Manuel Teran gave up everything to live in the forest. Nine months after their death, their family searches for answers, and the state cracks down on their fellow protesters
entered the foggy forest not long after sunrise. The group of officers made their way through the thin, bare trees and found two people tucked into a hammock. With guns drawn, they ordered that the couple get out, and placed Sarah Wasilewski, her partner, and their friend who was camping nearby under arrest. And then the officers kept venturing in farther.
“Oh, shit, wow,” said the officer holding her, and he put her in the van. It sounded “like a fucking massacre,” Wasilewski says. Vienna Forest, an activist whose name has been changed because she fears doxxing, says the state is attempting to make protesters look like an organization when they are a movement of individuals. She faces both domestic-terrorism and RICO charges. “They’re trying to grasp at straws and throw as much as they can to keep us tied up,” she tells me. “I hope the fight keeps going, the struggle continues, and we’re able to hold our heads high and face this together.
As they tell me about Teran, each memory seems to point to a life destined for activism. Teran was born in 1996 in Maracaibo, the second-largest city in Venezuela, the middle of three kids. As a child, Teran was generous, often emulating their mother, who worked in churches and did social work. When Belkis talks about their childhood, she remembers them giving away their Christmas gifts to kids who didn’t have toys.
In 2011, Daniel, Teran’s older brother who they idolized, joined the military. And the rest of the family was on the move again — first to Egypt, where they lived for three and a half years, then the Netherlands, then to Panama. It was during that year off when plans were solidifying to build a sprawling police training center on the outskirts of Atlanta. The City Council voted in 2021 to lease 85 acres of forest for the project — in spite of protests from environmental groups about the destruction of the woodlands required to build the facility and from groups who said the center would further militarize the police.
There’s a long and painful history to the Weelaunee Forest. It’s the traditional land of the Muscogee Creek people, who the U.S. government forcibly removed in the 1830s as part of the Trail of Tears, in which thousands died. This area of forest was later used as a plantation, then a prison farm. Now, a juvenile-detention facility operates nearby.
WHEN NEWCOMERS ARRIVED in the forest, Teran welcomed them, helping set up their tents and explaining how to stay safe during raids. The threat of raids hung like a shadow over life in the forest. They often began when construction workers tried to enter the forest — and the activists, in turn, blocked construction equipment, prompting police to crack down. In the spring of 2022, police arrested eight people, alleging they threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at officers.
Teran stayed active in causes other than the climate crisis that year they lived in the forest, and they’d often leave to volunteer. Like in early December 2022, when they heard neo-Nazis had made threats against a drag event in Maryville, Tennessee. Teran and their friends drove to Maryville to link up with a group organizing drag defense.
She heard the thrum of a helicopter and immediately thought of her friend, who was in a car in a nearby parking lot with Forest’s Anatolian shepherd. She walked over to check on them, peeking out from the tree line, but didn’t see her friend. Forest ducked back into the trees, and was arrested by two plainclothes officers.
Teran told Lyman that they were determined to stay in the tree. He says, “They were going to have to be removed — they weren’t going to come out willingly.” Teran withstood relentless police pressure for hours, Lyman says. They escaped without being arrested by waiting until police left, but the incident left them shaken. Lyman says it was particularly traumatic to Teran because it brought back memories of a previous physical assault.
Christmas had just passed when Lyman drove Teran back to the forest and dropped them off with a backpack full of clothes, books, weed, and energy bars. It was cold, so Lyman gave his sleeping bag to Teran. Returning to the forest didn’t seem like a good idea to Lyman, but he knew he couldn’t change his friend’s mind.
DeKalb, Ga., and Atlanta SWAT members are pictured leaving the Gresham Park command post in Atlanta on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023.SARAH WASILEWSKI FIRST met Teran on Jan. 17, the day before the shooting. She was walking through the forest searching for a new spot to hang her hammock and wandered into what looked like a camp that had been destroyed.
Anne, camping a 10-minute walk from BIPOC Camp, woke up early. Someone said they heard a loud noise from a nearby field, so at around 8:30, she walked over. She saw a huge group of police coming out of the fog, so she went back into the woods. Anne was a short walk from BIPOC Camp when she heard it. “There was a whole hail of gunfire that was really loud, all in one single sequence. Just a lot of shots blending together. Some were being fired simultaneously,” Anne says. “What I heard was not a shootout like the police want to describe it as. What I heard was an execution.”
Weeks before the raid, Myers, the assistant tactical commander of the SWAT team, wrote in his police report that the GBI told him protesters had attacked civilians, thrown Molotov cocktails, and burned a vehicle. A few days before the raid, the GBI handed him a Tactical Operations Plan that said an investigation had found “approximately 30 domestic terrorists” in the woods who were armed, and that explosives and booby traps were found there.
He fired the pepper-ball gun through the tent opening. He wrote that the pepper-ball gun “has thousands of documented uses with no known deaths or serious injuries.” That’s not true — a less-lethal pepper-ball gun killed a woman in 2004 when a Boston police officer shot her in the eye. That case is cited in an ongoing lawsuit against one of the officers involved in Teran’s killing who allegedly shot a woman in the face with the same kind of weapon.
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