In 2020, an occupied Black Lives Matter Protest in Seattle went from a peaceful festival to the scene of a black teenager’s death. “We Keep Us Safe” is a new audio documentary from NPR, KUOW, and The Seattle Times investigating how this protest resulted in the shooting death of a young person they sought to protect from violence. 

Sydney Brownstone, Will James, and David Gutman have been reporting on the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, since its inception in 2020. The protest wasn’t like other protests breaking out across the country.

“ It wasn’t just marches. Protesters came to occupy several square blocks of the city for three weeks and set up a kind of encampment in a zone that police had actually retreated from,” said Will James. 

After Seattle Police fled the Capitol Hill Precinct in a stand off with protestors, protestors formed their own community in the area. They hosted musical performances, speeches, and local grass-roots organizations related to social justice.

In the years since the event, Will James feels that people’s views on CHOP have soured and people don’t remember the days before violence broke out in the zone. 

“ I think there’s a tendency in some corners to look at this case as look at what the political left did, look at how the political left is bad, James said. “I think if you walk away from this story with that as your takeaway, you’re really leaving something very rich and interesting on the table.”

The story about Antonio Mays Jr.’s death at CHOP had gone largely unchallenged and his case remained unsolved for six years. Protestors said that Mays had been driving a white jeep erratically around the occupied zone. They claimed that shots were fired at protestors from the vehicle, and the protestors returned fire to protect themselves, shooting the two teenage boys inside the vehicle. 

After the boy’s father, Antonio Mays Sr. filed a lawsuit against the city of Seattle, the team of reporters started to unravel the truth of what exactly happened the night Antonio Mays Jr. was shot. At first, the team didn’t understand how an event that had been livestreamed and recorded had gone unsolved for so long. 

“ One of my reporting partners, David Gutman, he was kind of collecting a lot of these live streams immediately after the shooting in 2020, […] his feeling at the time was like, ‘oh, this is, this is gonna be solved in a matter of days.” said Will James. “There’s this, this kind of frustration when you realize how much of it was captured on video, but how much these videos leave out.” 

Throughout their reporting the journalists heard many different descriptions of who Antonio Mays Jr. was and why he decided to travel from Southern California to Seattle to join the protest CHOP. His father remembers him as a kind older brother to his siblings who wanted to make the world a better place. Some protestors at CHOP described him as an irritable aspiring gang member. 

“ I think he was an idealistic kid who ran away from home in California, who left his home without permission to join what he saw as the civil rights movement of his generation. He thought he was joining a protest,” said James. “ I think that mismatch between what Antonio hoped to find in Seattle and what he actually found is one of the core tragedies of this story.”

The podcast is still being released on the Embedded feed, but Will James believes that when the story concludes, people will walk away with a better understanding of what happened to Antonio on the night of his death.

“ I was kind of surprised at the amount of clarity we’ve been able to get about this shooting in the end,” James said. “I’m able to walk away with a fairly detailed understanding of what happened to Antonio and why.”

You can listen to “We Keep Us Safe” on NPR’s Embedded podcast feed.