Podbit · Up First from NPR
Antonio Mays Jr. was 16 years old when he traveled from Southern California to Seattle to join the racial justice movement. He arrived at CHOP — the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest — and was shot dead less than a week later by the protest's own armed security. Six years on, nobody has been charged.
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Ayesha Rascoe opens by transporting listeners back to the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd sent protest movements rippling across America. In Seattle, something extraordinary happened: a standoff with protesters escalated until police simply walked away from their own precinct, and protesters filled the vacuum by building CHOP — an Occupy-style autonomous zone complete with medical teams, art installations, and armed security. The experiment lasted three weeks before ending in gunfire. The victim was Antonio Mays Jr., a 16-year-old Black teenager from Southern California. The gunfire, Rascoe notes pointedly, came from people inside CHOP itself — the same people who had come to protest police violence. Six years later, nobody has been charged. Rascoe introduces the series as the work of NPR Embedded reporters Will James and Sydney Brownstone, who spent over a year investigating the case, and warns listeners the episode contains explicit language and the sound of gun violence.
Antonio Mays Jr.'s murder at CHOP remains unsolved six years after the shooting, with no arrests made.
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