”
David Peisner is a journalist based in Decatur, Georgia. He is a contributor to The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine, as well as the author of Homey Don't Play That!: The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution, which was published in 2018 by 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster.
