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The video begins with three highway police officers hitting a man on a dirt road in northeastern Brazil.
After a cut, the man’s legs are seen hitting him while two officers catch him inside a police vehicle. You can see white smoke coming out of the car.
“Look at the man over there, my God,” says a voice from behind the camera. “They’re killing him in the car.”
Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, 38, was killed when police took him to a hospital on Wednesday, according to his relatives. He was unarmed and suffering from schizophrenia when the Federal Highway Police found him deadly on the side of the road, according to his nephew, who said he was at the scene.
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Even in a place very accustomed to police killings, the video, widely shared on social media, caused horror and outrage throughout Brazil.
“We told the police all the time that he had a heart problem, that he had mental problems,” his nephew, Wallison of Jesus, told The Washington Post. “And they continued torturing, telling everyone to stay away.”
The Brazilian Federal Police issued a statement on Thursday saying it was investigating Santos’ death in the northeastern city of Umbauba, in the state of Sergipe. In a separate statement, the Federal Highway Police also said it would cooperate with investigating authorities and had already suspended officers involved in the incident.
The video has sparked protests in Santos’ hometown and calls for justice throughout Brazil, where police are known for military incursions, encouraged by Brazilian far-right president Jair Bolsonaro as part of his populist agenda. fight crime.
On Tuesday, the day before Santos’ death, at least 21 people were killed in a police operation in Rio de Janeiro. It was one of the deadliest raids in recent years, but only the latest in a long list of such operations.
Santos was black, according to Brazilian news, and his death also ignited anger over the history of police discrimination and the use of disproportionate force against black men.
“There is no way out for Brazil that is not built to guarantee the lives of the black population,” said Douglas Belchior, a member of a group of activists called the Brazilian Black Movement Delegation.
Lucas Rosario, a spokesman for Sergipe’s Secretary of Public Security, who oversees the state police, declined to comment on the video. He said Santos’ relatives provided the video as evidence when they filed a police report on Wednesday.
“The images are just shocking,” said Samira Bueno, executive director of the Brazilian Non-Governmental Forum on Public Security. “It’s a person with a mental disorder, and it’s the story of you using the vehicle as a gas chamber to immobilize a person.”
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The Sergipe Institute of Forensic Medicine, which conducts autopsies abroad, said Thursday that Santos died of asphyxiation, but could not determine the “immediate cause” of death.
Santos’ nephew told The Post that he saw police throwing a tear gas grenade at the car.
Rosario said the source of the gas that was spilled from the vehicle was under investigation.
Eyewitnesses and police offered contrasting accounts.
Officers said Santos “actively resisted” police as he approached, according to a statement released Wednesday, and that he “fell ill” during his transfer to a police station.
De Jesus, the nephew, said that the police stopped his uncle, who was riding a motorbike, and asked him to lift his shirt. Santos began to get nervous after police found packages of his medication. The nephew said he informed police officers about his uncle’s mental health and that he needed the medicine.
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“Then the torture session began,” he said of Jesus.
Police grabbed Santos’ arms, kicked him in the legs and threw him to the ground, his nephew said. After hitting him on the ground, officers tied his legs and threw him into the car along with the tear gas canister, he said of Jesus.
Santos’ wife, Maria Fabiana dos Santos, told G1 that her husband had been living with schizophrenia for two decades, but was never violent.
“I’ve been living with him for 17 years,” he said. “He never attacked anyone, he never did anything wrong, he always did the right thing. And at a time like this, they took him and did what they did. “
Ronaldo Cardoso da Silva, a local teacher and social worker, told The Washington Post that he had been friends with Santos. He survived on social security benefits and the occasional occasional job, sometimes driving a rickshaw and letting troubled passengers travel for free, Cardoso da Silva said.
Some 6,000 Brazilians have died after being intentionally shot by police officers on guard in 2020, according to data from the Monitor of Use of Lethal Force in Latin America, a consortium of researchers and academics in the region.
Bolsonaro called for criminals to “die on the street like cockroaches” and said police killing criminals “should be decorated, not prosecuted”.
José Luiz Ratton, a professor of criminal studies at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, said that the increase in violent attacks in recent years against the “socially vulnerable” has been “fueled by the authorities … who encourage and they reinforce violent, unregulated and uncontrolled police action in the name of “fighting crime.”