THE PAIN OF WAITING FOR JUSTICE
The clock said 23:00 when the sound of tires braking on Avenida Padre Mosca de Carvalho caught the attention of Marcos Laurindo’s mother and father. They could barely understand what was happening when they saw their son run in, scared. Right behind him a military policeman with a gun drawn. Lucia begged the soldier not to fire, hugging him from behind. She was pushed against the closet and saw and heard when two of the three shots hit her son.
"PLEASE, DON'T KILL MY SON!"
a policeman chasing her son
The young man collapsed onto the double bed with a red mattress, now also stained with blood. He died right there seconds after being shot, as the expert report of the Criminalistics Institute attested. Then the body was dragged to the vehicle by the soldier who shot him and the military policeman with whom he was a partner in policing. Placed in the back of the vehicle, he was taken to Agamenon Magalhães Hospital, 12 kilometers away from the scene of the incident.
The victim’s father managed to get into the back seat of the vehicle, against the police’s wishes. “I was arguing. He told me to shut up, to go look for my rights. I was afraid they would throw my son down the road or fake that he had a gun, like they did. But the (residuographic) exam was negative”, says Francisco da Silva. In the last week of his life, Marcos Laurindo worked as a bricklayer’s assistant, in the company of his father, and earned R$ 180 for the job.
The health unit registered that the victim had already arrived lifeless and then the body was sent to the Institute of Legal Medicine (IML), in the central area of Recife. The cause of death was “shock resulting from penetrating wounds produced by a blunt instrument”, as reported in Marcos Laurindo’s death certificate. The gun from which the shots that killed the young man came was registered as the property of the Pernambuco Military Police: a Taurus brand pistol, caliber .40, serial number SUK 14825.
The victim had no criminal record, unlike the police officer who shot him. At the time of the event, the soldier of the Pernambuco Military Police was responding in court to a lawsuit for murder. He could have been away from overt policing activities until the charges against him had been investigated and brought to trial. The report asked the Social Defense Secretariat for information on the progress of investigations into the death of Marcos Laurindo at the institution’s internal level. Also questioned was the fact that a police officer charged with homicide was working in open policing. The SDS reported that the soldier who shot Marcos Laurindo was excluded from the corporation, but said nothing about the fact that he remained in the police force and was already accused of murder. The colleague who was a partner with the policeman who shot Marcos Laurindo served 30 days in prison and was changed battalion.
MILITARY POLICE VERSION
IS DISCLAIMED BY INVESTIGATION
At the police station, the military police officers involved presented as belonging to Marcos Laurindo a .38-caliber revolver without registration with the National Weapons System, responsible for the control of weapons held by the population and for the conditions for registration and possession. To the Civil Police, the pair reported that they were in the vehicle at low speed, with the flashing lights off, so as not to draw attention, when they suffered an attempted robbery. A man reportedly shot at the police. He was then allegedly chased on foot and shot by the soldier who had driven the vehicle moments before. Captured inside his home, Marcos Laurindo was reportedly taken to the hospital still alive.
The police investigation, however, considered the official report by the police to be false. In addition to the production of forensic evidence, the investigation gathered testimony from nine witnesses, including the victim’s mother and father. After receiving and analyzing the work of the Civil Police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Pernambuco decided to formalize the complaint.
“The (military police) version is effectively discarded by the numerous evidence produced. The Visuographic Recognition of the Crime Scene, produced by the DHPP (Department of Homicide and Protection of Persons) on the same night the crime took place, concludes that ‘the version presented by the military police does not find any basis in the information collected preliminarily at the scene of the fact “, highlights an excerpt of the document.
The 28th Criminal Justice Prosecutor’s Office of the Capital also highlighted that “the Simulated Reproduction of the criminal action was also carried out, reaching the conclusion that the 4th staging, which represents the version presented by the accused, becomes untenable, as there is no relationship between the line of fire described by the shooter and the region of the injury suffered by the victim.”
The MPPE (Public Prosecutor’s Office of Pernambuco) also called for the preventive detention of the soldier who shot Marcos Laurindo, “who has a history of aggression and because he is responding to a similar process, also accused of murder, as seen in his criminal record”. But the court denied it and the defendant is free. In the judicial process for the death of Marcos Laurindo, there is also a petition by the residents of Bola na Rede, with a three-page signature notebook, which denounces the violence with which the indicted police officers operated in the Bola na Rede community.
In addition to the police officer indicted for intentional homicide, the officer he was partnering with during the work was indicted for having given false testimony to the Civil Police to cover up his partner’s actions.
PROVEN MURDER,
UNKNOWN REASON
The Civil Police presented evidence to support the indictments, but was unable to gather enough elements to indicate the motivation that led the defendant to act in that way. One of the hypotheses is a disagreement between the military policeman and the victim, two months before the fact.
The soldier had been called by 190 (emergency number) to respond to an incident coming from Marcos Laurindo’s family home. The young man had psychological disorders. That day, he was restless indoors. Marcos was even handcuffed and placed inside the vehicle. “The military policeman said he was going to take him to sleep one night in jail, but his mother asked him not to, and the policeman said that, next time, he would come and kill, because she was a naughty old pimp,” told the mother in testimony at the time. Awaiting justice, she is the main witness to the crime that killed her son.
Marcos Laurindo’s case is still far from being solved. The case is in progress at the Second Court of the Jury of the Capital, it took years to reach the indictment decision, issued by the judge in 2020 and authorizing the continuation of the action for the People’s Jury. The defendants filed an appeal against the indictment decision and, so far, this appeal has not become a process in the second instance due to the slow progress of the Court. Only after this stage the case can go to the Jury and finally have a verdict.