How an anti-police violence protest ended in a teen’s death

I'm Ayesha 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 U.S. 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 Occupy 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 is embedded, reporters Will James and Sidney 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 Sidney 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 29th, 2020, this isn't just a protest, it's a crime scene. Crowds of protesters are screaming in the middle of the street. One of them seems particularly frazzled and is carrying around a baseball bat. There are members of the Black clergy there praying over a blood smeared car. Here's what I learned. Two Black teens had been shot hours earlier. One of them was dead. His name was Antonio Mays Jr. My goal was to try to find witnesses who could tell me what had happened. They started down by the park and everybody started running. They were ducking down, whatnot. People staying at CHOP tell me that they saw a white jeep driving around erratically. Antonio Mays Jr. was in that jeep. Witnesses say they heard shots coming from the jeep, and then people inside CHOP shot back. Protesters thought that whoever was in that white jeep was from the white jeep. We are out here as peaceful protesters, but we do have to defend ourselves when there are threats against our lives. 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. 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 going to step forward and reckon with what happened that night? And police, were they going to 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 May's Jr. was 16 years old. In 2023, Antonio's dad, Antonio May's senior, 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. He went to take a stand, and 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 May's 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 the 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 police and 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 KUW, 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. By the time we started investigating this case, a narrative about Antonio had been out there for years. Protesters at CHOP said he was in the white Jeep attacking them, maybe even shooting when he was killed. We knew Antonio was 16 years old and from Southern California and not much else because Antonio's dad wasn't talking to reporters back when the shooting happened. But after Antonio's senior filed a lawsuit, we thought there was a chance he'd open up that he could tell us more about Antonio. Hello, Mr. Mays. Hello. 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 them after math? Yeah, I saw the car and I spoke to people on the ground. Antonio's senior 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 is a real-life black movement against police brutality that was going down in his lifetime. Antonio's senior would record protests happening in LA 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's senior 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, too, 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 used to love the Legend of Driz. I was like, oh my God, Antonio was a nerd. In a way that is super relatable, I should be clear, 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 has been barbecuing since before I was born. And he was training his son to take over. He'd be at home practicing slice and his onions, julienne style. Antonio Jr. and his dad would go to farmers markets and sell their handcrafted barbecue sauce. My son came to life at those markets. Like they would hang out, have fun talking to customers, have fun talking to the other vendors. There was one night when my son made 120 pounds of asparagus. And he just had this cast iron skillet. He would put it all together and he would just made it over and over again, over and over again. And it's flying out the window. I'm like, my God, look at him go. Antonio Sr. told his son all about black history. I taught my son what it is to be black in America. He raised him with a deep understanding of the struggle for black liberation. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Watts rise, the Harlem rise, the Black Panther Party. He taught him about the dangers young black men can face from police. And what to do if they confront you? I've been harassed by police on multiple occasions. So I teach my son to be careful so that when he's harassed by police, because I assume he'll be harassed by police, that he knows how to behave, knows how to speak, he knows how to move. Antonio Sr. has mixed feelings about this now. To be honest, if it meant that I had my son back, I wouldn't teach my son black history. Because I want to have him back right now. I said, man, they helped with black history. I know it's maybe difficult to talk about, but how did you find out about your son's death and what were your communications like with the city after it happened? The sheriff came to my house, knocked on my door, told me the bad news. I talked to the detective, the chief of police at that time, called me once or twice. I said, I need some arrest made. I need some justice for my son. We're working on that. We've got some leads we're gonna follow up on. You know, this could take a while, but we're working on it. And when's the last time you had any contact with the Seattle police regarding your son's death? Do you remember what year? 2020. Their phones just went silent. I couldn't get a hold of the detective. Someone said that the case got reassigned and someone else told me that the case was closed. And he said, eventually people just stopped picking up. I still don't have any answers to get a hold of anybody. This takes us by surprise. Seattle police have told us their investigation into Antonio's death is still open and active. We expected they'd been updating Antonio Sr. over the years, but he really doesn't know more than us. It made us wonder, are Seattle police still investigating or have they effectively given up on it? I should know exactly what happened. I should have some answers. I should have some closure. Oh, this is what happened, Mr. Mays. I should be getting a report. This is what these people did. This is what happened to your son. This is who was responsible for it. This is the action that we took. After our interview, we reached out to the Seattle police department. We wanted to know when they last communicated with Antonio Sr., but they declined to comment because of the, quote, open murder investigation. Antonio Sr. sued the city of Seattle in 2023. He says the killing of his son was not self-defense, that it was a violent crime, and the city let it happen. Clearly, there's no consequence because that's why I'm here on an interview with you. Our goal is to speak to as many people who were there witnessing what happened, and our hope is that some of them might be willing to tell us what actually happened. This is open in your face. 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 live-streamed 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. Oh, 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 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. You guys, so sorry, bro. Thank you very much for tuning in this evening. Stay tuned, guys. It made us wonder, what could we learn from these live streams about what really happened the night Antonio was killed? You see any shells on the ground? Pick those up, pocket them. That's coming up after the break. Every episode of It's Been a Minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture is asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed. 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. These videos have been online since the night of the shooting. There are three videos in particular that we've watched over and over again. They give us kind of a rough sketch of what happened that night. And the more we've watched them, the more we keep noticing new stuff, new details, new potential clues. Who's this guy? So this video starts a little before 3 a.m. It's shot by this live streamer who's standing in this big park that's right at the middle of a chop. They're in the midst of all these tents, and this person is panicked. More shots fired, more shots fired. More shots fired, more shots fired. The person recording sees a car driving through the park on a turf field that's normally used for soccer, baseball, frisbee. The live streamer says they hear gunshots coming from the car. The car has been circling around, shooting more shots into tents. We can see the car the live streamer's talking about. It's a quick glimpse on the video. This white jeep is what's got everyone all freaked out. It's that white car that's been circling around. We now know Antonio and another teen are inside this white jeep. I am ready to die for the cause, but it doesn't mean I want to be in the way of a fucking drive-by shooter. This live streamer sends out a message basically saying that this white jeep is attacking chop, but we can't see enough in the video to tell. The next live stream starts minutes later. This one is shot from an apartment right above chop. You see people running in the streets below. You hear shouting. It sounds like a war zone. We can hear what happens next, the fatal shooting of Antonio, but we can't see it. There's a tree blocking our view. And then the boys inside the white jeep crash into these cement barricades that the city put up around chop. You hear more gunshots, shots directed at the white jeep. You hear the engine rev. It kind of backs up a little like it's trying to get out of there. And then it crashes into the barricades again. It's a lot of gunshots this time. And you know it's dark out, but underneath the halo of a street lamp, you see a shadow outside the passenger door of the white jeep. And then you hear this just kind of surreal line. Oh, you're not dead? Want to get pistol whipped? Yeah, that's what you hear. All you can make out from the speaker who says this is their shadow, but they seem to be yelling at the boys in the jeep. Boys who at this point have been shot multiple times. Who yells this? And is this the person who shot Antonio? Yo, shot. Shots of fire. Shots of fire, Joe. Shots of fire. This is his third video. It's shot by a woman named Ashley Dorellis. She runs up to the crash jeep just moments after we hear the last gunshots. Move up the way, move up the way. It's chaos. People are all over the place. There's people trying to treat the two boys who've been shot. Jesus, boy, Jesus. One of these boys is Antonio Mays Jr. And the other one is a 14-year-old named Robert West. Somebody shot. Somebody shot. They're taking us to the hospital. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Protesters put these kids in two different cars to try and bring them to medical care. And once they leave, the scene of the shooting is pretty quiet. That's not your blood, right? Sports is 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 Dorellis 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, yeah? Pick up my shells. 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. I don't trust a cop. I need it to be here. Yeah, y'all don't know who I am. Thank you. I know. I don't care to know, all I know is thank you. That's it. What is she thanking him for in her mind? In her mind, I don't want to say it. In my mind, she is thanking him for shooting the two boys who, I think, in her mind, were a threat to protesters there. For security reasons, I'm going to cut this live off. I'm not going to let y'all see who talks to the cop and who doesn't talk to the cop. Be safe, y'all. You watch Ashley Dorellis' video and you're like, well, this will be solved real soon. So here's what we see across these three live streams. First, a protester announces that a white jeep driving on the play field is attacking chop. Minutes later, we hear one or more people shooting up that jeep as it crashes into a barricade. And then we glimpse someone walking around in the aftermath saying he needs to pick up his shells. So we've got some blanks to fill in here, and that means finding people who were there who will talk to us. And, you know, if we're looking for who was at the scene, the only people I kind of know for sure were at the scene were the people who shot the videos. Did they see anything that we can't see on the videos? Did they talk to anyone? Do they know who's saying, do you want to get pistol whipped? Who is saying, hey, pick up my shells? And so Ashley Dorellis was one of the first people we reached out to. Can you put my name as Ashley Quote, Aesthetics Dorellis? She was literally at work. She worked set like a restaurant. A cafe restaurant. I definitely can't wait to buy you a ride around when you come down here. And not only is she at work, but she's like the only one at work as it's opening. Hold on, I didn't want to say it. So she's talking to us on like video zoom as she's also like man in the drive through. I'm up forward in real quick. Aisthetics chicken and waffles was with senators. Can you do it? I'm just on a phone. Who was Ashley Dorellis before she ended up documenting the aftermath of this shooting? I guess I would call her a protester slash filmmaker. She is filming from all these protests. In California. Oakland, LA, San Francisco. I had died from notivation because I had been going live streaming like every single day. Came to Seattle because of the protests. She said she wanted to document it. That was how I ended up immersing myself in the Seattle community. We really want to ask Ashley if she has any more information about the man on her video saying, pick up my shells. Ashley, much like many of the live streamers who are there most of the time, purposely is like pointing her camera down. She's shooting people with a camera from like shoulders down. There is often a concerted effort not to film people's faces. And what happened when you asked Ashley to describe who this guy was? She said it was a big fat white guy. He was a big white man. Do you think he's one of the shooters? He is. He absolutely is the shooter. Do you know who he is? I mean, beyond just like a guy in a video? Interview with this motherfucker, no. Say that again? Sorry. I didn't have an interview with him. I just went, that's why I kept following him around. I needed to please the dude. You find out who this motherfucker is. Even though Ashley wasn't there for the shooting, she walked away believing the man she saw picking up shells fired at the white Jeep. So Ashley shoots this video, parts of which certainly appear self-incriminating. About a week later, the video gets Ashley arrested. Her arrest is filmed and it kind of goes viral online. What the fuck? Looky! She's just on a street corner and all of a sudden cops swarm her. She's doing it! Yes! Her name is Ashley! You all are motherfucking pieces of shit! She's taken off in a police van. Technically, it's for rendering criminal assistance, basically for helping cover up a possible crime. You got arrested a few days later and you, as I understand it, were never charged with anything. What was that like? They were trying to put me as like I was helping him clean up the crime scene. When I was like, no, I'm recording him doing it because if anybody gets in trouble, it's going to be him, not me. She says, no, I wasn't encouraging him, right? I'm not helping him. I don't agree with anything that he did. At the time, you might be thankful because those kids were shooting at you. But afterwards, when you find out the truth, you're like, man, fuck that shit, I don't want to be like this. Were the police like, hey, you know who did it? Or what were they saying? No, the police wanted me to give up the names of the people who were at the crime scene, like all the protesters. They didn't even give a damn about the shooter. They asked me one question about the shooter, but they were more interested about the protesters. Of course, there's stuff that's happening that happened there that I'm not going to divulge, but if I, what's the number one rule of fight club? Don't talk about fight club. Exactly. What's the second rule of fight club? I'm not going to tell you. You don't know. What she's saying is we don't talk about that stuff. You know, people who were there who witnessed this shooting, this killing, are not going to talk about it. And that is something certainly we've run into over a year of reporting is, I feel quite confident there are people out there who know who did this shooting, but there are people who don't want to talk about it and won't talk about it. It was someone walking around chopped with a gun, right? Obviously. Everybody was walking around chopped with a gun. So, you know, I'm up and I'm chopped like security too. What's up there? Like, come on now. Like, stop it. Cut the shit. Literally cut the shit. But what made him security besides the fact that he had a gun? That's why he was called security and everybody at Chop was security then. We'd heard about Chop security before. We'd seen people walking around the zone with body armor, sometimes with guns. But to understand who they were and what their role was the night Antonia was killed, we've got to go back to the beginning. How did Chop start? Why did some protesters there decide to arm themselves? And how did something so hopeful, a protest for Black Lives, end up turning into this circle of silence surrounding the killing of a Black teenager? Do Black Lives matter to the SBD? We didn't kick them out, they abandoned this space. Move back to your intersection. Move back to their... I always bristle at the fact that we gave up a precinct. It's way more nuanced than that. What were we so afraid of? That's on the next episode of We Keep Us Safe. This is a story from Katie Simon. It was produced by Adelina Lancianis with support from Dan Germa, research in fact checking by Donia Suleyman and Mioko Woof. Robert Rodriguez mastered the episode. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo, Justin Yan, Benjamin Rappaport, Leanna Simstrom, and Jenny Schmidt. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe and up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. This message comes from Avallera.