A 3-year-old physical education teacher named Diego dos Santos was murdered in a gym in Brazil on August 20 after a gunman shot him at close range in the city of Esperanca Nova. A surveillance video showed that the man was leading some exercises with a group of seniors when the gunman suddenly walked toward him and shot the teacher in the head. After falling to the ground, the assailant kept shooting dos Santos 15 times before escaping from the scene.
In a statement, Brazil’s Military Police said that the teacher was pronounced dead on the scene and that officials haven’t been able to identify the shooter. However, the force said that the gunman would face “the whole weight of Brazilian justice” and wouldn’t spend too much time free of “his inevitable outcome.” The military police also explained that there were 14 elderly people at the scene at the moment of the shooting, with none of them being harmed. It added that the murder was planned as numerous surveillance videos show that the criminal was following dos Santos on his motorcycle for hours.
Local media reported that dos Santos was killed a day after learning that he was going to be a dad, as his fiancée Ingrid Carbonera told him she was pregnant. While his mother Fatima Callegario is a prominent local politician and is currently running for city council, the military police said the motives that led the assailant to kill dos Santos weren’t political. Instead, they said all the pieces of evidence suggest that the tragedy was nothing more than a “passionate crime.”
The teacher, who was the sports director of the City Hall since 2022, used to teach classes to 60 children and 45 seniors. He was also the coach of a local youth soccer team and was described by his friends and family as a man who “always had a smile on his face” and always loved to share with his loved ones.
Following his death, some journalists and political commentators claimed on social media and local media that his assassination was another episode of the exacerbated crime crisis that Brazil has been dealing with over the last few years. Most of them blamed the left-wing government of Lula da Silva, which has been showing a soft approach to crime as a way of showing that violence can be solved “without executing more violence.”
Some political analysts such as Gustavo Sege have said that Lula has been taking such a disastrous approach because the socialist president promised during his campaign that he would stop the “hardline style” of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula has consistently claimed that his predecessor was a “fascist” who thought he could solve Brazil’s crime crisis by turning the police into a death squad and turning the favelas into “massive bloodbaths.”
