The student at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj) Matheus Passarelli Simões Vieira, aged 21, missing since April 29, was murdered in a favela in the north of Rio de Janeiro, the Civil Police confirmed this Monday , 7. His body would have been burned by drug traffickers. The boy had left a party alone in the Encantado neighborhood, in the north zone, and gave no further news. According to Gabriel Passarelli Simões Vieira, Matheus' brother, the boy was sought out this week by friends, who spread posters in the area where he disappeared and created a campaign on social media in search of information, with the hashtag #CadeMatheusPassarelli. He was a Visual Arts student at Uerj and also studied at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts. He identified with both the male and female gender, and was sometimes called Matheus, sometimes Matheusa. There is a suspicion that the crime was motivated by LGBTphobia. The Paradeiros Discovery Police Station, which is investigating the case, reported that Matheus was murdered in the early hours of the 29th, upon leaving a party in Morro do 18. The perpetrator of the crime has not yet been identified, nor has the motivation yet according to the police. . The body was located. But the police did not say whether it was charred. “There is no other information that can be disclosed without jeopardizing the investigations,” he said. The family is from Rio Bonito, in the interior of Rio. Matheus and Gabriel moved to the capital to study. Gabriel is studying Occupational Therapy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). The Dean of Student Policies at UFRJ had expressed its attention to the case last week, stating, in an official note, that “due to her LGBTQ identity, a population commonly exposed to violence, the disappearance of Matheusa, as she is also known, , inspires us with reinforced concern.” The brother wrote an emotional text on Facebook, published on Sunday, the 6th, in which he said that Matheus was the person he loved most in his life. “About his body, also according to information collected by DDPA, it was burned, and there are few possibilities of finding any materiality, in addition to the thousands that Matheusa left behind in life, and which will greatly help us to give new meaning to the brutal reality that we are living” , says the text, which mentions the student’s artistic production. “Unfortunately, the latest information that reached us and the public institution that is developing the investigation process demonstrates different sides of the cruelty to which we are subjected”, he lamented. “And, 'if there has to be a dichotomy between love and hate, I choose love', at that moment, I continue to choose love, because I know that like this phrase, my sister writes this on the bodies of everyone who has ever been and still will be crossed by the existence of MATHEUSA”.
