RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Police arrested a man and two teenagers for the killing of an American professor and said the three were drunk and high on cocaine when one of them shot James Petersen in an Amazon rainforest town.
Welison Cornelio de Oliveira, 18, confessed to the Saturday killing of Petersen, the 51-year-old chairman of the University of Vermont’s anthropology department, a police inspector said Monday.
Inspector Normando Barbosa said the three robbed a restaurant where Petersen and a Brazilian archaeologist were dining Saturday in the town of Iranduba, about 1,800 miles northwest of Rio.
As they were leaving the restaurant, Oliveira turned and shot Petersen once in the chest, Barbosa said by telephone. The American died on the way to the hospital.
“They thought (Petersen) was going to resist,” Barbosa said. “It just shows how unprepared they were. They were drunk and drugged.”
Police also arrested Janderson Pereira da Silva, 23, and Ricardo Pereira de Lima, 16, who were with Oliveira at the restaurant. Officials recovered an identity card, a driver’s license, credit cards and other documents belonging to Petersen and his Brazilian colleague, archaeologist Eduardo Neves.
“It was a gang that got together to rob the restaurant,” Barbosa said. “Petersen just had the bad luck to be there at the wrong time.”
Petersen, a former professor at the University of Maine at Farmington and the University of Maine, was investigating the life of native tribes in Brazil before the first Portuguese explorers arrived here in 1500.
Police are searching for two other men – former Amazonas state police officer Ronaldo Costa dos Santos and his son – who are the suspected leaders of the gang.
“They owned the house where we found them. They owned the guns and the motorcycles they used,” he said.
Police set up roadblocks and sent teams of trackers into the thick, steamy jungle around Iranduba to search for dos Santos but failed to find him, Barbosa said.
The body of Petersen, a native of Salisbury, Vt., was taken to the morgue in Manaus, a river city of 1.5 million people near Iranduba. Morgue officials released it Monday, and the body was to be flown to Rio and returned to the United States.
The U.S. embassy in Brasilia, the capital, was following developments but could not comment on the crime because Petersen’s family had not waived the Privacy Act, the embassy’s press office said.
Petersen was the second American murdered in the Brazilian Amazon this year. In February, U.S. nun Dorothy Stang was shot and killed by hired gunmen when she tried to preserve a stretch of rainforest that a local rancher wanted to cut down.
In December 2001, pirates on the Amazon River shot and killed two-time America’s Cup winner Peter Blake of New Zealand, who was on a worldwide expedition to monitor global warming and pollution aboard his 119-foot yacht.
In an interview with Vermont Quarterly, he called his Amazon research “some of the richest, most exciting archaeology anywhere on the planet.”
Petersen and his work will be sorely missed, his colleague said.
“He had many friends and a broad vision of archaeology,” Neves said. “It’s an incalculable loss.”
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