RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Alessandra Rodrigues said that her son Lucas Rodrigues, 18, was a quiet boy. They lived in Novo Holanda, in Rio’s north zone, where he made money selling water and popcorn to motorists on the highways surrounding the impoverished community.
At his funeral Sunday, she said that he was gunned down in the street by police while on the way to get bread.
Lucas was one of two residents of the Maré Complex that were hit by “balas-perdidas,” the “stray bullets” that are a by-product of the constant back and forth between drug traffickers and police.
Across town, authorities said they shot five criminals in Chapadão, four in Pavuna, and another man in Niterói.
However, Lucas’ mother said Sunday at his funeral that he was an honest boy. “My son died innocent. He wasn’t a bandido; he was a worker. Now, what does it look like?”
Authorities at a checkpoint outside the community stopped a friend attempting to rush Lucas to the hospital shortly after he was shot. According to Rodrigues, police refused to let the vehicle through for a half-hour, by which time he had already died.
Pedro Rodrigues de Sousa, a local barber in Maré, was shot while walking home from work during the same police operation in which Lucas died.
“We knew there was an operation, but at the time he was hit, it was very quiet. Then the police truck came from nowhere and started shooting. We don’t know why or at whom, I just know that my father was hit,” said de Sousa’s daughter Lenne Macedo de Sousa.
According to Lenne, his body was left lying in the street for more than six hours before the police came to investigate the death.
“I called an ambulance, and they said they wouldn’t go because my father was already dead. I called the police, and they opened an incident report and told me they needed the permission of the nearest police station to enter the community. And then my father lay there until 11 pm until the investigators arrived.” Criminals shot at the investigators when they were entering the community.
In the operation in Chapadão police said that they responded to reports of a stolen cargo truck. On entering the favela, they said there was an intense firefight in which five criminals were injured. The injured were taken to hospital by authorities who recovered a pistol following the incident.
In Niteroi, police conducted an operation that resulted in the death of one man and the recovery of a pistol and drugs.
Despite an overall drop in crimes, injuries and deaths during police operations are up this year in Rio de Janeiro as Governor Witzel’s administration has pushed for more aggressive policing actions.