Missing persons report filed immediately
Antonio Mays Sr. filed a missing persons report as soon as he discovered his son had left for Seattle without telling him.
Snapshot · Up First from NPR
How an anti-police violence protest ended in a teen’s death
Explore episode
Jun 14, 2026
Where this was said
Portrait of a Son: Books, BBQ, and Black History
At 11:39 · chapter starts 9:55
As Brownstone interviews Antonio Mays Sr. over Zoom, he walks to a bookshelf overflowing with worn paperback fantasy novels — R.A. Salvatore, Raymond Feist, The Legend of Drizzt — books his son read so many times the spines were battered. He describes Antonio Jr. as a nerd in the best sense, always with a book in his pocket. He also describes a close partnership: father and son working the barbecue business together, Antonio Jr. practicing julienne cuts at home, helping sell handcrafted sauce at farmers markets, lighting up when he talked to customers. This was a young man his father was grooming to take over the family business. And Antonio Sr. taught his son something else too: Black history. Martin Luther King. Malcolm X. The Watts Riots. The Black Panthers. He raised Antonio Jr. to understand what it means to be Black in America, to know how to behave if police confronted him. That education, he now agonizes, set his son on a trajectory toward Seattle.
1,000 miles traveled to protest
Antonio Mays Jr. traveled approximately 1,000 miles from Southern California to Seattle to join the racial justice movement.
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