Will James

And that escalated for a week until police decided to retreat.

They abandoned the precinct.

CHOP grew up in the roughly eight square blocks around that vacant precinct.

Police were hands off.

They decided they'd only go into CHOP for life-threatening emergencies.

And through it all, people chronicled almost every detail on livestreamed videos, with thousands of viewers following along in real time.

There were so many live streamers at CHOP that sometimes it felt like you couldn't walk 10 feet without seeing someone documenting it on a phone.

What's up, ladies and gentlemen?

Hey, y'all, I'm back.

It's the resistance, y'all.

It's been a minute.

I'm out here.

You had live streams from citizen journalists, from independent journalists.

Hey, you mind giving up a couple of words on how you feel about this autonomous zone going on out here?

You had YouTubers.

I'm going to try my best to keep the camera away from people who don't want to be filmed.

All broadcasting their version of CHOP.

It made us wonder, what could we learn from these live streams about what really happened the night Antonio was killed?

When we started investigating Antonio's death in 2025, we knew we had to revisit old live streams recorded that night.

So we enlisted the help of our friend and colleague David Gutman of the Seattle Times, who'd been on this story from the beginning.