Brutality Off the Autopsy Reports
Felipe Guilherme Antunes wanted to leave Morro do Fallet and take his family to Vassouras, where his maternal grandmother was from, but instead he ended up in drawer 582 of Cemitério São João Batista. On February 8, twenty-one-year-old Felipe became corpse 5857/2019, the number on the autopsy report of the Instituto Médico Legal (IML), Brazil’s national forensic institute. Two videos filmed on the day in question by an employee of the Hospital Municipal Souza Aguiar, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, to which piauí was granted access, show a body measuring 1,60 meters. There are lesions all over the corpse, blood on the face, nose, and ears, and marks on the neck and chest; the head is swollen, one side more sunken than the other. There is a gunshot wound near the heart. The videos show the brutal outcome of a police operation that left fifteen dead on that Friday morning: Felipe had been eviscerated, his intestines were piled on top of his belly, completely exposed. A month later, we still have no idea what happened. Officially, it did not happen.
“The body is that of a mixed-race man,” the report noted the following day. Coroner Reginaldo Franklin Pereira, former director of the IML, observed that he was “well-nourished” with “short brown hair” and “a mustache and beard,” but failed to mention that the viscera of the deceased were outside his body. The four-page-long document notes that the body showed evidence of having been shot seven times, with fourteen wounds to the skull and thorax—seven entrance and seven exit wounds. According to the examination, the bullets had come from all around—front to back, back to front, left to right, vice-versa—striking his head, left lung, heart, diaphragm, liver, stomach, and intestinal loops. There were traces of gunpowder from three of the projectiles, which indicated they had been fired from a distance of under thirty centimeters, but the autopsy report contains no pictures of these wounds. “Photographs were taken for identification purposes,” reads the reports, which is to say: only photographs of the face.
The videos filmed at the hospital show discrepancies between what is visible in the images and what can be read in the autopsy reports obtained by piauí. While a member of medical personnel gives instructions for three of the fifteen bodies to be moved off the stretchers and placed on the floor—“Grab that one, put the three of them on the floor, in a row, over there,” says the voice of a man—the architect of the video walks around filming the deceased on her cell phone. The two videos show a rapport between the doctors on duty and the Riot Police. A doctor and a man in a blue shirt with no medical coat receive instructions from what appears to be a military police officer. “Write something up. This is the first lot. The second’s on its way,” says the man, off-camera.
Last Friday, March 8, 2019, marked the one-month anniversary of the most lethal police operation in Rio de Janeiro of the decade. Over it hang fifteen ghosts, the number of people killed in five hours’ worth of raids on the three favelas under the control of Comando Vermelho (CV), in a region known as Complexo de Santa Teresa. All of the deceased were in some way connected to the CV, a rival faction of Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP). TCP used to control all the drug trade in the neighboring Coroa until it was driven out by CV. On the day of the operation, TCP reclaimed control of Coroa.
How does a man end up eviscerated in a police operation? It’s a mystery, and not the only one. Gunshots can travel a distance of up to two kilometers, piercing bodies as if they’re sheets of paper and leaving behind holes as big as apples, sometimes bigger, on their way out. After being hit with seven high-caliber projectiles, you’d expect Felipe’s funeral to have been closed-casket, especially considering one of the shots was to the head. But it wasn’t: the casket remained open until the end of the ceremony. The boy’s skull was deformed, but his mother said the only gunshot wound she saw on his body was from a bullet already lodged near his heart.
“I only saw one gunshot wound. Around five years ago, Felipe survived a bullet to the chest. The cops locked him up, claiming he was a criminal, but at sixteen he wasn’t mixed up in anything. He was in prison for eight months,” explains his mother, Tatiana Antunes, who is thirty-eight years old, unemployed, and the mother of three younger kids: two boys who are eight and ten, and a fourteen-year-old teenage girl. A bullet was found in his body, but the examination did not specify where. Tatiana has said the same thing from day one: “He was tortured. They stabbed my boy to death.” She wants his body to be exhumed, and for another autopsy to be conducted.
A photo taken of a house at the entrance of Fallet, at Rua Eliseu Visconti 39, in the Catumbi neighborhood, where police officers killed Felipe and eight other men on the morning of February 8, may confirm Tatiana’s suspicions. In the image, pictured by one of the officers, Felipe appears belly-down in a puddle of blood, combat-boot prints in the red stain around him. Felipe was shirtless, and from that angle, you should be able to see the entrance and exit wounds. But his back is intact—the only thing on it a tattoo of a woman’s face. The Military Police claim that the “traffic soldiers,” which is the name given to people in charge of security in the city’s favelas, were gunned down during an encounter, but relatives of the deceased and public defenders insist they had surrendered. Among them was a teenager of sixteen.
According to forensics experts, a careful autopsy should take at least two hours, which is the time needed to open three cavities in the body (in the head, the thorax, and the abdomen) and, following a technique coined nearly 150 years ago by the German doctor Rudolf Virchow, remove the organs one by one for examination. This procedure is fundamental when conducting an inquest, so that the coroner can analyze the body’s lesions, measure the wounds caused by blades or bullets, assess the trajectory of the shot, and determine if the victim was standing, prone, or on their knees, and whether or not an execution had taken place. In the case of the slaughter in Fallet, each report took less than forty minutes, according to information contained in the examination. One of these autopsies, on a body that had not yet been identified by the time it arrived at IML, took ten minutes. The bodies recovered from the operation were struck by an average of three shots each. The autopsy conducted on Felipe, who had been eviscerated, was more complex. It lasted half an hour, from 8:10 to 8:40.
According to doctor and coroner Leví Inimá de Miranda, former director of the army’s forensic team and retired officer of the Rio de Janeiro State Police, it is impossible to conduct an autopsy in such a short amount of time. He states that, “the absence of the evisceration from the document demonstrates that the coroner did not examine the wound beneath the eviscerated loops, and that he would have been unable to determine whether it was a contused puncture or the result of a sharp object.” According to Dr. de Miranda, who has nearly fifty years of professional experience under his belt, “every lesion needs to be photographed, both from a distance and from up close. This is the only way of preserving a wound so that it can be produced in criminal proceedings. The coroner must have taken his own photos, for teaching purposes, but they were not included in the report. An examination without photographs, where the full extent of the trauma is not visible, an examination that does not mention the fact that the body was eviscerated, is a travesty.”
The autopsy reports show a certain pattern: gunshot wounds to the back. At least seven of the men were shot from behind. One of the deceased was shot three times from the waist down and another received a bullet to the left leg, opening a hole that went from his knee to the middle of his ankle. Twenty-six-year-old Carlos Alberto Castilho—corpse 5852/2019—had an incision on the left side of his face. Though described in the report as a gunshot wound, the public defenders suspect it was caused by a knife. When the experts consulted while reporting this piece saw the incision, visible in one of the two videos, they admitted this possibility.
According to coroner and professor Uerj Nelson Massini, it is not uncommon for police officers to transport bodies from favelas to public hospital emergency rooms in order for them to alter the crime scene. “It’s what people refer to as a fake call. They claim to offer everyone medical assistance, just so they can take apart the crime scene,” says the doctor. When questioned, the Civil Police stated that an investigation had already been conducted on Rua Eliseu Visconti 39, even though the coroner in charge of the autopsy reports had noted in the document that “as of now, we have no information from a crime scene investigation.”
Massina affirms that, “on top of the excessive number of gunshots, all of them seem to have been aimed at back and chest. According to the lesions described, the police officers fired from a distance of five to eight meters, demonstrating that they had subdued the criminals,” he interprets. “Just from the photographs and reports, we can conclude the house was stormed and all the men executed.”
The coroner whose name is on the reports—Reginaldo Franklin Pereira, university professor, surgeon at Santa Casa da Misericórdia, and author of several books on forensic science—informed piauí in a phone call that he was not allowed to comment. Questioned about the reason for the absence of Felipe Guilherme Antunes’s evisceration from report 5857/2019, he answered: “I don’t recall any eviscerations. I have a huge case load; I can’t remember one over another . . . Please get in touch with the Civil Police’s public information office.” Concerning photographs of the wounds, he said they had been taken, even though they were not appended to the reports. “I’m just the coroner. The Civil Police are the ones with information,” he said, ending the interview.
Public defender Daniel Lozoya is still waiting for the reports, despite having requested the documents from the Civil Police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office more than a month ago. In his words, the “omission of the evisceration is an unforgivable error.” He then went on to say that the Defense would move to have the bodies exhumed if the photos were not produced. “We need to consider the possibility that the men were tortured, but so far we haven’t had access to the inquests or autopsy reports. We’re not casting doubt on the coroners’ impartiality. The fact is that in Rio de Janeiro, and in Brazil, these official investigations occur within the police department, and direct subordinates to the state governor. What we have here is an issue of independence, on top of unmanageable workloads,” affirms Lozoya, who is in charge of the Human Rights Center of the Public Defender’s Office. It would have been essential for them to interview the officers on the day of the operation, “but apparently this still hasn’t happened. It’s a complicated case.”
If in the end Prosecution did not produce the photographs, Lozoya said he would file a motion with the Civil Police’s department of internal affairs, demanding the coroner be heard in proceedings in order to clarify why, among other things, the evisceration was not included in the report. The Public Prosecutor’s Office intends to reconstruct the crime scene, though it’s unclear when this will happen. According to an employee of the agency, “the case is currently with Department 23 of Criminal Prosecution, which is being assisted by the Public Safety Tactical Unit (GAESP).” They were still waiting to hear from the captains of the Riot Police, BOPE, and the Special Operations Command (COE), which both departments are subordinate to.
The following people were contacted through the public information office, but were not available for comment: Prosecutor Débora Cagy Erlich, who is handling the case; colonel Rogério Figueiredo de Lacerdo, Secretary of State of the Military Police; André Luís de Souza Batista, captain of the Riot Police; and Marcos Drucker, from the Homicide Division, the officer in charge of the investigation. “We are doing our due diligence. We have interviewed witnesses and relatives of the deceased, and are now awaiting the findings of the autopsy report,” read a statement from the Civil Police. They did not respond to questions concerning whether the tactical knives of the police officers who took part in the operation—each member of Rio de Janeiro’s élite forces carries a limited Zakharov-brand model knife with a twenty-four-centimeter-long blade and an engraving of their battalion’s insignia—were handed over for the investigation.
In the Military Police’s first statement about this case, they claimed that “every single body was found on the communities’ streets,” and did not mention that the majority of them had been gunned down inside a house. Later, they said the operation was a planned intervention in a war between two factions, Comando Vermelho (CV) and Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), and that “their main concern was to save lives.”
“I lost, I lost,” yelled a man in the house on Rua Eliseu Visconti, at the back of number 39. A neighbor heard the screaming as she chopped potatoes for lunch. “I lost,” the woman heard again. An answer soon followed: a volley of gunshots that echoed through the Fallet favela.
Nine men died in the house on Rua Eliseu Visconti after it was raided by fifteen Riot Police officers. The police split into two teams. The first team entered the house from the back, while the second knocked on the door. The MP’s official story is that they received this information from Disque-Denúncia, a hotline for anonymous tips, but piauí was able to confirm that no such call had been made. Residents of the neighborhood suspect the tip-off came from a rival drug gang in Querosene, on the other side of Rua Itapiru, with ties to the TCP. That same Friday, the Riot Police had just completed a drone training course for its officers, and these skills were used to identify the house. “Open up. We’ve received a report that there are criminals in this house,” one of the officers said, according to a neighbor.
A resident of the building opened the door. The landlady and her son tried to stop a massacre from taking place, but the MPs carted them to the house across the way, which they were only allowed to leave once things had ended. According to Felipe Antunes’ mother, one of the first people to arrive on the scene, at least ten minutes passed between the moment the police showed up and when the first shots were fired. Aside from a man crying “I lost, I lost,” the neighbors also claim they heard desperate screams muffled by the sound of gunshots. According to reports given to piauí, Felipe was the first person to surrender.
Among the deceased were two brothers: Victor dos Santos Silva and Roger dos Santos Silva. According to the autopsy reports, the younger brother died from gunshot wounds to the chest, which caused cardiac and pulmonary lesions, as well as a hemothorax, an accumulation of blood in the pleural cavity. Roger also died of gunshot wounds to the thorax, which led to hemorrhages, blood in the peritoneal cavity, and lesions to multiple organs. One of the two boys’ uncles watched the videos taken at Hospital Municipal Souza Aguiar and now doubts the report’s findings: “They say Roger was shot in the thorax three times, but all you can see in the video is a gunshot wound to his left leg,” claimed the uncle. Unless the wounds from the three high-caliber shots are somewhere beneath the boys’ arms, which are lying over his chest, the uncle is right: the wounds are not visible.
In another house of Fallet, seventeen- and twenty-two-year-old brothers Maikon and David Vicente da Silva, one Black, the other white, were tortured for forty minutes before being killed, according to a witness cited in the newspaper Extra. They lived with their mother. A neighbor told piauí: “I heard screaming, I’m not sure if it was just one person. The cops took their time in there. At some point someone yelled from the window, ‘just kill them already,’ in the hope that they’d be done with it.”
The official story is the same as the one the police gave for the men killed on Rua Eliseu Visconte: they resisted, shots were fired, they died during the encounter. The MPs claimed there was a firearm in the house, as well as baggies of cocaine. The mother denies this and affirms the boys were killed when she was at the supermarket. In the videos taken at the hospital, you can see a gunshot wound on Maikon’s right thigh; the entrance wound is in the back and the exit wound in the front. The older brother was placed on a stretcher. There are no visible gunshot wounds, even though he is lying belly-up and shirtless.
While at the hospital doctors and RNs were receiving the corpses that had been transported there by cops who, in a video taken by a driver and shared on social media, were caught on camera trampling over the bodies, relatives of the deceased were calling their sons over and over, in the hope of finding them alive. The following day, a Saturday, the mother of twenty-two-year-old Matheus Lima Diniz found her son’s body in a shallow grave, covered in dirt and leaves. Beside him was twenty-year-old Michael da Conceição de Souza. The two boys had grown up together on Rua Rubens Nunes Moreira, in Prazeres.
Twenty-two-year-old Gabriel da Silva Carvalho was the first of fifteen to die on the morning of February 8. He had tried to leave the drug trade to work as a street vendor, selling water in Copacabana, but for 800 reals a month (roughly $190 USD at the time), he decided to go back to his post defending Comando Vermelho’s territory in Prazeres. He died from a gunshot wound to his chest during a shift on Rua Gomes Lopes, one of the most important streets of Prazeres. Next to him was a young man identified as Italo Supriano, shot in the stomach and rescued by a group of evangelical women who were leaving a church and took him to Hospital Souza Aguiar. He survived and is now being treated at the health clinic of the Gericinó Penitentiary, in Bangu.
According to reports piauí received in Prazeres, Gabriel was killed by snipers. The autopsy report has not been released. He and Italo were targeted by BOPE officers who are thought to have been posted in a building of Rio de Janeiro’s Department of Education, the Amália Fernandes Conde Center for Integrated Education, more commonly known as the Casarão dos Prazeres, a mansion on top of the hill that once served as the setting of a Trapalhões film and is now the favela’s main cultural space. The mansion was closed at 16:10 on Thursday, February 7, the eve of the operation. After police officers left the favela, the door to the house was found open. The building is 300 meters from the place where Gabriel and Italo were shot. One of the library windows was broken. Tracks and empty Coca-Cola bottles were found on the floor and held on to by that a resident who hoped the space would undergo an official examination, though it never was. Community leaders have filed a complaint with local authorities.
According to the Military Police, the operation was coordinated by Special Op forces and took place on a Friday because, according to intelligence, it was the best window of time in which to “minimize collateral damage.” The MP stated in a note that “during the encounter, a group of people, among them one of the gang leaders, tried to escape through the back of the house, but ended up turning himself in. Five men were arrested.” This group was in another house on Rua Eliseu Visconti. The MP affirms that an inquest is being conducted to determine whether the officers committed any executions. Concerning suspicions raised by Fallet residents claiming cops had attacked the location to clear the way for TCP to take control, the police countered that they received a single financial offer: one hundred thousand reals from a manager in Fallet in exchange for not being arrested.
Governor Wilson Witzel, who won the election having promised to turn the verb “abater”—a Portuguese word whose meaning ranges from “discourage” to “slaughter”—into a statewide policy, was in favor of the operation and expressed his belief in its legitimacy on his social media platforms. On his birthday, less than two weeks after, Witzel began the day by exercising with the BOPE officers, who jogged to war cries like: “If crime is a disease, BOPE is the cure.” Support for the operation did not only come from the governor, but also from Brasilia. On Twitter, President Jair Bolsonaro liked a post shared by his youngest son, Carlos Bolsonaro, in which he heralded Operation Fallet as a “new era.”
Public Defender Pedro Strozenberg is concerned about the direction police operations are taking in Rio. “The fear,” he said, “is that a pattern will emerge in the number of deaths. We can’t allow an operation like this one to be considered legal. It’s not an isolated incident, but the result of a violent policy.” Bruno Paes Manso, a researcher at the Center for Study of Violence at São Paulo University recalls the operation that left nineteen dead at the Complexo do Alemão in 2007 and gave rise to a new debate about security in Rio, culminating in the creation of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) the following December. “What we are seeing today is the confirmation of a deadly campaign discourse. This in a city where the militia controls 40% of the land. In a country with weakened democratic institutions, the risk of these groups swaying political decisions is real,” Paes Manso explains.
On Rua Gomes Lopes, in Prazeres, dealers hung up a black banner: “We mourn our brothers, who fell while fulfilling there (sic) duty. Prazeres cries.” A little more than a month after the operation, a Military Police vehicle, sometimes an armored personnel carrier, could be seen driving along Rua Eliseu Visconti almost every day at reduced speed. It would pass number 39, and turn right and continue until it had left the favela. The traffic soldiers are under orders not to shoot, but they are alert, while residents hold their breaths. In the house in the back of number 39, the landlady has plastered over the bullet holes. A prayer group was summoned to clean the space of “heavy energy,” according to one resident. Terror had come to visit, and life on that street is now strained.
