Brad Will

We were making a home out of a crumbling building. The interior of the building needed help, and we brought that building back to life. It was standing strong. And the only reason it was standing was because people were living in it. If we had let it go the way the city wanted it to go– they tore out the stairwell, they punched holes in the roof. The water– the rain was rotting that building from the inside out. We replaced the joists. We rebuilt the floors. We sheet rocked the walls and made the building alive. What did they do? They killed it. That building is over a hundred years old. It was standing strong.

Traveling under a tourist visa, Will arrived in Oaxaca in early October 2006 in order to document and film the teachers' strike. On October 27, he was videotaping near a barricade erected by pro-strike protesters when he was shot twice. In the last few minutes of the video Will filmed before being shot, voices speaking in Spanish are heard demanding that filming be stopped and cameras be turned off. In the final seconds of the video a voice in Spanish reprimands Will for not having turned off the camera. In the middle of this statement a gunshot is heard, there is a scream, the camera pans down to the ground and the video ends.

During a news conference on October 29, 2006, Oaxaca mayor Manuel Martínez said that four men, all local public officials, were being detained in connection with the shooting.

On November 11 and 12, 2006, Friends of Brad Will organized a gathering in New York City to commemorate Will's life. The event included a memorial service at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery attended by 250 people, as well as speeches and concerts. Outside the church was an array of freegan food as well as a pile of Will's personal possessions, from which attendees were urged to take. It was followed by a procession through the East Village described by The Villager as "jubilant and rowdy", which culminated in marchers breaking into the former CHARAS/El Bohio - inside which they cavorted, scrawled graffiti, twirled fire bolas and cycled - for about 20 minutes.

In 2000, while visiting the Czech Republic Will attended a protest in Prague against the International Monetary Fund Summit. He later traveled through South America while participating in anti-globalization. He reached Ecuador, Argentina, Chiapas and Brazil in that trip.

In 1998, he and partner Hazel spoke at the Ecosaloon, a weekly activism forum held on Tuesday evenings at the Wetlands Preserve nightclub. Their presentation connected the struggle to defend the forests of the Pacific Northwest with the fight against the gentrification of Manhattan's Lower East Side. After helping to organize Buy Nothing Day and a Reclaim the Streets protest in Times Square, Will traveled to Seattle for the 1999 WTO protests, and was a long-standing participant in the New York City Direct Action Network (DAN) and New York Independent Media Center (IMC). In August 2001 he joined participants for a roving exploration of usable food in Tribeca garbage; they were accompanied by a TV crew from PBS's Life 360. In his latter years, Will began recording documentary videos, releasing them on the internet through the Indymedia network of websites. During the summer of 2006, Will continued videotaping demonstrations, including a June 15 protest at the Mexican Consulate in response to a police incursion into a teacher's plantón (encampment). On June 29 he video-recorded and helped organize a protest against Victoria's Secret at the Manhattan Mall in response to the resources used to print the high volume of mail-order catalogs which the company mails out. He also filmed a street theater performance by the group A for Anarchy, organized in response to the release of the film V for Vendetta. At the time of his death, he was working on a documentary about folk punk music.

Will was born in Evanston, Illinois, and raised in Kenilworth. He graduated from New Trier High School in 1988, then attended Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A. in English. Beginning in the summer of 1991, he was a regular attendee at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the summer writing program of Naropa University and was a teaching assistant to Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey). In 1995, after spending time at Dreamtime Village in southwest Wisconsin, he moved to Manhattan where he squatted on the Lower East Side before moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Bradley Roland Will (June 14, 1970 – October 27, 2006) was an American activist, videographer and journalist. He was affiliated with Indymedia. On October 27, 2006 during a labor dispute in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, Will was shot twice, possibly by government-aligned paramilitaries, resulting in his death.