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The First Degree

Episode 357: Terence Freitas

The First Degree

Alexis Linkletter and Jac Vanek

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.5 • 10K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On February 25, 1999, a 24-year-old environmental and Indigenous rights activist and two Native American advocates disappear from Arauca, Colombia, after meeting with local U’Wa people. The U’Wa’s lives and lands are under direct threat from multinational oil extraction, and the activists are there to help facilitate protection of the tribes’ indigenous sovereignty and environment. A week later, their bodies are found near a river, shot to death. And so the long and complicated battle begins for their loved ones to find answers and have the killers held accountable in the midst of political instability and armed conflict. In episode 357, Jac and Alexis detail the heartbreaking case of Terence Freitas, Ingrid Washinawatok, and Lahe’ena’e Gay, and Indigenous communities’ fight against the complex and nuanced geopolitical backdrop of the threat of extractive industries on both fragile ecosystems and their custodians’ very way of life.

Transcript

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0:00.0

The first degree.

0:02.0

First degree.

0:04.0

First degree.

0:05.0

First degree.

0:06.0

First degree.

0:07.0

The first degree.

0:09.0

You see it on the news.

0:10.0

You see it on the paper.

0:11.0

You see it on Facebook.

0:13.0

These things are supposed to happen in movies, not in real life.

0:16.0

And I was like really excited because way later that night, the three of them would be home.

0:27.6

But I got a call that let me know that they had been kidnapped.

0:35.6

Nobody was prepared.

0:36.6

There was nothing, nothing in my experience that prepared me for this.

0:42.3

And like, if there were anybody in the world that I would, like, be able to walk alongside

0:47.5

to go through something like this, it was parents.

0:50.0

And he was dead.

0:51.6

He had been murdered.

0:56.1

Welcome to the first degree, the true crime podcast that you might end up on.

0:59.9

My name is Jack Fannick. I'm sitting here with Alexis Link Letter.

1:02.7

Happy Wednesday, people.

1:04.9

Happy Wednesday, everyone.

...

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