How an anti-police violence protest ended in a teen’s death
6/14/202633 min
In the summer of 2020, sixteen-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. traveled a thousand miles to be part of the racial justice movement. He arrived in Seattle during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, known as CHOP. Less than a week later, he was shot and killed there. The case remains unsolved.
Today on The Sunday Story, we bring you the first episode of a new series from NPR’s Embedded podcast that investigates Mays’ death.
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First 90 secondsAyesha Rascoe· Host0:00
I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. [instrumental music plays] 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 US. 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 Occupied 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's Embedded, reporters Will James and Sydney Brownstone take us inside CHOP to find out what happened the night of the shooting and how violence