It was not even 10pm and the football match she was watching on TV had still not finished when Luyara Franco, then 19, decided to go to bed.
But then the phone started ringing.
First, a friend called and asked if she was all right. “I said yes, found it strange, and she hung up,” Luyara recalled. Then an ex-boyfriend called: “He said he was working up the courage to tell me what had happened.”
In shock, she returned to the living room. “I think something’s happened to my mother,” Luyara remembers saying.
Her grandfather switched the TV to a news channel, and it didn’t take long for the devastating headline to appear: Luyara’s mother, the Rio city councillor Marielle Franco, 38, had been murdered.
“That long night has still not ended,” said Luyara, now 25.
On Wednesday, six years and seven months after the assassination of Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, 39, the two former police officers accused of carrying out the March 2018 crime will face trial.
Ronnie Lessa, who has confessed to firing the shots, and Écio de Queiroz, who has confessed to driving the getaway car, will be tried in Rio for double homicide and the attempted murder of Fernanda Chaves, who was Franco’s press officer and the only survivor of the attack.
“It’s the first step toward the justice we’ve been waiting for for so long. We need this answer,” said Luyara.
The crime was one of the most shocking and high-profile murders in Rio’s history: Franco, a gay Black woman, was a rising political star, and an outspoken critic of police violence and corruption.
But the path to the trial has been long and tortuous.
Lessa and Queiroz were arrested about a year after the crime, but the inquiry, initially led by the Rio state police, ran into a string of obstacles, including the destruction of evidence, frequent changes in lead investigators and the resignation of two prosecutors who denounced efforts to hinder their work.
It was only when the federal police took over at the beginning of 2023 that the case began to progress. In March, the three alleged masterminds were arrested: two influential Rio politicians, Domingos and Chiquinho Brazão, and Rivaldo Barbosa, a former head of the police who was in charge of the homicide unit when Franco was killed.
According to the federal police, the Brazão brothers – who have long been accused of involvement with paramilitary mafia groups known as militias – ordered the killing after becoming frustrated by Franco’s attempts to disrupt lucrative housing development plans. In his statement, Lessa said that he was promised land as payment for the murders.
Barbosa is alleged to have helped plan and cover up the murder. Lawyers for the three men deny the allegations.
As Domingos was an adviser to Rio’s court of auditors, he can only be tried by a higher court, so the case against the three alleged masterminds is being heard at the Brazilian supreme court. The initial arguments were concluded on Monday, and a date for their trial has yet to be set.
“The investigations have revealed how the relationships between politics, crime and the police are very explicit in Rio, reaching even the highest levels of public administration,” said Daniel Hirata, a security specialist from Rio’s Fluminense Federal University.
The case against the men who carried out the killing is at a more advanced stage in Rio’s court of justice, and given the confessions, there is an expectation of conviction in the jury trial that is expected to last at least two days. Lessa and Queiroz will testify via video calls from their prisons.
The sole survivor, Chaves, who was in the bullet-riddled car, will also testify remotely. After the murder she and her family fled abroad for a while, and now live in Brasília.
“I don’t feel safe in Rio any more,” she said, adding: “It’s frightening the extent to which Rio has deteriorated. Organised crime is present in all spheres of power … Achieving justice for Marielle also means advancing the fight against organised crime and freeing Rio from these criminals”.
After her assassination, Marielle – who was already well known in Rio, having been the fifth most-voted-for councillor in her first election – became a national and even global icon. Four of her former aides were elected as congresswomen in the first election after the crime.
Marielle’s sister, Anielle, founded an institute to preserve Marielle’s memory and encourage women’s participation in politics. Since Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration began in 2023, Anielle has been Brazil’s minister of racial equality.
On Wednesday morning, a small crowd of supporters chanted “justice” as the families of Franco and Gomes arrived for the trial. Franco’s mother, Marinete Silva, told reporters she felt as if she were reliving the day of the murder. “It feels like going through that pain all over again, but today we’re here to try to overcome it. [We are here] to say that this isn’t normal, that something like this shouldn’t happen anywhere.”
Luyara, Franco’s daughter, said: “It’s important for people to understand that you cannot plan to take the life of a Black female politician, elected with more than 46,000 votes, and think that nothing will happen.”
