AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A new series from NPR's Embedded podcast, the Seattle Times and KUOW investigates the unsolved killing of a Black teenager from Southern California. Antonio Mas junior was just 16 years old when he joined the Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle in 2020. A week after arriving there, he was shot dead.
The series, called We Keep Us Safe, uncovers new evidence and talks with key eye witnesses who challenge the dominant narrative about Antonio's killing. We're joined now by two reporters on the series, Sydney Brownstone from the Seattle Times and Will James from KOW. Welcome to both of you.
WILL JAMES, BYLINE: Thanks for having us.
SYDNEY BROWNSTONE: Thank you for having us.
CHANG: So in the wake of George Floyd's killing in 2020, Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country. We all remember these images. But the protest in Seattle was different, right? It got a lot of media attention at the time. Can you just remind listeners what was going on there?
JAMES: So in Seattle, a really intense standoff between protesters and police formed outside a particular precinct, and police ended up walking away from the precincts, just abandoning the building.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: The police are now moving out. The street is going to open up.
JAMES: Protesters then established a self-governed police-free zone in about eight blocks surrounding the precinct, called the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP for short. And for a little while, it was idealistic and utopian. There were no police there. There were people giving out free food.
But by the time Antonio arrived a couple of weeks in, things had devolved. A lot of people had shown up to just party. There were reports of gangs. There were drugs. There was crime. Protesters had set up kind of self-styled security groups - a lot of them were armed - to defend against right-wing attacks. And while this was a Black Lives Matter protest, a lot of these security volunteers were white.
CHANG: Interesting. And then three weeks into CHOP, as it was called, there was a shooting, and Antonio Mays Jr. was killed. Sydney, I know that you were on the ground reporting just hours after that happened. What were you hearing at the time?
BROWNSTONE: The protesters who were there overnight told me that they were attacked by a stolen white Jeep driving around erattically. There was shooting coming from the Jeep towards the protesters. Antonio and another teenager, a 14-year-old, were in that Jeep, and the story was that armed protest security fired back at them in self-defense. This shooting killed Antonio and wounded the other teenager. And the widely accepted narrative on the ground was that these teens were in a gang or doing a gang initiation, and that's why they were attacking the protest, and that's why they were killed.
CHANG: That was the widely accepted narrative, but what did your investigation find out about that version?
BROWNSTONE: For years, pretty much everyone thought that there were only two kids in the Jeep that night, Antonio and the 14-year-old. But we discovered that there was actually a third teenager in the car. We are calling him D.G. - those are his initials - because he doesn't want to talk to law enforcement or get involved in a court case. And D.G. told us that the boys went for a joyride, that they were unarmed, and almost as soon as he got into the vehicle, another car started chasing them and shooting at them.
D G: I'm laying there thinking I'm going to die. Like, you know, these bullets are, like, whizzing over my head and going through the seats.
CHANG: Wow. Sounds terrifying.
BROWNSTONE: Yeah, and when we asked D.G. the hard question - did you have guns? Were you shooting? - this is what he said.
D G: We didn't have no guns. Three 16-year-old boys would have been shooting back at them if we had guns. We were just sitting ducks, getting literally just, like, hawked down.
JAMES: And D.G.'s account is supported by some new evidence. The city of Seattle hired a video analyst to go over a bunch of recordings from that night, and this analyst found multiple shots coming from multiple sources but did not find any shots coming from the white Jeep that those teenagers were in. There were a couple of eyewitnesses, and one of them, Eric D'Intino, says he saw someone walk up to this white Jeep after it had already crashed.
ERIC D'INTINO: I see someone approach the passenger side of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, like, really close, like, point blank, and just unload his clip.
CHANG: OK, so a lot of discrepancies with the presiding narrative about what happened - but what else were you able to find out about who actually could have shot Antonio Mays Jr.?
JAMES: We were able to see text messages from a Seattle City official and a police official that prove that they knew about a suspect who went by the name Steve, and they knew about him since 2020. Police tell us that in order to close this case, they need witnesses to come forward, and that means people who were there at the protest when the shooting happened. Apparently, so far, that hasn't happened.
BROWNSTONE: But there are other reasons why this case may remain unsolved. Police did not immediately secure the scene. We were able to obtain body camera footage from police that shows a contingent of police officers approaching the crashed Jeep. And they see protesters milling around the Jeep tampering with the crime scene, and they make the decision to leave that scene for hours until homicide detectives got there the following morning. So it's possible that important evidence was destroyed or tampered with.
CHANG: Absolutely. Well, how do you feel your reporting has changed your understanding of Antonio and what happened at CHOP?
JAMES: It raises the question, did protesters mimic the overuse of lethal force that they were critiquing that summer? Even some protesters we talked with five years later, six years later, kind of walked away with an understanding of that irony.
BROWNSTONE: And what makes that irony even more tragic is that we learned - contrary to the story that Antonio may have had bad intentions, we learned that he really did come to CHOP to protest. He was there for the cause. This narrative that Antonio was up to no good, these gang allegations - it's something that really continues to affect his dad, Antonio Mays Sr., who's still left without answer and feels like he's the only person standing up for his son's memory. One of the things we were able to find in our investigation is a clip of Antonio speaking at CHOP in the days before he was killed, and we showed it to his dad.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANTONIO MAYS JR: So the police - their purpose is to serve him protect, right?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes.
BROWNSTONE: We asked him about what he thought of seeing his son on the video.
ANTONIO MAYS SR: It's like a gift from God, just cracking the heavens wide open and letting the sun come gaping through. He's speaking his own testimony right there. You know, anything that anybody will ever tell you that knew my son will tell you he is exactly that. He's respectable. He's caring, and he's supportive.
BROWNSTONE: We get a much fuller picture of Antonio Mays Jr.'s life and where the culpability for his death lies in the full series.
CHANG: That was Sydney Brownstone of the Seattle Times and Will James from KUOW. Thank you both so much for this reporting.
BROWNSTONE: Thank you.
JAMES: Thank you, Ailsa.
CHANG: We Keep Us Safe is a production of NPR's Embedded podcast, The Seattle Times and member station KUOW. All episodes are available now in the Embedded feed. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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