“The police, their purpose is to serve and protect right? And we agree with that purpose but we do not agree with them because of what they have been doing,” Mays, wearing the white mask, said during the newly unearthed interview (Image: Converge Media/Q13)
New video found among the hours of reporting by Omari Salisbury and Converge Media has also shined new light on what drew 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. to the camp and the 2020 protest in Seattle.
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 Jeep Cherokee that had been driven at high speeds through the streets around the CHOP camp and died as camp security and medic volunteers worked to save him while Seattle Police and Seattle Fire refused to enter the protest area.
His teen companion in the vehicle survived but suffered a brain injury. It was a final straw as Seattle Police stormed the protest encampments and cleared the area two days later.
No suspects have been publicly identified in the case.
The lawsuit brought by this father says the city failed to protect Mays Jr. and seeks monetary damages to be determined at trial.
CHS reported here in October as new details from the Oshan & Associates law firm representing the family revealed evidence showing new details of the confusion within the camp on the night and how SPD failed to enter the camp zone until hours after the shooting. That evidence could foil the city’s defense that Mays was committing a felony crime at the time of his slaying. City Attorney Ann Davison also asked the court to reject the defense’s witness responsible for establishing a monetary value for the teen’s life.
Similar lawsuits were settled by the city before trials began.
In 2022, the city agreed on a $500,000 settlement in the suit brought 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.
The start of proceedings in the Mays case has also brought new evidence to light in the unearthing of a video recorded by Salisbury and Converge Media in the days leading up to the Mays shooting captured the young man speaking out about the protest.
“Journalists Sydney Brownstone and David Gutman from the Seattle Times, along with Will James from KUOW, and a team from NPR found the footage. In it, you don’t see the ‘rioter’ or ‘threat’ that some defense attorneys might try to conjure up in a courtroom,” Salisbury writes. “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.”
With the trial proceedings getting underway, the first challenge will be selecting a jury as the city and the plaintiffs square off over elements like expert witnesses and instructions to the jury.
The lawyers for the Mays family will ask jurors to consider if the teen was breaking the law at the time he was killed, if the city was negligent in it duties to protect lives, and if that negligence was a factor in his death. The jury could also be asked to arrive at the value of damages — both economic and “noneconomic” — suffered by his family, if the city is found at fault.
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