EMEF Eber Louzada Zippinotti sits in Jardim da Penha, a middle-class neighborhood in the Vitória capital of Espírito Santo. It is a municipal elementary school, serving the early grades, and on the afternoon of August 19, 2022, students were in their classrooms. Trad first tried to walk through the front entrance claiming he had a meeting. When school staff refused to let him in, he walked to a wall and climbed over, dropping one of his backpacks behind him. Inside the school grounds, he found a classroom and entered. He raised the crossbow. A school coordinator pushed him back out of the room. He reloaded. Mistaking her for a different coordinator - someone he had remembered from his days as a student - he shot her in the leg with the crossbow.

As Trad reloaded his crossbow again, a physical education teacher made the decision the next generation of counterfactuals would be built around: he tackled him. An off-duty police officer who had been at the school for reasons unrelated to the attack helped tie and immobilize him. When the Military Police arrived minutes later, Trad was already restrained. No one died. The coordinator he had shot survived. The victims of his planning were three adults who chose to confront an armed attacker instead of running, and the wounded coordinator who kept her composure while bleeding. Later, investigators found that Trad had told officers his intention had been to kill as many people as possible. While he was being restrained, he reportedly said: "Wow, what a fucking failure, even Timur Bekmansurov was better than me" - a reference to the gunman who killed six people at Perm State University in Russia in 2021.

Trad had been working on this day for three years. He began planning in 2019 after what he described as being bullied during his time at the school, and his inspiration was the Suzano massacre earlier that year, where two former students killed seven people at their old high school before taking their own lives. Trad came from a family with a strong military tradition - his father and grandfather had served in the Brazilian Armed Forces. As an adolescent, he was described as introverted, intensely interested in computers and online games, and increasingly withdrawn in the months leading up to the attack. In the hours before he left home on August 19, he spent a long stretch playing Morimiya Middle School Shooting, a Japanese role-playing game in which a young woman attacks her school before being confronted by police.

Trad was arrested for attempted murder. In May 2023, one attempted murder charge was downgraded to unlawful restraint after Trad claimed during proceedings that his true intent had been to provoke police into killing him - a scenario known as suicide by cop - rather than actually murder anyone. Court-appointed psychiatrists found him criminally sane, aware of the consequences of his actions. His father was separately charged with procedural fraud after he destroyed Trad's cell phone in front of a police station hours after the attack. As of late 2025, Trad had not yet been tried. He was being held at the Rodrigo Figueiredo da Rosa Penitentiary Complex, facing a possible sentence of more than 50 years if convicted. One month after his failed attack, a 14-year-old named only by his initials I.S.C. attacked a school in Barreiras, Bahia, killing one girl before being shot and wounded by police. Investigators later discovered I.S.C. and Trad had been talking on Discord for a year.

School attacks in Brazil became more frequent beginning in 2022, with analysts pointing to access to violent content on social media, extremist online communities, political polarization, and eroding social bonds among young people. The failed Vitória attack is now cited as both a warning and a success story - planning that might have killed dozens was stopped because the people in the building chose to respond rather than flee. The school installed a panic button after the attack. The physical education teacher who tackled Trad, the coordinator who pushed him out of the classroom, and the off-duty officer who helped restrain him all remain mostly anonymous in public accounts, but in the school where they worked, students and parents know exactly who they are. On a Friday afternoon in August, they made a day that was supposed to end in massacre end, instead, in classrooms full of children going home.