LONDON (AP) — It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to have the most traumatic event of your life reenacted as television drama.
For one Brazilian family, it is cathartic.
“I want them to see the reality that my boy was innocent,” said 80-year-old Maria de Menezes, whose son was shot dead by London police in 2005 after being mistaken for a suicide bomber. The shooting remains a scar on the reputation of the Metropolitan Police, and an unhealed wound for the dead man’s family.
“Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes,” which will be released April 30 on Disney+, dramatizes the killing of the 27-year-old electrician, which happened a day after failed bombing attempts on the London Underground. The botched attacks, in which the home-made explosives failed to detonate, came two weeks after suicide bombers attacked three London subway trains and a bus on July 7, killing 52 people.
De Menezes, who lived in an apartment building that police believed was home to one of the on-the-run suspects, was on his way to work when he was shot seven times at close range by police who followed him onto a subway carriage. The two officers who shot him testified at an inquest that they believed de Menezes was one of the failed bombers.
Missteps and misinformation
Screenwriter Jeff Pope said a “poorly planned and poorly executed” police operation was followed “by obfuscation, by denial, by evasion.”
“And that has denied his family proper closure,” said Pope, whose previous forays into fact-based drama include Laurel and Hardy biopic “Stan & Ollie” and Irish church-abuse story “Philomena,” which garnered him an Academy Award nomination.
The first two episodes of the four-part miniseries recreate the build-up to the shooting with agonizing suspense, showing how bad luck and police missteps led to tragedy at a time when the city was on edge and officers under intense pressure.
The surveillance officer watching the building where de Menezes lived had stopped to urinate and didn’t get a good look at him. The team of armed officers was too late to stop him as he made his way by bus to a subway station and boarded a train.
“There’s so much horrendous chance involved,” Pope said. “But it was the misinformation that really got me.”
The police force initially told reporters de Menezes’ bulky clothing and panicked manner had caused commanders to fear he was a suicide bomber, and that he ignored a shouted warning from officers before being shot.
Those claims were contradicted by witnesses and rejected by an inquest jury. But false details lingered. “Suspect” is, in part, an exploration of the long afterlife of false information.
Like millions of people in Britain, Pope said he vividly remembers the 7/7 bombings and the shooting of de Menezes 15 days later. But he said that “at the back of my mind, I had retained these details – that unfortunately he was wearing bulky clothing. He’d vaulted the barriers, he’d run down the escalator, and that somehow his behavior tragically had led to his death.”
“I then started to really dig into it … and what I discovered made me angry because it’s not true,” he said.
In Pope’s telling, misinformation about the shooting spread not through an organized cover-up but through confusion and buck-passing, as police officers closed ranks to protect the force’s reputation.
No officers were charged over the killing, though the Metropolitan Police force was fined for endangering public safety.
A family's long battle
De Menezes’ family waged a long legal battle for accountability that included suing the police in civil court. That case was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2009. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that British authorities were correct not to charge any police officers.
Both Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of the botched surveillance operation, and then-Metropolitan Police chief Ian Blair were cleared of wrongdoing. Dick rose to become head of the force. Blair was later appointed to the House of Lords.
The series comes not long after ITV's “Mr. Bates vs The Post Office” and Netflix drama “Adolescence,” two recent British docudramas that started conversations and sparked pressure for action on social ills – respectively, a miscarriage of justice that led to the prosecution hundreds of post office managers and the pernicious impact of social media on children.
Actor Russell Tovey, who plays Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, a senior officer who pressed the force to set the record straight, said “Suspect” is “a hard watch and it’s disappointing watch,” because there is no big moment where justice is served.
But he believes art can "change perceptions and hold people accountable.”
“A drama in your living room hits home quicker than any government rhetoric, quicker than any op-ed piece," Tovey said. "Drama changes the world.”
Twenty years after his death, the show also restores the humanity of de Menezes, played by newcomer Edison Alcaide. He’s not just a victim, but a rounded person, building a life in London and with a much-loved family back in Brazil.
For that reason among others, de Menezes’ family welcomes the series.
“I want to believe that from now on things will be different," Maria de Menezes said. “That the people who doubt the truth, they will see it and believe it’s real — that the boy was not guilty of anything, that the boy was innocent.
"They killed an innocent boy.”
Hilary Fox And Jill Lawless, The Associated Press
