Marielle Franco

 ( 1979 Births ) 

The next day, Franco attended a round-table discussion titled "Young Black Women Moving Power Structures" (). Less than two hours after leaving the round-table, she and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, were fatally shot by two men who were driving another car. The men fired nine shots at them, four of which struck Franco – three in the head and one in the neck. Franco's press officer was next to her in the back seat and was injured, but survived.

Marcelo Freixo, a Rio de Janeiro legislative assembly member from PSOL who came to the scene shortly after hearing of her killing, determined that the bullets had been directed at her in a clear execution. According to the Rio de Janeiro police, the direction of the nine shots supports the hypothesis that Franco was assassinated. The bullets that killed Franco are from a batch bought by the federal police in Brasília in 2006; Minister of Public Security Raul Jungmann later said that they were stolen from a post office storage facility in Paraíba, but the ministry subsequently retracted this explanation after the Post Office publicly denied it.

In January 2019, police arrested Ronald Paulo Alves Pereira and issued a warrant for Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, both suspects in Franco's assassination. Each suspect received honors from president Jair Bolsonaro's son Flávio Bolsonaro in the early 2000s. Nóbrega's wife and mother were still being employed in Flávio Bolsonaro's office in 2018.

In March 2019, police arrested two suspects, former members of the military police allegedly tied to a vigilante militia, for the murder. Prior to their arrest, both suspects had pictures taken with former President Jair Bolsonaro, and one was his neighbor at a luxury apartment complex in Rio. In November 2019, following leaked reports that President Bolsonaro had been in touch with one of the main suspects of the shooting, a number of Brazilian media outlets reported that police were investigating possible ties of his second son, Carlos Bolsonaro, to the case. In 2020, then-governor of Rio de Janeiro Wilson Witzel admitted on television to having interfered in investigations of her death.

On October 31, 2024, a court sentenced former police officers Ronnie Lessa and Élcio Vieira de Queiroz to 59 and 78 years in prison, respectively, for Franco's assassination.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose husband David Miranda was a fellow City Council member at the time of her assassination and was a close personal friend of Franco's, listed what he referred to as the "most important subjects to cover" regarding Franco's assassination stating:

Her relentless and brave activism against the most lawless police battalions, her opposition to military intervention, and, most threateningly of all, her growing power as a black, gay woman from the favela seeking not to join Brazil's power structure, but to subvert it.

The double murder of Marielle and her driver Anderson was the subject of condemnation across the political spectrum in Brazil. All presidential candidates in Brazil during the 2018 campaign condemned the crime, except for former President Jair Bolsonaro, who repeatedly declined to comment on the case; his campaign alleged that his views on the subject would be too controversial, despite his being the campaign that most focused on security issues prior to election day.

In 2022, President Lula announced the appointment of her sister, Anielle Franco, as Minister of Racial Equality.

Amnesty International included Franco's name in its campaign for those who wrote for human rights and lost their lives, while an update was made and an online tribute listed Franco among over 400 human rights advocates for women by the Association for Women's Rights in Development.

A docu-series titled Marielle – O Documentário was released by Globoplay on 13 March 2020.

Version 19 of antiX, a Linux distribution based on Debian Stable, is named after Marielle Franco.