5 years after CHOP in Seattle, teen’s shooting death is without answers

By the time he was a teenager, Antonio Mays Jr. knew all about the struggle for civil rights and Black liberation.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Nat Turner, the Watts riots — Mays’ dad taught him the stories because he wanted his son to know his history, the history of being Black in America.

In 2020, 16-year-old Antonio watched the next chapter of that history begin to unfold from his home near Los Angeles. The murder of George Floyd on May 25 had sparked what would become the largest sustained protest movement in American history. So Antonio left a note telling his father he was going to make him proud, that he was going to accomplish something. And he left home for Seattle, a place he’d never been, a city where he had no known connections.

He was drawn, his father said, by news coverage of CHOP — the Capitol Hill Organized (or Occupied) Protest — an eight-block area that police had largely abandoned after weeks of often violent clashes with protesters.

But Antonio never came back.

He was killed a week after he left, shot in the CHOP zone while in a stolen Jeep. Two days after his death, then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered CHOP shut down.

RELATED: The final days for CHOP — but not the end of a Seattle movement against racism, police violence

CHOP existed for about three weeks as a protest space but created a much longer-lasting mark on both the city’s and the nation’s consciousness.

In its earliest days, CHOP’s “cop-free” blocks around the abandoned East Precinct felt like a respite from the nightly clashes with police, tear gas and blast balls that had enveloped Capitol Hill for more than a week. But then the zone took a darker turn, attracting guns, drugs, people with mental health issues and people with nowhere else to go. National news organizations and political influencers flocked to the scene. Right-wing agitators threatened to descend on it.

CHOP became, fairly or not, a symbol of liberal cities’ perceived lawlessness. Two days after CHOP’s creation, President Donald Trump, after watching Seattle protest coverage, called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and told him to “act fast and hard” because the city was going to be taken over. Last fall, CHOP was still on his mind: He brought it up in both presidential debates.

But in Seattle, CHOP’s scars have mostly vanished from public view. There have been no charges filed in Antonio’s death, no answers as to who killed him. The Police Department and City Attorney’s Office have declined to answer questions about the case.

RELATED: Photos: Final moments of the CHOP as police clear the area

In 2023, Antonio Mays Sr., frustrated by the city’s silence, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, alleging the city’s negligence created the conditions that led to his son’s killing.

The city has argued in court filings that it doesn’t bear legal responsibility for Antonio’s death because he was driving a stolen Jeep and shooting a gun before he was killed. City attorneys have filed in court a partially redacted police report about the theft of the vehicle and a livestreamer’s video in which the livestreamer can be heard saying gunshots were coming from the Jeep. Yet neither confirm the allegations that Antonio was driving or shooting.

Mays says he was told another narrative about the night his son died. Mays said a Seattle police detective on the case told him in 2020 that Antonio wasn’t driving and there was no evidence of him shooting a gun. But police have not clarified the facts.

Now Mays and his attorney are making another push to get answers from the city leaders they believe enabled CHOP’s descent into violence. In a letter to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent last week, Mays’ attorney urged Congress to probe the creation of CHOP and the status of the police homicide investigation.

Antonio’s death represents a challenge to Seattle’s identity as a bastion of progressive values. A Black teenager was killed at a protest against police killings of Black people. And according to videos taken during and after the fatal shooting, he may have been killed by armed protesters who’d appointed themselves as security in the absence of police.

“If it meant that I’d have my son back, I wouldn’t teach my son Black history,” Mays said through tears from his home in Orange County, Calif. “Because I want to have him back right now.”

There were dozens of people around when Antonio and a 14-year-old boy he was with were shot. A handful of people were filming, livestreaming the shooting and its immediate aftermath. That footage remains online, available to anyone with an internet connection, but much of it is shot at a distance or pointed at the ground to avoid identifying protesters.

Seattle police say the case remains active and have denied public records requests seeking further information. The shooting deaths last year of six teenage boys in Seattle also remain unsolved. Several of those killings also had multiple witnesses present.

Mays says he hasn’t heard anything from the police since 2020.

“I couldn’t get a hold of anybody,” he said. “Everything went silent.”

Seattle police and the City Attorney’s Office have declined to answer reporters’ questions about the events of June 29, the Jeep and the police investigation of Antonio’s death, citing ongoing litigation and an “active” police case.

In the absence of that information, many questions remain. A Police Department response to a public records request said Detective Alan Cruise was assigned to the homicide case. In late February, the department declined a request for an interview with Cruise and did not specify how many, if any, other detectives are working on the homicide investigation.

Five years later, Mays and his attorney have written to Congress because they want accountability from Seattle’s former mayor, police chief and others who they say have simply moved on. “I’m hoping that they bring the previous administration back to answer for their wrongdoing,” Mays said. “And to provide answers as to who was the de facto police in that zone.”

In an emailed statement to The Seattle Times last week, former Mayor Durkan called Antonio’s death a tragedy and described it as “part of an enduring cycle of violence that has traumatized families and taken too many young people like Antonio.”

Durkan said that as mayor, she addressed gun violence and its disproportionate impact on Black boys and men by working with public officials and community members to drive down murders in 2021.

A spokesperson for current Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell wrote in a separate emailed statement that while Antonio’s death occurred before Harrell took office, “we express our sympathies to the family for the tragic loss of their son.”

Harrell’s office cited investment in the city’s Police Department, new crisis response tools and additional resources for marginalized communities as part of its commitment to public safety and advancing racial equity, but said it would defer to police and the City Attorney’s Office for details about Antonio’s case specifically.

'My God, look at him go'

With no answers, Mays is left with memories:

Memories of Antonio, a voracious reader, engrossed in fantasy novels that he’d carry around in his pockets. Of Antonio learning his father’s barbecue business — slicing onions, cleaning the grill, lighting the smoker.

Mays, who raised Antonio as a single father, remembers his son coming alive at farmers markets and festivals, where the family would sell chicken, brisket, sides and homemade sauce.

At the 626 Night Market in Orange County, a massive event with hundreds of vendors at a fairground, Antonio came along to help out. But he didn’t just staff the register or pour drinks. At 13 or 14 years old, Antonio was responsible for cooking up the asparagus side dish — charred asparagus, onions, jalapeños, a creamy garlic sauce — to hundreds of customers.

They’d brought 120 pounds of asparagus, and Antonio cooked it all, a couple of handfuls at a time in a cast iron skillet. Chopped, blistered, seasoned, tossed, over and over again. “And it’s flying out the window,” Mays said. “I’m like, ‘My God, look at him go.’”

Mays remembers how Antonio would saunter over to the DJs at night markets and end up on the mic, singing and dancing, carrying on.

“It was just, it was a blessing to be able to be a part of his life,” Mays said. “And guide him and watch him have a good time and socialize and teach him along the way.”

In Seattle, people who walked through CHOP in its early days described it in similar terms to a buzzing fairground — a place with free food, activities and a “festival” vibe. Less than three weeks before Antonio was killed, Mayor Durkan speculated that CHOP could turn into a “summer of love.”

But by the early morning hours of June 29, CHOP had changed. Guns and drugs were out in the open. The space had transformed into something much more volatile.

A 19-year-old had been shot and killed nine days prior. A year later, police arrested the shooter, who subsequently pleaded guilty. The city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit from the victim’s family.

RELATED: Family of 16-year-old killed in CHOP zone alleges Seattle’s failings enabled a 'state-created danger'

Mays said he filed a missing-person report with his local police department after his son went missing and he found Antonio’s note. But Mays had no idea his son was in Seattle and only learned of his death a week later when police officers showed up at his door.

‘You’re not dead, huh?’

There were dozens if not hundreds of people in the CHOP area around 3 a.m. on June 29. Some were sleeping in tents. Some were milling around. Some were patrolling, acting as security for protesters scared by reports of possible right-wing violence.

At 2:54 a.m., gunshots rang out. About a dozen, within 30 seconds. They roused Marcus Kulik in his fourth-floor Capitol Hill apartment overlooking the protest zone.

A video game artist, he’d been largely shut inside in the early days of the pandemic and had started broadcasting live footage of the protest area, using a camera perched at his window.

When he heard the gunshots, he grabbed a longer lens to see what was going on.

“I’m not used to living in a place where shootings happen right outside my window,” Kulik recalled. “I’m like, ‘OK, I want to record this. I want to see what’s going on if I can, but I also want to keep myself safe.’”

In Kulik’s video, shouts can be heard from the streets below.

“Everybody down, everybody down!”

“Eyes up, eyes up, eyes up!”

“Anyone with weapons, I want them behind this barrier … multiple vehicles, multiple vehicles, stolen white Jeep!”

Three minutes later, tires screeched and a white Jeep Cherokee traveling up East Pike Street turned left on 12th Avenue, headed toward the encampment of protesters outside Seattle police’s abandoned East Precinct.

A scream, then a gunshot, then two more. People ducked behind barricades and fled. The Jeep hit either a concrete barrier or a portable toilet at the edge of the protest area. Six more gunshots.

The Jeep backed up briefly, then drove forward again and hit the barrier and the toilet. Ten more gunshots.

Someone appeared to approach the Jeep.

“Oh, you’re not dead, huh?” someone said. “Yo, you want to get pistol-whipped?”

Kulik said Seattle police have never contacted him or asked about his video.

Both Antonio and the 14-year-old were pulled from the Jeep and bandaged by volunteer medics. They were then taken from the scene in private cars because Seattle police and paramedics refused to enter the zone. The car with the 14-year-old drove straight to Harborview Medical Center, while the car with Antonio attempted to meet Seattle Fire Department medics at a rendezvous point a few blocks away.

This resulted in a 24-minute delay in getting Antonio professional help, according to a review of the incident from Seattle’s Office of the Inspector General. A video from the car with a bleeding Antonio shows paramedics drove away from them. The driver pursued the paramedics and eventually met them in a parking lot, but by that time Antonio had died.

A Fire Department spokesperson said in the inspector general review that paramedics perceived the car with Antonio inside as a “threat” because it was driving erratically with a person on the roof. However, participants in the review, published in 2022, said the Fire Department should have been prepared to treat emergencies like this at agreed-upon rendezvous points. Seattle police had told the Fire Department that a car with Antonio was trying to reach them, the review said. Reviewers didn’t understand why the ambulance drove away.

The white Jeep sat just outside the abandoned East Precinct, pocked with bullet holes, its windows shattered, its interior splattered with blood. Videos of the aftermath captured at least two people walking with AR-15-style rifles. The morning after the shooting, the vehicle used to transport Antonio was parked inside CHOP in the middle of 12th Avenue and smeared with blood, according to a Seattle Times reporter on the scene.

Ashley Dorelus, who had come from the Bay Area to join and film the protests, ran two blocks from Cal Anderson Park to the site of the shooting, livestreaming on Instagram. Her video captured someone next to the crashed Jeep saying, “You see any shells on the ground, pick those up, pocket ’em, take ’em home.”

“Hell yeah, no evidence, no evidence, pick that (expletive) up,” Dorelus responds on the video. “Did anyone witness?” someone asks.

“No, and nobody is going to witness anything,” Dorelus responds.

About a week later during another protest, police pulled her off a downtown street corner as onlookers filmed. She was arrested for investigation of rendering criminal assistance but never charged with a crime.

Dorelus, in a recent phone interview, said she’d been scared that the occupants of the Jeep were shooting at protesters and was caught up in the moment. She said police asked for her video after she was arrested in 2020, but she hasn’t spoken with them since.

Dorelus is also confident that the person in her video telling people to pick up shell casings “absolutely is the shooter,” although she doesn’t know his identity.

“I agreed with him like, ‘Oh yeah, if I shot somebody, yeah, I would collect the bullets.’ But not thinking I was stupidly just saying that out loud,” she said. She said she didn’t actually touch any bullets or shell casings. Police said the crime scene was disturbed.

Looking for answers

Mays’ lawsuit against Seattle is scheduled for trial in November. His attorney, Evan Oshan, has also filed a personal injury lawsuit against the city on behalf of the then-14-year-old who was shot alongside Antonio but survived with a serious brain injury.

Seattle’s attorneys argue the city is not responsible because Antonio and the other boy were allegedly driving a stolen vehicle and shooting from it before they were shot. The teen who survived, however, was never charged with a crime. Mays maintains that Antonio, who had never been in trouble with the law, wasn’t driving or shooting from the vehicle.

A man who said he was the owner of the Jeep said he was attacked by two males with a pickax about 2:30 a.m., roughly half an hour before Antonio was killed. He said they took his backpack, phone and car keys. In a police report filed with the city’s defense to the wrongful death lawsuit, the man claimed the people who attacked him were “involved in the shooting in CHOP.”

Mays said a Seattle police detective told him in 2020 that the man reported being attacked by a group of kids. It is unknown whether Antonio was one of them.

In its legal defense to Mays’ lawsuit, the city is invoking what’s known as the state’s “felony bar” statute, which shields governments from wrongful death or personal injury liabilities if plaintiffs were committing a felony that was the cause of the injury or death. Activists have sought to reform this statute in recent years because they say it has been used to block courts from examining police use of force.

In 2021, those activists succeeded in making a change to the law to limit its use to cases where it has been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” that plaintiffs were committing felonies.

The City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on its defense.

Oshan said that while the Mays lawsuit could win a settlement for the family, it’s unlikely it will yield the answers Mays wants. That’s why they’re seeking a separate inquiry by Congress.

“My goal here is to find out, if not who killed his son, let’s have some direction of what’s going on,” Oshan said. “It’s been almost five years.”

Anyone can request a congressional inquiry, and lawmakers could simply ignore the plea.

But there are reasons to believe Congress may be receptive to the idea, including Trump’s lasting interest in this chapter of Seattle’s history.

In Antonio’s case, the ongoing silence has added to his father’s perception that Seattle’s establishment wants to forget the protests of 2020, despite families like his continuing to live with the fallout.

“I can’t believe that there’s no answer,” Mays said. “This is not like a serial killer kidnapping somebody and stashing a body.

“This is open, in your face,” he continued. “How are there no answers?”

This story was published in collaboration with The Seattle Times. All three reporters of this story reported from CHOP in 2020.