A journalist has started a true crime podcast looking at the shooting of environmental activist Manuel Teran aka Tortuguita. The podcast has gotten hold of an internal report which basically confirms everything the Georgia Bureau of Investigations has said about the case.

Previously unavailable records obtained by the Guardian shed light on the killing of environmental and social activist Manuel Paez Terán during a police operation aimed at clearing out fewer than two dozen people from an Atlanta-area forest as they protested against a training center planned to be built nearby known as “Cop City”...

The records appear to confirm that Paez Terán fired a gun at police from inside a tent, as Georgia authorities have stated since the 18 January 2023 incident – and that six officers fired back, filling the activist’s body with 57 bullet wounds, instantly causing death...

As for the shooting itself: ballistics evidence appears to confirm that a bullet that wounded one of six Georgia state patrol officers surrounding Paez Terán’s tent matched a gun belonging to the activist. A hail of gunfire from the six officers followed, causing Paez Terán’s immediate death.

But records also show that it had only taken about three minutes for the encounter between the state troopers and Paez Terán to get to that point. The activist had refused to leave the tent several times and the officers fired six pepper balls into the tent, big enough for one or two people. Then, gunfire erupted.

The time element – three minutes – caught Steven D Remick’s attention.

For those who aren't familiar with the facts of this case, here's what happened in a nutshell.

Police entered the forest to clear out protesters who were trespassing and preventing construction of an approved project called the Atlanta Police Training Facility. A group of state troopers came across one man inside a tent. They asked him to come out and he refused. They fired pepper balls inside the tent and the protester, Manual Teran, fired a shot that hit a Georgia State Trooper in the abdomen. Police fired back and killed Teran. The trooper was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery and luckily he survived. Authorities concluded the police shooting was justified and no one involved was disciplined, fired, indicted, etc. 

But ever since it happened two years ago, activists associated with Teran have been pushing a very different story. They claimed Teran was unarmed, a pacifist, and was murdered by police who shot him 57 times. In the chaos, they also shot their own officer and then covered the whole thing up. They claim that there was no gunshot residue found on his hands and that this suggests it was a case of friendly fire.

So here we are two years later and the new documents confirm the police were telling the truth all along and the activists telling the alternate story were wrong/lying. It's hard to overstate what a significant change of course this is. Left-wing media outlets really have been bending over backwards for two years to ignore the facts. Lots of supposedly reputable media outlets have devoted time and space to suggesting that maybe Teran was some kind of environmentalist martyr and leaving out the inconvenient facts about him shooting a trooper. This has happened over and over again.

But we didn't need the new documents to know they were all lying by omission. The basic facts have been out there for a long time. Here's what we've know since the first few weeks after Teran's death. Police found Teran's gun at the scene. He had purchased the gun legally in September 2020 and his friend who was with him at the site admitted that he had the gun with him in the forest. The gun had been fired and the bullet removed from the injured officer matched Teran's gun. Gunshot residue was found on Teran's hand when it was tested. And he was shot by the responding officers 14 times creating 57 wounds.

As for him being a pacifist, that wasn't true either. His own diary showed him daydreaming about murdering police officers. “Killing cops is okay! Killing people is generally a bad thing. Fascists and cops count as people but killing them is morally and ethically just because they are threats to the survival of many people. . . Dead cops! Dead cops everywhere,” he wrote.

So there's no new discovery here that changes the essential facts of what happened, facts the left has been trying to sidestep for two years. Nevertheless, Matt Shaer, who created the podcast, is trying to sell the idea that he's uncovered something new and significant.

If we looked at the shooting itself, the exchange of lethal gunfire in a little encapsulated vacuum, and we said “what actually happened?” The evidence strongly suggests that the GBI’s account of the order of shooting, the order of exchange of fire, is correct. However, when we set out to find this information, one question that we bumped up against is: Okay, if this is what the GBI alleges happened in this forest, why are they so reticent to give us these files? And I think now, having reviewed them really carefully, I understand why. Part of it is what you’re saying here with the pepper balls. So on the one hand, you’ve got that. You’ve got just the fact that these are fired at very close range into a tent. But there are a few other factors here which are really important. One is the length of time that elapses between when troopers first make contact with Tort and when they disperse the pepper balls...

Now we interview the use of force expert in the show. And I’ve since spoken to other people in law enforcement. There were other ways this could have gone. It’s as simple as that.

So what's new? Nothing really. Police fired pepper balls into the tent. We've known that for a long time. But Shaer wants to simultaneously admit the police account was correct all along and also suggest the police acted rashly because it only took 3 minute from the time they encountered Teran to when they fired the pepper balls into his tent. The suggestion here is that they could have waited him out, maybe for hours. It's as simple as that.

You know, fine whatever. Maybe they could have waited longer. The police aren't beyond being questioned or corrected, but it's amazing to me that after two years of leftist hacks lying about this case routinely his main takeaway is this kind of copwatch BS. This seems like an effort to salvage some sort of defensible fallback position for Teran's family (who are suing the police) rather than a disinterested overview of the story. The story here is the violent activist who shot a cop and the media's effort to pass him off as a martyr. When does that story get told?

Maybe I'll take a listen to this podcast and see if there's anything worth rehashing this all over again. And who knows, maybe it's better than it sounds. If you're so inclined, you can listen for yourself here.