Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First. Our story today starts in the summer of 2020. Remember, that's when protests were happening all over the country after the killing of George Floyd. But in Seattle, something happened that didn't really happen anywhere else in the US.
Chapter 2: What events led to the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in Seattle?
A standoff with protesters went on for days. And then the police actually abandoned a precinct in the middle of the city in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. They just left. And once they were gone, protesters set up an Occupy-style camp around it. The camp was called CHOP, the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
It was an experiment in a different kind of world, with its own medical teams and its own armed security. People there believed they were building a better version of society, one that rejected police violence. But three weeks in, that experiment ended. There was a shooting at the camp and the gunfire came from the people who were actually trying to defend the camp. A black teenager died.
Six years later, the case remains unsolved. In a new eight-part series from NPR's Embedded, reporters Will James and Sydney Brownstone take us inside CHOP to find out what happened the night of the shooting and how violence came to occupy this anti-violence occupation.
Today, we're bringing you the first episode in the series, and new episodes will be released weekly over the coming months in the Embedded Podcast. One more thing before we start. This episode includes explicit language and the sound of gun violence. Okay, here's Sydney and Will.
I remember the shooting happened on a Monday morning, a few blocks from where I used to live in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. An editor called and asked if I could go down and report from the scene. So I get dressed and I run out of my apartment. Everything looks normal at first. People are walking their dogs. They're grabbing their fancy coffee drinks.
I'm walking by rainbow crosswalks and a leather daddy bar. This is Seattle. But then I cross over onto 12th Avenue and it's like stepping into a different universe. I end up walking into CHOP. CHOP was an Occupy-style protest that included a field of tents. There were crowds, art installations, and makeshift barricades. All of it took up about eight square blocks of my neighborhood.
It had been there for three weeks. But this morning, the morning of June 29, 2020, this isn't just a protest. It's a crime scene. Crowds of protesters are screaming in the middle of the street.
You know you fucked up. You and your fucking partner.
One of them seems particularly frazzled and is carrying around a baseball bat.
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Chapter 3: What was the atmosphere like at CHOP during the protests?
I mean, when you come in shooting, I don't think it's that much of a surprise when you get shot back.
I felt really unnerved by the certainty among the people I talked to that protesters had acted in self-defense.
Chapter 4: How did the shooting incident involving Antonio Mays Jr. unfold?
Things just seemed so chaotic on the ground that I didn't know how anyone could be certain of anything. And the story of what happened seemed to be hardening before my eyes. I was covering the protests in 2020 as well. And like Sydney, I was waiting for answers about this shooting. Why would this Black teenager attack CHOP?
Were protesters gonna step forward and reckon with what happened that night? And police, were they gonna arrest anyone? But instead, years passed, and this case faded from public consciousness. As reporters, we turned our attention to other stories. The protesters' version of events went pretty much unchallenged. But Will and I couldn't shake this feeling that there was more to what happened.
One of the complaints that was filed this week is by a father who lost his son. Antonio Mays Jr. was 16 years old. In 2023, Antonio's dad, Antonio Mays Sr., filed a lawsuit that told a different story. He said his son wasn't attacking CHOP. The lies that those people up there told about my son angered me so much. He said Antonio Jr.
had actually come to Seattle to join the protest, to be part of the civil rights movement of his generation. You know, he went to take a stand and I, you know, I had to be proud of him for having the courage for that. And he said whoever shot Antonio... didn't act in self-defense, but killed him in cold blood.
I'm not a legal professional, but I think it's common knowledge that it's not legal to allow vigilantes to police their own zone. Some of the questions we'd been asking ourselves from the beginning came rushing back. Who was Antonio Mays Jr. ? And if he did come to Seattle to protest, how did he end up as someone protesters felt they needed to defend themselves against?
Was whoever shot Antonio really protecting the protest? And why do we still not know who they are or their motives all these years later? We investigated these questions for more than a year, interviewing close to 100 people and reviewing evidence that's never been public before.
But the more we looked into this case, the more we ran into this circle of silence, from protesters themselves to the police and officials who were leading the city. We started to see what happens when the people in charge and the people demanding change seem to decide that protecting themselves is more important than their responsibility to anyone else.
I'm Will James, a reporter at KUOW, a public radio station in Seattle. I'm Sydney Brownstone. I'm a reporter at The Seattle Times. From NPR's Embedded, this is We Keep Us Safe.
When we come back, Will and Sydney continue the story.
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Chapter 5: What were the immediate reactions and consequences of the shooting?
He talked to us from his home in Southern California while he was also taking care of his kids. Do you have questions for us before we start asking you questions? You were there right after it happened? Yes. So you guys got to see the aftermath? Yeah, I saw the car and I spoke to people on the ground. Antonio Sr.
painted this picture of a father and son taking in and processing all of the protests breaking out across the country that summer. The George Floyd thing happened. He sees a current example of police brutality bigger than the Rodney King. I mean, this was a real life black movement against police brutality that was going down in his lifetime. Antonio Sr. would record protests happening in L.A.
where he worked and share those videos with his son. My son asked me, he said, Dad, if you didn't have us, would you be joining those riots? And, you know, for fear of him being excited to go join, you know, this is the one time I felt like, damn. Did I give him too much information?
You know, did I encourage him in a way that I don't want him to be encouraged right now because I didn't want him to go join that fight. About a month after George Floyd's murder, Antonio Sr. learned his son had gone to join that fight. Antonio Jr. left his home for Seattle on June 23, 2020, without telling his dad. Antonio Sr.
filed a missing persons report as soon as he discovered his son had left.
I had no idea that he would travel that far.
He was shot and killed at the Seattle protest less than a week later. Antonio Sr. doesn't know what Antonio was doing during his days at CHOP. But he doesn't believe the protesters' narrative. Because it just sounds nothing like the son he raised. These books are stacked two, back to back. One, two, three, four. As Antonio Sr. and I are speaking over Zoom, he walks over to a bookshelf.
These go all the way. These go all the way down. And he starts pulling out these worn paperback, thick, thick fantasy novels his son used to read. R.A. Salvatore and Raymond Feist. He used to love The Legend of Drizzt. I was like, oh my God, Antonio was a nerd. In a way that is super relatable. I should be clear, like, I was also a fantasy nerd. Wow. So definitely dozens in there.
He was reading dozens of these books. He read all these, and some of them multiple times over. When we would go to work, he would have any one of these in his pocket at any time, wherever we was at. Antonio Sr. runs a barbecue business. My family's been barbecuing since before I was born. And he was training his son to take over. He'd be at home practicing slicing his onions Julianne-style.
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Chapter 6: Who was Antonio Mays Jr. and why did he travel to Seattle?
And our hope is that some of them might be willing to tell us what actually happened. This is open in your face.
You know, how are there no answers?
And there's a reason Antonio Sr. is so baffled that this case is still unsolved. It's because so many of the minutes before and after Antonio's death were live streamed. And many of these videos have been public for years. The events leading up to CHOP and CHOP itself unfolded in about a month, but it felt like years worth of history were compressed in that time.
It started a few days after George Floyd was murdered, when thousands of protesters showed up in Seattle streets to confront police brutality. Then police unleashed crowd control weapons. A standoff formed outside a police precinct. 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.
We're out here live in Seattle, and we're going to keep seeing what we run into.
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.
Thanks for following me, bro. Thank you very much for tuning in this evening. Stay tuned, guys.
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Chapter 7: What narratives emerged around the events of the shooting?
That's not your blood, right? Of course it's not my blood. We see the crashed white Jeep. Its windows are broken and it is... riddled with bullet holes. There is medical debris on the ground from when volunteer medics tried to treat the boys. After pulling them out of the car, there's gauze and blood and broken glass. And there are about a dozen people milling around the scene in the dark.
Ashley Durellis films a guy walking around, and you never see this guy's face. You get a quick glimpse of him from the chest down. It kind of looks like he's wearing work boots, khaki, cargo-type pants, an unzipped leather jacket. He's carrying a plastic bag.
Right as he appears on camera, we hear this voice saying, Unless you see any shells on the ground, pick those up, pocket them, take them home.
Talking about hiding evidence, you know, stealing or destroying evidence.
Hell yeah. No evidence.
Ashley is, to put it generously, she's encouraging.
Pick that shit up. Yep. Pick up my shells. Because I want to get the fuck out of here. Well, thank you. Yeah, hey, I'm sorry I got to take off.
No, I know.
But you needed to be here. Yeah, y'all don't know who I am.
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