Genivaldo de Jesus Santos dies of asphyxiation after being trapped in the back of a smoke-filled car by officers.
Video of an unarmed black man in Brazil being choked to death with gasoline in the trunk of a police car after being stopped by highway patrol has sparked anger in the country.
Pictures from Tuesday’s police stop in Conversionba, in the northeastern state of Sergipe, show officers pinning Genivaldo de Jesus Santos to the ground before forcibly restraining him in the back of their police vehicle as a thick plume of white smoke billows from the SUV.
The 38-year-old man in chains – described by his family as suffering from schizophrenia – can be heard screaming and his legs, which are sticking out of the vehicle, kick out for a while until they finally stop moving. The officers seem undisturbed by onlookers around them.
Social media broke out over the images, which were captured with a phone camera. Dozens of people gathered to protest in Conversionba on Wednesday, where they blocked a road, burned tires and waved signs demanding justice.
“People are outraged,” a man said in a video of the protest posted on Twitter. “They murdered the guy!” another told the crowd over a loudspeaker.
‘Brutality’
According to the victim’s family, Santos was approached by officers as he drove around the area on his motorcycle. He became nervous when officers found his schizophrenia medication in his bag, Wallyson de Jesus, a nephew of Santos, told news website G1.
“They threw some kind of gasoline in the trunk and went to the police station, but my uncle was unconscious. They took him to the hospital, but it was already too late,” de Jesus said.
In a statement, Federal Highway Police said the man displayed aggressive behavior and “actively fought back” the officers who stopped him. The agents immobilized him, the statement said, and then used “instruments with lesser offensive potential” to contain him.
The statement said Santos fell ill while being transported to a police station and taken to a hospital, where his death was confirmed.
It didn’t mention the two officers who locked him in the back of their car when white gas spewed out, but said federal highway patrol had opened an investigation into the officers’ behavior.
A preliminary autopsy concluded the man died of respiratory failure due to “mechanical asphyxia,” George Fernandes, a spokesman for the Sergipe State Forensic Institute, told the Associated Press news agency.
“This disability can be caused by several factors, and at this early stage it was not possible to determine the immediate cause of the asphyxia, nor how it came about,” the institute’s report said, according to Reuters news agency.
The forensic institute must submit its in-depth final report to the Federal Police within 10 days.
The incident “shocked Brazilian society due to the level of its brutality and revealed the institution’s unwillingness to guarantee that its agents follow basic procedures,” the Brazilian Public Safety Forum, an independent group, said in a statement.
President Jair Bolsonaro said he would learn what happened from the Federal Highway Police. He also mentioned another incident two weeks ago when a man shot and killed two highway cops on duty.
The incident came just days after highway patrol officers took part in an operation in Rio de Janeiro that killed more than 20 people.
Police have said they had no choice but to use deadly force, but reports from residents published in local media have cast doubt on that claim.