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Updated 17:58, 30 July 2008
View a video of the press conference with Camila Campos, the mother of shooting victim Andre Martins' two children, below. (Scroll down to the bottom.)
The Brazilian community all across Massachusetts woke up to a mourning climate. From Cape Cod to Framingham, to Nashua, NH, the main topic was the fatal shooting of house painter Andre Martins, 25, by a Yarmouth Police officer on Sunday, July 27.
"This is the time we have to protest, this is the time we have to fight," said Fausto da Rocha, executive director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center, in Allston, Mass. "Nothing justifies the brutal way this Brazilian worker was shot dead."
The Brazilian Women's Group said in a statement, "We hope that Martins' immigration status will not be used as justification for his death."
Heloisa Galvão, the group's president and founder, classified the incident as a "tragic and unnecessary death." She said she'll be following the news to know how the state authorities will provide Martins' girlfriend, Camila Campos, and their two American-born kids, the support they need to cope with this "horrible situation."
Campos was in the car during the fatal shooting, but she was not injured.
Martins' death seems to have provoked a clash between local residents and individuals in the Brazilian community, which numbers about 14,000 in Cape Cod, where Yarmouth is located.
At Loja da Branca, a store in the heart of nearby Hyannis, where many Brazilian immigrants buy imported groceries and wire money to their families, people talked about the fatal shooting all day.
Many complained about news reports that revealed Martins' past. Barnstable court records show that Martins had been scheduled to go to court next month because of previous cases of driving without a license.
On Monday, July 28, the office of District Attorney Michael O'Keefe released a press release that stated that Martins "was smoking what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette which was still in his mouth as paramedics pulled him from the vehicle."
"Now it's easy to accuse my son. Nothing justifies what they did to him. My son was not a criminal. He committed a mistake of not stopping, but why didn't they shoot the tires?" said Martins' father, Luis Carlos de Castro Martins, speaking by telephone from Brazil, on a radio show for Portuguese-language WSRO (650 AM), in Framingham, Mass., on Tuesday.
Luis Carlos is a police officer in Brazil who is retired but remains on reserve duty as needed. He lived in Hyannis from 2002 to 2005.
Martins senior also said he has always complimented the American police. "They can disarm a criminal without having to draw a shot," he said.
The mention of the marijuana cigarette case triggered the most heated reactions on the live radio show.
With sarcasm, Paulo Arocha, a Brazilian construction worker from Hyannis, said that "if we were to shoot everybody who consumes marijuana around here, you would kill half of the high school."
Caller Mario Felipe, of Framingham, told the WSRO audience that he was more concerned "the community would focus more on the immigration debate than on the real issue: how are the local police trained?"
Last month, the Brazilian community watched with disbelief, via satellite TV, news of an incident in Rio de Janeiro in which police bullet-sprayed a car that had a mother and two kids inside. A 6-year-old boy died in the incident.
The police apparently thought the vehicle belonged to criminals. Now, many in Massachusetts are likening the Rio's and Yarmouth's cases, saying it's all about "shooting first, asking later."
The consul general of Brazil in Boston, Mario Ernane Saade, requested a meeting with Massachusetts Secretary of Public Safety Kevin M. Burke, which may happen this Thursday, July 31.
Speaking to EthnicNEWz.org, Saade said he can "assure the Brazilian community that he'll do everything in his power to make sure there'll be a transparent and thorough investigation."
The consul general also urged Brazilians to respect the laws, drive carefully, and always comply with the police requests.
Camila Campos, who was in the car with Martins during the shooting, has been coping with the death of the father of her two children.
She declined several requests for interviews with EthnicNEWz.org, but three of her friends said on Tuesday that Campos was fired from her job at a gynecologist's office, a position she had for more than a year.
Friends speculate that the employment termination may have occurred because Campos requested one extra day off to deal with her personal situation. (EthnicNEWz.org was not able to confirm these allegations.)
Consul general Saade confirmed that Martins' body has been cleared by state authorities and is ready to be transported to his homeland, Paraná, a state in the south of Brazil.
His father told EthnicNEWz.org he'll fly to the U.S. this Thursday. He wants to fly back to Brazil with his son.
Fausto da Rocha is certain that all in this case comes down to the lack of access that thousands of Brazilian immigrants encounter when trying to get a state-issued driver's license, which Martins did not have.
The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles denied a driver's-license renewal for Martins because of "unresolved issues in New York," according to the Cape Cod Times [2].
"Once again, this case shows that the local authorities are out of touch with this issue. All people want is to be able to go to work. Not having this document creates a climate of fear to many fathers and mothers who live in these communities," said da Rocha.
The Portuguese-speaking community is not the only one affected by Martins' death at the hands of a police officer.
"This incident reflects the climate of fear immigrants live under today. [It] proves, once again, how broken is our immigration system, and how badly we need a solution to the immigration issue," said Thomas Keown, spokesman for the Irish Immigration Center, a Boston non-profit created to serve Irish immigrants but now reaches out to workers from 112 nations.
For Maria Elena Letona, executive director of Cambridge, Mass.-based Centro Presente, it's often after tragedies like the Martins one that communities learn from each other.
"Take the African Americans, for example. They have a history of dealing with the police. When something awful like this happens, we see that we have more in common than not," says Letona, a Salvadorean who has been the head of Centro Presente for nine years.
"That's why we need to united around the Welcoming Boston project [a grassroots campaign to eliminate hostility towards immigrants]....But to reach that point, we first need to learn how to treat undocumented immigrants as human beings, as André Martins was not treated," Letona said.
Martins' death marks the third time, in less than a year in New England, that the Brazilian community has been plagued with questions surrounding the death of one of their own in a controversial situation involving law enforcement.
In August of 2007, Edmar de Araújo, 34, died while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in Providence, RI. The cause of death was listed as a reaction to cocaine use mixed with medication for epilepsy.
A month later, Maxsuel Medeiros, 25, suffered a heart attack in a State Police jail, in Andover, Mass. His death was also caused by use of cocaine, said the medical examiner's report.
Now, André Martins, father of two, was fatally shot by Yarmouth Police Officer Christopher Van Ness after a high-speed chase during which he refused to stop.
Camila Campos held a press conference on July 28, 2008, about the death of Martins, the father of their 2- and 5-year-old children. Click here to see the video [3] (in English), produced by CapeCodOnline.com.
source: EthnicNEWz.org
Copyrht 2008 New England Ethnic News, EthnicNEWz.org. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express permission of the source. Contact Newz for more information.
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