Six years after a 16-year-old was shot and killed inside Seattle's Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone, new video evidence is raising fresh questions about what actually happened that night.
Antonio Mays Jr. was killed in the early morning hours of June 29, 2020. Robert West, 14, was critically injured in the same shooting. A third teenager, whose presence in the vehicle has never been previously reported, was grazed by a bullet and fled the scene. No arrests have been made. No charges have been filed. Seattle police say the case remains unsolved, according to NPR.
CHOP was an eight-block zone of tents, graffiti and round-the-clock protests that occupied a section of Seattle for 23 days after police abandoned a nearby precinct. Officers had withdrawn following 10 days of mass demonstrations sparked by the murder of George Floyd, during which police had repeatedly blanketed the neighborhood with tear gas. After they left, protesters set up mutual aid stations, held movie nights and organized speeches and music.
By the night of the shooting, the atmosphere had changed. An armed, voluntary security force had formed inside the zone. People at the camp were on high alert after a car had earlier driven into a crowd of protesters and several other shootings had occurred nearby.
Shortly before 3 a.m., protesters began tracking a stolen white Jeep driving erratically around Cal Anderson Park. The vehicle came within 10 feet of a tent, and fear spread quickly through the camp. A livestreamer broadcasting live to Facebook captured the chaos as it unfolded. "There's shots, shots fired, I think," the livestreamer said in the shaky video. Then gunshots. "More shots fired, more shots fired. It's that white car that's been circling around."
The implication spread fast through the crowd: people in the Jeep were shooting at protesters. Less than 10 minutes later, armed guards at the perimeter shot all three occupants of the vehicle. Antonio Mays Jr. died. The morning after, protester Colby Williams told reporters: "When you come in shooting, I don't think it's that much of a surprise when you get shot back."
That version of events, that the Jeep's occupants fired first and that protesters or their allies fired back in self-defense, spread quickly on social media and persisted for years inside and outside the encampment. The entire sequence was captured on surveillance cameras, by citizen journalists and by livestreamers. And yet the killing has never been solved.
NPR's reporting, which includes a review of new video evidence, challenges the self-defense narrative that took hold in the hours after the shooting. The report is the first to reveal the presence of a third teenager in the Jeep that night.
