On June 9, 2021 four members of one family were killed at a smallholding on the edge of Brazil’s Federal District: Claudio Vidal, forty-eight, his sons Gustavo Marques, twenty-one, and Carlos Eduardo Marques, fifteen, and Cleonice Marques, who was taken from the house alive and found dead three days later. The man police named was Lazaro Barbosa de Sousa, thirty-two, a farm labourer from Barra do Mendes in Bahia who had been at large since escaping prison in 2018.
What followed was one of the largest manhunts in recent Brazilian memory and it lasted about twenty days. Roughly three hundred officers from the Goias and Federal District civil and military police, the highway police and the federal police worked a cordon of more than ten square kilometres of cerrado scrub with dogs and helicopters. He moved through the bush, slept in trees and on riverbanks, sheltered in empty sheds, took hostages repeatedly and released them, stole cars and burned one to break the trail, and exchanged fire with police more than once. Residents of Cocalzinho de Goias left their homes. The Goias security secretary said publicly that he believed Barbosa was being sheltered by a criminal network, and two men were arrested on suspicion of hiding him.
It ended on June 28 at the house of his former mother-in-law at Aguas Lindas de Goias. The security secretary, Rodney Miranda, said Barbosa fired a .380 pistol at the officers who found him and that they shot back. He was taken to the Hospital Municipal Bom Jesus and the Goias forensic police confirmed his death. President Jair Bolsonaro marked it on social media the same afternoon with three words in capitals, announcing that Lazaro’s taxpayer registration had been cancelled.
He was thirty-two and he had never stood trial for a killing. Police first arrested him in Bahia in 2007 over two deaths; he escaped custody within ten days and moved to the Federal District. Arrested again in Brasilia in 2009, he was convicted there of theft, rape and illegal possession of a firearm, which are the only convictions he ever received. He escaped Papuda prison during an Easter outing organised by the institution. He was detained again in March 2018, suspected of aggravated homicide, illegal firearm possession, robbery and rape, and escaped that July with three other prisoners through a hole cut in the roof. By 2021 he was the only one of the four who had not been recaptured.
Police attributed six killings to him in total across those fourteen years, and injuries to three other people. In the weeks before the family were killed he was accused of two home invasions in the same region, in April and May 2021, in which people were held captive and a woman was raped. None of that was tested in a courtroom either.
A medical team that examined him in prison in 2013 concluded he had serious mental health problems, describing him as impulsive, anxious and unstable. The press gave him several names, among them the Executioner of Incra 9 and the Killer of Goias.
What the record therefore holds is a police attribution rather than a verdict. Four of the six deaths have surviving witnesses, hostages who were released and physical evidence, and the case against him was strong enough that few in Brazil doubted it. But he was shot before any of it was put to a court, and the only findings a judge ever made against Lazaro Barbosa de Sousa concern theft, rape and a firearm.