Antonio Mays Jr. was 16 years old. He traveled from Southern California to Seattle on June 23, 2020 to take part in the racial justice protests, and before he left home he wrote to his father: "I am not running from home. I am fighting for a cause" [1]. Six days later he was shot seven times and killed at the edge of the protest zone known as CHOP.
Six years on, no one has been arrested and no one has been charged [1].
What happened in the early hours of June 29, 2020 is the subject of an 18-month investigation by NPR's Embedded podcast, The Seattle Times and KUOW, published Sunday morning, and the account it produced is not the account that circulated at the time [1]. A white stolen Jeep drove near the CHOP encampment at Cal Anderson Park. Occupants of a silver Nissan Pathfinder fired at least 15 shots at the Jeep, according to the investigation's reading of security footage, and further gunfire followed as the Jeep neared the barricade at the abandoned police precinct [1]. Antonio was killed. Robert West, 14, was critically injured. A third teenager was grazed by a bullet, a detail the investigation reports had not been public before [1].
The version that took hold in 2020 was that the people in the Jeep were attacking protesters. A forensic video analyst who reviewed the material "did not identify any gunshots coming from the white Jeep," according to the investigation [1]. No guns, no bullets and no shell casings were recovered from Antonio, from West, or from the vehicle [1]. The footage the analyst examined is reported to show fire directed at the Jeep and none coming out of it [1].
The scene was not preserved. Police reached it roughly four hours after the shooting, and the Seattle Police Department noted that "the crime scene had been disturbed" [1]. Livestream video from inside the zone captured a person telling others: "Unless you see any shells on the ground, pick those up" [1].
There is footage nobody outside the department has seen. Police surveillance cameras mounted on the abandoned precinct looked directly onto the place where Antonio was killed, and that video has not been released [1].
Former Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes has asked the public to close the gap: "We need people who were there, inside of the area, to come forward" [1]. Dozens of people interviewed by the reporting team said they knew nothing or declined to say more [1].
Two records exist for the same few minutes. One is the story that formed within hours in a place full of cameras and got repeated until it hardened. The other is what a forensic analyst says the cameras actually captured, which surfaced six years later and attaches to a case with no defendant in it. A child who told his father he was going to fight for a cause was shot seven times, a second child was critically wounded, a third was grazed, and the file is open.
The unreleased precinct footage is the smallest and most fixable part of that. It exists, it belongs to a public agency, and it points at the spot.
