A memorial for Mays inside the CHOP camp in the days following his 2020 killing (Image: CHS)
A King County jury has found the City of Seattle negligent in the 2020 deadly shooting of a San Diego teenager during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
Antonio Mays Jr. was 16.
The case centering on the Seattle Police Department’s abandonment of the East Precinct and the failures in the police and Seattle Fire response to the 12th Ave shooting scene came to a swift conclusion Thursday with the jury’s decision after two weeks of deliberation.
The decision comes with a heavy price tag. The jury arrived at compensatory damages totaling more than $30 million for the teen’s father, Antonio Mays Sr., and family.
The deadly shooting — one of two killings of Black teens in the camp — came early on a Monday morning amid a night of drive-by shooting fears around the protest zone. Mays was shot inside a stolen Jeep Cherokee that had been reported driving at high speeds through the streets around the CHOP camp. The teen died as camp security and medic volunteers worked to save him whileSeattle Police and Seattle Fire refused to enter the protest area.
Mays’s 14-year-old companion in the vehicle survived but suffered a brain injury.
The shooting was a final straw as Seattle Police were ordered to storm the protest encampments and clear the area two days later.
No suspects in the June 29th, 2020 killing have been publicly identified. SPD says the investigation of the Mays Jr. killing remains an open case.
CHS reported here in December on the start of proceedings in the wrongful death case against the city.
Evidence presented during the case by the Oshan & Associates law firm representing the family revealed new details of the confusion within the camp on the deadly night and how SPD failed to enter the zone until hours after the shooting. That evidence helped foil the city’s defense that Mays was committing a felony crime at the time of his slaying.
Similar lawsuits were settled by the city before trials began.
In 2022, the city agreed on a $500,000 settlement in the suit brought by Oshan & Associates over the death in the shooting of 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson on the edge of CHOP.
In 2023, it reached a $3.6 million accord with businesses and property owners over the protest zone.
Last year, the city settled its largest CHOP case so far as it reached a $10 million settlement with 50 plaintiffs harmed by the SPD’s flawed response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter and CHOP protests.
Like those before it, the Mays case also revealed new details about CHOP and the city’s responses including the unearthing of a video recorded by journalist Omari Salisbury of Oshan & Associates in the days leading up to the Mays shooting that captured the young man speaking out about the protest.
“You see a child. You see a young man wearing a black and yellow shirt and a white mask, standing calm amidst the storm. He wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t violent. He was articulate and wise beyond his years,” Salisbury said about Mays.
The new $30 million verdict brings the total damages against the city across the major CHOP lawsuits to $44.1 million.
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