On the evening of 2 April 2015, Betinho Casas Novas gets pictures and news on his smartphone of a boy who was killed, grabs his gear and runs. As fast as he can, he runs through the alleys of the Complexo do Alemão, a favela consisting of 25 settlements whose thousands of tiny brick houses stretch across several valleys and mountains north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Suddenly, shots roar through the alleys.

Forty minutes pass: shootings between police and drug gangs stall his progress. By telephone, relatives of the dead boy guide him to the crime scene. When he arrives, the people applaud him – because he is one of them, a guy from the favela. But Casas Novas is afraid that he will pass out. ‘Filming a dead boy with a hole in his head, bleeding, his body destroyed – I didn't know if I could do it’, he says.

That night, he just begins to film, takes photos and lets himself be told what has happened. Terezinha de Jesus Ferreira was sitting in front of the television with her son Eduardo. The 10-year-old went to the door to wait for his sister. All of a sudden, there was a crash. Terezinha ran outside and found her son dead in a pool of blood. Struck by a single shot to the back of his head, from a distance of 10 meters, by a policeman.

Casas Novas documents the tumult: how neighbours gather at the scene, how policemen push the crowd away from the body at gunpoint, how the mother almost collapses. Children cry. Fear of the police mixes with anger and powerlessness. ‘Murderers!’ women scream. ‘Cowards!’ He publishes the photos on social media – Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. They are immediately clicked on and shared.

The video, which he edited during the night, was watched by thousands on YouTube within a short time span; today it stands at 16,000 clicks. TV stations request Casas Novas for the footage for their coverage. ‘The big media didn't come to the favela that night’, he says. ‘Luckily, my video was so successful – otherwise Eduardo would have been just another number in the statistics.’

Youth Falling Victim to the Violence

In the violence-ridden favelas of Complexo do Alemão, the police often act as if they are above the law.