A federal judge has dismissed the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the parents of Manuel Paez Terán, the 26-year-old activist shot by Georgia state troopers during the long-running "Cop City" protests outside Atlanta.
Judge Steven Grimberg of the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled that the officers' use of lethal force was "objectively reasonable" and that the troopers did not violate Terán's constitutional rights.
The case was dismissed with prejudice. That means it cannot be refiled.
For the activist left, which spent years trying to turn Terán into a martyr and the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center into a symbol of state oppression, the ruling lands like a brick wall at the end of a dead-end street.
Terán, a Venezuelan activist, had been camping in the woods near the construction site for months before the January 18, 2023, shooting. When six troopers approached the tent that day, officers pepper-balled it first, the Daily Mail reported. Then Terán opened fire, wounding a trooper. That fact was not just the state's position. It was acknowledged by the plaintiffs themselves in their own filing.
Judge Grimberg's ruling was unsparing in its clarity: "Because Paez Terán initiated gunfire with the GSP officers, Plaintiffs cannot maintain that Defendants' actions were the proximate cause of the use of deadly force that ultimately ended the decedent's life."
He continued: "Thus, Plaintiffs' proposed amended complaint fails to state a claim for wrongful death."
The judge also held that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields government officials performing discretionary duties from civil liability when their conduct does not violate clearly established constitutional rights. The family's Fourth Amendment claim was rejected outright.
For over two years, activists and sympathetic media outlets labored to construct a very specific story around this shooting. Terán's mother, through her lawsuit, described the killing as an "assassination in cold blood." An independent autopsy revealed Terán was hit 57 times, a detail that became a centerpiece of protest rhetoric. Body-cam footage from four officers involved failed to show the shooting itself, which activists seized on as proof of a cover-up.
What that framing consistently omitted was the most important fact in the case: Terán shot first.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it captured the initial encounter and traced the bullet that struck the trooper to a pistol legally purchased in 2020. Officers had warned that remaining on the site would result in arrest for criminal trespass. Terán chose to stay. Then chose to fire.
The family's attorneys, Jeff Filipovits and Wingo Smith, released a statement saying Terán's parents were "devastated" by the ruling: "They feel they are being denied the accountability they deserve."
They added that "the records of their child's death still have not been publicly released" and that the family would be "reviewing all their legal options." But it is difficult to see what legal options survive a dismissal with prejudice built on facts the plaintiffs themselves conceded.
The $115 million, 85-acre Atlanta Public Safety Training Center was never the rogue project its opponents made it out to be. Consider the timeline:
This was democratic governance in action, approved by elected officials, affirmed by a public vote. The opposition to it was never really about trees or environmental concerns, though those were the decorative arguments. It was about a broader ideological hostility toward law enforcement that metastasized during the 2020 racial justice protests and never fully receded.
Activists set up encampments. They occupied the woods. Some escalated to destruction and violence. The unrest triggered a 2023 racketeering indictment against 61 protesters, which was later dismissed by a Fulton County judge. Republican Attorney General Chris Carr is appealing that dismissal.
The pattern is familiar. A lawful project moves through democratic channels. A radical fringe rejects the outcome. Protest escalates to occupation. Occupation escalates to confrontation. Someone gets hurt. And then the people who created the confrontation demand accountability from the people who responded to it.
Judge Grimberg's decision does not just close a single lawsuit. It establishes, in the clearest possible legal terms, that officers who are fired upon may fire back, and that doing so does not create constitutional liability. That should not require a federal ruling to confirm. But in an era where every use of force by law enforcement is treated as presumptively criminal by activist lawyers and sympathetic press, apparently it does.
The left wanted "Cop City" to be its next cause célèbre, a rallying point against policing itself. They wanted Terán to be a symbol. The courts looked at the evidence and saw something far less convenient: a person who shot a trooper and was shot in return.
Symbols are useful. Facts are stubborn.