GhLinks Media
David Miranda, a Brazilian congressman and the husband of journalist Glenn Greenwald, has passed away at the age of 37.
Mr Greenwald, 56, took to Twitter to write a heartbreaking tribute Tuesday morning announcing Miranda’s death, alongside photos with their two sons, aged 13 and 15.
Shortly after 8am on Tuesday 9 May, Mr Greenwald wrote: “It is with the most profound sadness that I announce the passing away of my husband, @DavidMirandaRio. He would have turned 38 tomorrow. His death, early this morning, came after a 9-month battle in ICU. He died in full peace, surrounded by our children and family and friends.”
David Miranda cause of death
The cause of death was pancreatitis and a gastrointestinal infection that progressed to septicemia, his doctors told local press.
Miranda was admitted to the ICU at Clínica São Vicente in Rio with severe abdominal pain in August.
Who was David Miranda?
Miranda was born in Rio in 1985 and grew up in the mostly black favela of Jacarezinho, notorious for its violence, poverty and drug dealing. His mother died when he was just five years old and he moved in with his aunt.
He left home at 13 and dropped out of school because he wanted ‘to get to know the world’, working shining shoes and cleaning buildings for six years.
Miranda said his life changed one day in 2005 when he was playing volleyball on Ipanema beach and knocked over an American tourist’s drink.
That tourist was Greenwald and the pair quickly fell in love, moving in together five days later.
‘We’ve been together constantly since,’ Miranda told Time magazine in 2019.
In a New York Times profile of the couple that year, Greenwald remembered: ‘I was not at all the type that ever fell in love with someone at first sight. But the passion, David’s intensity, it was like two asteroids colliding.’
It was Greenwald who introduced Miranda to politics in 2013 when the pair worked alongside a team at The Guardian newspaper to publish Edward Snowden’s bombshell evidence of mass surveillance by the US government.
When he returned to Brazil, Miranda started getting involved in local politics and then in 2016 became the first ever gay man elected to Rio’s city council.
