By the time he got to Oaxaca he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a one-named Brazilian filmmaker who produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” But in the end there were no noble last words. Just an image, the last one he filmed: the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.

Jeff Sharlet on the life and death of activist-journalist Brad Will. Read more stories from Sharlet in the Longreads Archive.

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