Luana Barbosa
08.04.2016 sp/br
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Case Luana Barbosa dos Reis
Black, lesbian, young, and peripheral woman, who was taking her son to the IT course, was beaten and killed by three male military police officers, in the interior of São Paulo.
victims
Luana Barbosa dos Santos Reis
Age
34 anos
Race
Black
status
awaiting trial
City
ribeirão preto, sp
date
08.04.2016
Introduction
Luana Barbosa dos Reis Santos, a black woman from the outskirts of Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of São Paulo, lesbian and mother of Luan dos Reis, was brutally beaten by three male military police officers on April 8, 2016. Following the incident, on April 13 of the same year, at the age of 34, with brain injuries caused by the wounds she sustained, Luana passed away.
The involved military police officers are free: one of them retired in 2017 and, according to a report by Alma Preta Journalism, in 2018, the Public Security Secretariat reported that one of the officers returned to work in "operational activity" in Ribeirão Preto, even with the case under investigation. The family is still awaiting a response from the judiciary, after more than six years of proceedings in the 1st Jury and Criminal Executions Court of the District of Ribeirão Preto – in September 2021, the 4th Criminal Chamber of the São Paulo Court of Justice removed the qualifiers and maintained the indictment of the defendants under article 121, caput, of the Penal Code.
We know that organizing a protest in a small town is difficult to mobilize many people, especially when it involves the death of a black person and, in this case, an LGBT black woman. So, the mobilization it was something that also attracted attention
”Pedro Borges, journalist Alma Preta
Report from family members
Luana Barbosa's family, alongside social movements, has been tirelessly fighting for the accountability of the police officers involved in Luana's murder. The family's view of the case is that Luana was never treated as a human being; instead, she was cornered like an animal and treated as if she were the defendant in the process. Roseli Barbosa dos Reis, Luana's sister, emphasizes that the police officers' actions were directed and driven by the fact that Luana was a lesbian, black, and from the periphery—a condition that Luana experienced every day since her birth. Roseli equates the dehumanization of Luana to a common behavior of the Brazilian Judiciary, which overlooks the occurrence of deaths, the existence of witnesses to police brutality.
“They approach her in an aggressive way and put her on the wall and say they don’t accept that my sister is a woman.”
Roseli Barbosa dos Reis
English 
Portuguese