[3] The details of Lopes's death received substantial attention in Brazil's media because of the barbarity of the crime and due to it highlighting the existence of poder paralelo (parallel power) within Rio—meaning criminals controlling areas of the city with impunity.

Cachaça saw the story and commented to a sambista friend, Monarco, of the Velha Guarda da Portela, that Lopes's reporting was "the best material that he had ever seen" on Mangueira.

[7] Lopes was one of the founders of the Carnaval bloco, "Simpatia é quase amor" (Sympathy is almost like love) of Ipanema, and had served as an official judge of the annual carnival procession at the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí.

[4][13] Lopes won a Brazilian journalism award called the Prêmio Abril de Jornalismo in both 1985 and 1986 for feature stories involving football in the sports magazine Placar.

[8] Tim Lopes's journalism colleagues described him as an old-school type reporter who gleaned his stories from researching on the street as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing the Internet for ideas.

[10] A consistent theme of Tim Lopes's reporting was to show how low-income citizens living within Rio's favelas could be subjected to terror and powerlessness under the 'law of the traffickers.

His aim was to shine a journalistic light on the risks posed to ordinary citizens of Rio of being mugged or assaulted by thieves, as this was a particularly acute reality at that time.

During the course of the investigation, Lopes witnessed a dramatic scene which was all caught on camera: A group of teenagers mug a pedestrian couple in Rio's Centro business district, with one of the thieves wielding a large knife.

When a taxi driver scares the mugger off by firing a revolver, the boy runs into heavy traffic on Avenida Presidente Vargas and is violently killed when he is hit by a city bus.

Several Globo cameras were filming the entire episode from different angles, which was shown during the report (a black bar covered a portion of the frame at the moment the boy was killed).

[18] Lopes had previously confided to colleagues that he was feeling tired and wanted to take a break from the agitation and violence of the city and find a rural retreat somewhere where he could recuperate.

In addition to drug selling, traffickers in certain favelas were sexually exploiting minors from the community at their baile funk,[4] sometimes forcing girls to put on explicit shows by having sex out in the open against a wall at these events.

"[4][10] After leaving his office that afternoon at the Rede Globo television studios, where he left his "cell phone, wallet, and dress shirt," Lopes went to the Penha Shopping Mall where he rigged himself with a hidden camera.

On the afternoon of June 2, Lopes decided to film at a boca de fumo (a drug-selling location) along Rua Oito (Eighth Street) in the Vila Cruzeiro favela.

[10] Inside Vila Cruzeiro, Lopes went to a bar and bought a beer, then walked across the street and hung out on the sidewalk while filming armed traffickers driving by on motorcycles.

[4][24] The traffickers drove Lopes along a winding back dirt road leading away from the Vila Cruzeiro favela (which is situated in Penha) and into the Complexo do Alemão network of favelas,[4] a distance of about 5 kilometers (3.1 miles)[10] on winding roads through hilly terrain (this also being the same route used by groups of fleeing criminals brandishing assault rifles when military police units and the Brazilian military invaded Vila Cruzeiro during the 2010 Rio de Janeiro security crisis).

For many years these hilltops were used by leaders of drug trafficking gangs as sanctuary from law enforcement; they now feature the stations of a gondola transport system connecting the Complexo, operational since July 2011.

Detective Daniel Gomes learned through speaking to shopkeepers and others in Vila Cruzeiro that Lopes had arrived at the favela in the afternoon and was accosted by traffickers at around 8:00.

[31] At that time, a Globo attorney entered a nearby police station with the driver from the previous night and spoke with Inspector Daniel Gomes, the chief detective in charge of the Lopes case.

When Gomes started investigating in Vila Cruzeiro that Monday, the word on the street was electric, as residents spoke about a man who had been captured and beaten by traffickers.

[27]Days after Lopes' disappearance, two suspect traficantes (traffickers) were arrested by the 38ª DP-Brás de Pina Military Police in the Morro da Caixa DÁgua (Water Box Hill), which is in Penha near Vila Cruzeiro.

[10] The Globo program Jornal Nacional subsequently televised a response, including an editorial by newscaster William Bonner criticizing Gomes' report.

Then going by the name Cinqüenta (Fifty), he was a 12-year-old boy in 2002 when he was told to buy diesel fuel and bring it to the top of the hill in order to set fire to Lopes.

Among those convicted of Lopes's murder, Claudino dos Santos Coelho (Xuxa), and Cláudio Orlando do Nascimento (Ratinho - Little Rat) were each sentenced to 23 years and 6 months' incarceration.

[40] Claudino dos Santos Coelho (known by the nicknames Xuxa and Russão) escaped from the Bangu penitentiary in Rio's Zona Oeste (West Zone) in February 2013, along with 30 other prisoners by tunneling to a sewer.

[41] By September 2013 he was one of those leading a gang of sixty heavily armed bandits ensconced in the jungled hills above Rio (between Covanca and Lins de Vasconcelos) as a home base from which they preyed on neighborhoods.

[52][53] Rio journalist Jorge Antonio Barros, who has been writing about Rio's favelas and the crime beat since the 1980s and was a colleague of Lopes at Globo, wrote that Lopes's death served to snap him out of the dream state, to which people sometimes fall prey, of romanticizing "the malandro;" and that his death reminded people who don't have to live in favelas under the "law of the trafficker" of the terror that exists as a daily reality.

Seabra wrote in response to Lopes's death that the culture of crime reporting at that time needed to change: "We're tired of giving the criminals the front page.

)[10] In June 2012, ten years after Tim Lopes's death, the Complexo do Alemão began to be under the umbrella of eight new Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) at the predetermined conclusion of the military's presence.

[65] One of the UPPs within the Complexo covers the area of the Pedra do Sapo, which is the hill and upper field where an anonymous tip led detectives to discover a clandestine cemetery which contained some fragments of Lopes's bones and some of his personal effects.