Rio de Janeiro is the state with the highest number of homicides due to police brutality – often as a result of incursions related to the war on drugs. In 2019, for instance, 1.808 deaths were classified as homicide due to police intervention, a classification given when a police officer kills in self-defense. It also gives rise to a series of procedures which primarily result in the archiving of the cases without a proper investigation, or the police officers being absolved of murder, or any other crime for that matter. Such injustice leads the victims mothers to unite – engaging in social movements to fight for justice, seek clarification of the circumstances in which their children died, as well as to demand punishment of those involved. This study aims to investigate how grief is converted into political struggle as these mothers engage in social movements, more specifically in the Rede de Comunidades e Movimentos contra a Violência. Narratives enunciated by these mothers in public protests organized by the Rede are considered the privileged loci for analysis. Based on a micro-perspective, this analysis is guided by a qualitative-interpretative approach, and draws on studies which consider narrative discourse a way of constructing social life as well as a political tool used by social movements to demand justice. The macro-social context in which the deaths of Black people are placed also informs the analytical process which is organized around four spheres that are part of the mothers engagement in social movements: the narratives told at the protests, political resistance, the concept of maternity and the management of emotions. The first analysis describes the structure of the stories – referred to here as narratives of engagement –by employing elements from Labovian theory in tandem with theories which accentuate the interactional and sociocultural values underpinning narrative practice. The second analysis observes the discursive resources brought to bear on the narratives of the victims relatives in their process of managing emotions as pain. The analysis focuses on their systems of coherence, i.e., whether sequential ordering and causality relations constructed in these stories relate to culturally established discourses. The third analysis aims to understand how the categorization of “mother” is elaborated in the stories. The fourth and final analysis is focused on catalysing events that drive the engagement and sustained activism of these relatives in the Rede, investigating how moral shock is constructed in these narratives. In sum, the analytical work suggests the existence of a recurrent pattern that organizes narratives of engagement. Two discursive mechanisms interact with each other in the narratives: i) a double transition between personal experience with police brutality and the collective experience of those who have lost their children – this means that individual pain becomes collective pain, and the specific characterization of one police officer is transformed into grievances with respect to the corporation as a whole; ii) the rationalization of events leading to the death of their children by using coherence systems that operate with simplified versions of racism and the theory of Necropolitics. In a sense, these narratives of engagement are characterized as practices of resistance and work to denounce the racism that permeates several State s institutions. As well as practices of re-existence. By means of publicly mourning their children, these mothers humanize the victims of police brutality reframing these deaths not as isolated cases of police misconduct, but as part of a system.