In the early hours of June 29, 2020, in a popular downtown neighborhood of Seattle, an African-American 16-year-old named Antonio Mays, Jr. was publicly lynched in one of the most well-documented terrorist murders in American history. Following his execution, his killers destroyed evidence to avoid arrest. Shell casings were retrieved and disposed of; the bullet-riddled Jeep he’d stolen was ransacked; and no one involved in the murder spoke to the police on behalf of a murdered child.

After the killing, the injustice of Antonio Mays, Jr.’s death was compounded by cowardly city leaders who cared more about shielding themselves from repercussions than fulfilling their oaths of office. Seattle itself engaged in a systematic, politically motivated cover-up in which public records were illegally destroyed and the city was issued crushing sanctions by a federal judge, who stated unequivocally that “the city’s conduct exceeds gross negligence” and officials acted “in complete disregard of their legal obligation to preserve relevant evidence.”

One might wonder how it is that most readers have never heard of Antonio Mays, Jr. This is the type of story that should start journalists salivating: a brutal murder; an unsolved mystery begging for investigation; evidence destruction by corrupt government officials; villains begging for righteous condemnation; and the sick irony of a black teenager shot in the back by people who had allegedly gathered in defense of black life.

And yet there was no breathless CNN coverage. The American media spent weeks whitewashing his killers and denying the threat they posed, then buried the story, concluding it wasn’t politically useful enough for them to investigate. Antonio Mays, Jr. was betrayed by the American press because the story of his murder ran contrary to their political preferences. Pervasive groupthink and the rejection of basic journalistic standards allowed the horrific public murder of a 16-year-old boy to go effectively unreported.

This isn’t the story of a teenager dying. It’s the story of how every major institution in America failed him before he died and continues to fail him.

On June 8, 2020, after almost two weeks of clashes between protesters and the police following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Seattle police abandoned the East Precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, handing it over to a disorganized rabble of idealists, gang members, and political extremists. This decision unleashed three weeks of chaos, culminating in six shootings and two murders.  

Protesters repositioned barricades around the vacated precinct and declared the area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. Activists later took to calling it CHOP, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, but “autonomous zone” is a more accurate term for what it was in practice. In less than a day, unaccountable gunmen took it upon themselves to provide “security” for this autonomous zone. Most of these people operated under assumed names and provided their “security services” from behind identity-obscuring face masks. Although the protesters advocated police accountability, CHAZ itself was policed by unaccountable security personnel whose names were withheld from the people they were nominally protecting. Over the next month, these pseudonymous individuals committed a series of brazen assaults, many of them captured on live camera.

Unsurprisingly, this gaggle of untrained militants did a poor job maintaining order. There were two shootings on June 20, including the murder of Lorenzo Anderson. The next day a 17-year-old was shot and taken to Harborview Medical Center. Over 24 days, six people were shot in an area encompassing a mere six blocks; for comparison, the entire City of Seattle had 80 shootings in all of 2018. All six victims were black.

It was into this maelstrom of violence that Antonio Mays, Jr. and an unnamed 14-year-old drove on the morning of June 29. A Seattle Times article from after the shooting said Mays left his home in San Diego on June 24, five days before his murder.  It is unclear how he got to Seattle. Eventually, he began staying with a homeless woman named Ciara Walker in a tent at Cal Anderson Park. Walker was on the phone with Mays when he was killed and is one of the few witnesses to speak out publicly.

Around 2:30 in the morning, Mays and his friend assaulted a man near Cal Anderson Park and stole his white Jeep Cherokee. They took the Jeep on a joyride around the Autonomous Zone and at 2:53 are visible in security footage driving onto the field at Cal Anderson Park. CHAZ security later claimed the Jeep committed a drive-by shooting at Cal Anderson, necessitating their armed response. However, this is an obvious lie. As the Jeep swerved across the field, streetlights reflected off both the driver’s side and the passenger’s side windows. A drive-by shooting would have been impossible because the windows were not rolled down.

At 2:54, 30 seconds after Mays drove off the field, the first round of gunfire occurred. Mays began driving erratically, penned in by the concrete barricades the CHAZians erected to block off roadways.

As he was chased, Mays called Ciara Walker, the homeless woman he stayed with at Cal Anderson. He told Walker men with guns were after him; three cars were in pursuit, including a black SUV with “security” on the side. Walker instructed Mays to drive towards the police precinct, under the assumption he’d be safe at that location.  

Mays never got there. He crashed into the barricade on 12th Avenue, after which there was a cacophony of gunfire. One of the boys—Walker never knew which—cried, “I’m hit. I don’t wanna die.” The phone disconnected and she never spoke to Antonio Mays, Jr. again. He was dead before he reached the hospital.

Footage of the shooting shows without any doubt that Mays never returned fire. CHAZ security shot out the Jeep’s tires, causing it to crash into a barricade. After more gunfire, Mays tried to escape but crashed into a barrier behind his vehicle. The Jeep rolled forward and came to rest in a completely immobilized position, the tires blown out; the Jeep was inoperable.

Despite the helplessness of their prey, security did not stop firing. There were at least ten more gunshots, all of them directed towards the vehicle, with no return fire. Mays and his friend were making no attempt to escape, they weren’t shooting back, and they posed no threat to security as they moved in for the kill.

There is a further horror to this murder: The fatal shots probably came from behind Mays’s back.  A medic reported that Mays was shot several times in the arm and once in the side, in addition to grievous wounds to his jaw and temple. However, there was little bullet damage to the front of the car, only one or two rounds fired through the front windshield. 

The back windshield was shattered, several bullet holes ringing the trunk. The second row’s passenger-side window was also shot out. The bullet holes through the front windshield are not consistent with multiple gunshots to the right side of the head, which both witnesses agree Mays sustained. Even more damning, in a video that captured part of the shooting, a voice can be heard at 3:01 A.M. yelling, “Shot from behind.” It is one of the clearest bits of audio taken that night and aligns perfectly with the ballistic evidence.

Antonio Mays, Jr. was not killed by bullets fired through the front windshield. He was killed by an unseen assailant who fired through the rear passenger’s window; he was executed from behind while he was totally defenseless. Anyone who believes this was a justified shooting will have to explain where the justice is in shooting a screaming teenager in the back.

After Mays was gone, his murderers destroyed evidence while waging a propaganda campaign to paint him as the aggressor. An activist named Ashley Dorelus filmed the scene while Mays was being carted off. In Dorelus’s footage, an offscreen voice instructs people to dispose of shell casings. “Pick those up, pocket them, take them home,” it says. Dorelus replies, “Hell yeah, no evidence.” Later, Dorelus insults a bystander for asking if there were any witnesses. “Nobody is going to witness anything,” she replies, before asking for a flashlight to participate in the disposal of shell casings.

Dorelus was never charged with any crime for participating in the destruction of evidence at the scene of a public murder.  She was arrested two weeks after the shooting, but was released without further repercussions.

Meanwhile, Mays was the victim of a defamatory propaganda blitz. One Seattle anarchist received thousands of likes on Twitter for falsely claiming Mays committed a drive-by; she then mocked Mays’s death, saying he’d been “fucking MURKED” by “beautiful shot placement.” Additionally, a CHAZ medic named Dan Baker, a former Army sniper currently in federal prison for threatening to commit a mass shooting, said the reason there was no evidence Mays was armed was because CHAZ security took his gun to their “armory” after the shooting. This is hard to believe. According to Baker, Mays was armed at the time of his death, but security inexplicably hid the evidence that would have vindicated them.

In footage from that night, a guard yells “no weapons” a minute after the shooting. Seconds later, the same voice screams for a car and the rush to provide aid begins. Medics provided aid to Mays and his friend because they’d already been told they weren’t armed. Nonetheless, several people who were present when the cry of “no weapons” went up persisted in claiming Mays was armed for several days afterwards. Those people were not making a mistake. They were choosing to defame a murdered teenager to protect his killers.

If this were a tale of deranged activists committing murder while play-acting as revolutionaries, it would have value as tabloid fodder but little more. What elevates this story is what it tells us about the failings of contemporary America—failings that go continuously unaddressed because powerful people benefit from them, even as the rest of the nation suffers.

Political extremists are consistently given too much power in America even when their ideas are almost universally opposed. Because extremists are loud, obnoxious, and constantly on Twitter, politicians think that unpopular ideas are supported by a larger constituency than is actually the case. As a result, radical politicians frequently adopt whatever extremist nonsense is currently trending on social media, wrongly believing their unpopular ideas have widespread support. Moderates fail to push back because they think their opposition is stronger than it is.

This is the dynamic that took place in Seattle. Unprincipled progressives caused a hellish catastrophe while mindlessly chasing left-wing trends, and moderates lacked the courage to arrest the spiraling derangement. The best lacked all conviction while the worst were filled with passionate intensity, and Antonio Mays, Jr. paid the price in blood.

The conduct of the progressives on Seattle’s city council throughout this ordeal was unconscionable. They served as the political arm of CHAZ, ignoring the will of Seattle’s voters. When Mays was murdered, they whitewashed his killers.

One of the demands of the CHAZ protesters was to cut Seattle’s police budget by 50 percent. None of the progressives on the council had been supporters of that idea before June 2020. The first time a council member floated massive police defunding was when Teresa Mosqueda broached the subject on June 8, the same day the CHAZ occupation began. On June 9, council member Kshama Sawant led protesters from CHAZ to city hall in support of halving the police budget. In July 2020, a 7–2 supermajority of the City Council pledged to cut Seattle’s policing budget by 50 percent. 

Halving the police budget was not an organic idea, nor was it developed due to public support. Polling found that 71 percent of Seattleites opposed such massive cuts. In 2019, a bill to create an incentive program to hire more officers passed with the support of every councilmember except Sawant. The council’s endorsement of anti-policing budget cuts derived from the CHAZ occupiers, in direct opposition to the will of their constituents.

The council’s behavior after Mays’s murder cannot be excused. City Council President Lorena Gonzalez’ first comment on the killing was a 19-part Twitter thread, the purpose of which was to deflect attention from the killers and avoid taking responsibility. Gonzalez claimed that “portraying gun violence as an issue caused by the existence of #CHOP distracts us from discussing the root causes.” She blamed the “gun lobby” for “intentionally [fueling] gun violence in Black + Brown neighborhoods,” fumed that “gun violence [is] uniquely American,” and argued that the shootings should not be used as “justification for @SeattlePD to move back into the East Precinct.”

In that same thread, Gonzalez stated that she disagreed with “any attempt to politicize these shootings,” a laughable claim when she went on to blame the violence on the NRA. She clearly did want to politicize the shootings, just in a way that distracted attention from her personal culpability in the murder of a teenager.

Lorena Gonzalez wasn’t the guiltiest member of the city council. From the beginning, Kshama Sawant was the occupiers’ biggest political ally. On June 11, Sawant called the police evacuation of the East Precinct a “major victory” and argued the building should be turned over to the occupiers permanently, with the police never allowed to return.  

Nine days before the murder of Antonio Mays, Jr., she publicly endorsed the very people who lynched him. When Lorenzo Anderson was killed on the 20th, Sawant released a statement blaming “right-wing hate and violence” for that murder, which was committed by an African-American during a random street dispute. Sawant went on to say, “It is crucial that the CHOP occupation has developed a self-defense committee, which has played an important role at the encampment.” In Sawant’s worldview, these self-defense committees are necessary for “marginalized people to defend themselves and carry out necessary functions in place of the forces of the state.”

Following Mays’s death, Sawant took to Twitter for damage control. She first claimed Mays was killed in a drive-by, which was already known to be false. She blamed “capitalism’s brutality” for a murder committed by her own political allies. She concluded by arguing that a murder in a neighborhood police hadn’t protected in 21 days proved Seattle should “defund police by at least 50 percent.”  

As progressives destroyed Seattle, its centrist mayor lacked the will to stop them. Unlike the egomanics on the city council, Mayor Jenny Durkan knew what should be done. She just continuously failed to do it.

After Lorenzo Anderson died on June 20, Mayor Durkan emailed Chief of Police Carmen Best, bluntly stating, “What happened this am was foreseeable and avoidable. It cannot be repeated.” Antonio Mays, Jr. died nine days later.

The same Mayor Durkan who recognized the “foreseeability” of homicides in CHAZ was interviewed by Chris Cuomo on June 11 and infamously called the situation “a Summer of Love.” In that interview, Durkan said there was no danger at CHAZ because “we have block parties and the like in this part of Seattle all the time,” as if the typical block party includes masked gunmen who want to overthrow the state. Durkan went on to say, “It’s not an armed takeover.”

Except it was an armed takeover, and Durkan knew it. Focusing on daytime CHAZ created the illusion that the night was comparably safe, but Mayor Durkan must have known that the dangerous activity took place after dark.

From the first night of CHAZ, there was a clear danger presented by gun-wielding security personnel, none of whom were trained and most of whom worked behind pseudonyms. Several of these individuals were convicted felons and more have been convicted post-CHAZ. DeJuan Young, who would later become CHAZ’s second shooting victim, was a “volunteer security guard” who couldn’t legally handle a gun due to prior felony convictions in New Jersey. Court records indicate that at the time he was working at CHAZ, he was on the lam after missing his arraignment for charges related to domestic violence; Young allegedly choked his girlfriend until she couldn’t speak and threatened to murder her. He was taken into custody by police following his release from the hospital and subsequently pleaded guilty to 4th degree assault.

This convicted drug dealer who was wanted on charges of assaulting an intimate partner was working as CHAZ security at the same time Seattle officials assured the public the autonomous zone was safe.  

More famous than DeJuan Young is Raz Simone, whom conservatives dubbed the “Warlord” of CHAZ. Simone, one of the de facto heads of security, was caught on camera committing crimes before CHAZ even began. On June 7, he assaulted local journalist Omari Salisbury on live video without provocation. On June 8, the first night of the occupation, Simone was filmed handing out assault rifles from the trunk of his car. Simone obviously did not background check any of the individuals he was providing with weapons.

Unfortunately for Simone, he didn’t know the gun laws. In 2018, voters passed a referendum making it illegal to transfer an assault rifle to anyone under 21. In the first video of Raz distributing rifles, a recipient states that he is currently 18 years old, making Simone guilty of illegally transferring a firearm to someone not old enough to possess it. Over the course of his stay in CHAZ, Simone repeatedly broke Washington State gun laws, to say nothing of the various assaults he took part in. Nevertheless, Raz has never been charged with anything.

The reason Simone was never charged is probably because Seattle was coordinating with him throughout the CHAZ occupation, with Fire Chief Harold Scoggins serving as Simone’s point of contact with the city. For example, one text from Scoggins regarding the East Precinct building reads, “Raz, I just got word that 4 people broke the door at SPD and entered the building… Can you guys work with us on that?”

This gets substantially worse once you learn about Simone’s background. Raz is an alleged sex trafficker who has been accused by eight women of forcing them into prostitution. These less savory aspects of Simone’s character were hardly unknown in 2020. MTV reviewed his debut album in 2014 and mentioned his career as a pimp and drug dealer. Several of his alleged victims filed complaints as early as 2017. Simone was accused of withholding food, strangulation, and false imprisonment. One woman provided the Seattle Times with video footage that appeared to show Simone breaking into her garage. 

One of Simone’s accusers, who goes by “Pearl,” claimed Simone kept her hostage in the headquarters of Black Umbrella, Inc., the corporation under which he runs his record labels. In a video reviewed by the Seattle Times, Pearl is crying in a dark room with cuts on her face; in another video, the camera pans over plastic sleeping pods stacked on top of each other.

Maybe Simone is innocent and stacks of plastic sleeping pods are a fixture at any thriving record label. Regardless, in 2019, Seattle gave Simone a grant of $83,250 to add a recording studio to Black Umbrella Headquarters. That’s the same building where Pearl said Simone imprisoned her, an allegation she first made to the Seattle police in 2017.

The city’s gang unit claims Simone is an affiliate of Deuce 8; he has a conviction for cruelty to a child; he broke Washington State gun laws on camera; and he committed multiple assaults, including beating a graffiti artist. In return for this criminality, Seattle coordinated with him during CHAZ and gave him $83,250 to renovate a building which a woman previously alleged he was using to hold his sex slaves captive.

On June 22, after the shooting she described as “foreseeable and avoidable,” Mayor Durkan released a statement saying CHAZ would soon be cleared and police would return to the East Precinct. “Violence has led to increasingly difficult circumstances for our businesses and residents,” she wrote. If Mayor Durkan knew this on June 22, why wasn’t the zone cleared for another 10 days, by which time three more people were shot?

Because Durkan was unwilling to follow through when confronted with far-left opposition. Seattle tried to remove the barricades on June 26, but activists blocked their work crews. Instead of using police to restore order to a neighborhood collapsing into brutality, Durkan capitulated after a two-hour meeting with protesters and agreed to let the barriers remain until June 28. For reasons that have yet to be explained, Seattle never removed the barriers on June 28, either.

In his interview, Chris Cuomo asked if the city had the ability to clear CHAZ if need be. Durkan responded unequivocally, “We do.” Two weeks later, she failed to clear CHAZ twice. Antonio Mays, Jr. was murdered at 2:59 A.M. on June 29, three hours after Seattle missed its second clearance deadline. Had Seattle kept to its commitments, rather than giving in to unreasonable demands when confronted with the least resistance, he would still be alive today.  

Unfortunately, we don’t know the full extent of Seattle’s misconduct that summer because several city officials illegally destroyed evidence, an act for which they have yet to be held accountable. In January, a federal judge issued crushing sanctions against the city because “circumstantial evidence” indicated that officials had improperly deleted thousands of text messages pertaining to CHAZ. Judge Thomas Zilly argued that “the city’s conduct exceeds gross negligence” and officials had acted with “complete disregard of their legal obligation to preserve relevant evidence.”

Evidence for these charges is contained in a 37-page report produced by expert witness Brandon Leatha as part of a class action lawsuit brought against the city for its actions during CHAZ. According to Leatha, seven Seattle officials illegally deleted texts, including Jenny Durkan, Police Chief Carmen Best, and Harold Scoggins, the man responsible for coordinating with Raz Simone. 

The deletion of these texts was official misconduct twice over. The class action was filed on June 24 and the city was informed that records must be preserved; however, the city had earlier been sued by Black Lives Matter on June 9 and was required to maintain records of all relevant communications since that time. On June 19, employees at the Mayor’s office received a memo ordering that all communications be retained.

More importantly, these texts were public records and should have been saved even in the absence of litigation. A Washington Supreme Court decision called Nissen v. Pierce County held that text messages sent or received by public employees in their official capacity are public records, even if those texts are on a private phone.  Since official texts are public records, deleting them is a violation of RCW 40.16.010, “Injury to Public Record,” and is a class C felony.

No reasonable person can review this case and believe the deletion of texts was accidental. Leatha’s report found that five officials had their phones factory reset between October 8 and November 3, 2020. The city’s explanation, according to the Seattle Times, is that all five officials were locked out of their phones because they forgot their passwords or had “other problems.” 

Durkan’s story is even more ludicrous. On July 4, two days after CHAZ was cleared, she accidentally dropped her phone in a tidepool near Puget Sound. After the phone was restored, her settings had been changed to automatically delete text messages that were stored in the cloud. She claims she doesn’t know how this happened and it was entirely unintentional. Her phone was then reconfigured to delete texts more than 30 days old. Durkan has no idea how that happened either.

There are too many coincidences for this to be accidental. Durkan had clear motives to hide those texts. The deletion process began two days after CHAZ was cleared, when she no longer needed them. Six officials involved in her CHAZ response deleted their texts in the following months; and multiple settings were changed to thoroughly wipe her messages. For the city to argue that there was no malfeasance in the destruction of these public records represents a cover-up nearly as blatant as Mays’s killers picking up shell casings.

When one considers the above, it’s hard to comprehend the total lack of media coverage this murder has received. In a nation with a functioning media, Seattle would be pilloried by every newspaper in the country for a decade. Instead, the story was buried and few people have ever heard Antonio Mays, Jr.’s name. The media in this case was so blinded by political prejudice that it was incapable of honestly reporting on CHAZ. 

On June 12, 2020, Kelly Weill published an article with the Daily Beast headlined “Local Businesses Love the ‘Domestic Terror’ Zone in Seattle, Actually.”  Local businesses later filed a class action lawsuit against the city, which resulted in a $3.65 million settlement. So much for Weill’s claim that they were supportive.

On June 16, Vox published a piece by Katelyn Burns, which said, “there is no hint of the violence suggested by the likes of Fox News.” Two days before that piece was uploaded, an auto shop adjoining CHAZ was robbed and partially set on fire. When the owner responded, the arsonist attacked his son with a box cutter, leaving cuts on his clothing that were visible when he spoke to reporters. A mob of angry CHAZians surrounded the owner, threatening him and his son into releasing the arsonist; they let him go out of fear they might be killed. Burns mentions none of this.

Burns wrote a second CHAZ essay on July 2, in which she does her best to obfuscate her earlier lies. According to her, “In the first week of CHOP’s existence, people…told Vox they felt safe” but things “eventually took a turn for the worse.” This gives the impression that CHAZ only became dangerous later, when in fact CHAZ was already dangerous when Burns called it safe.

The Washington Post published its own CHAZ article on June 16, applauding CHAZ security for its de-escalation techniques and noting approvingly that “trying to understand the needs of those who are in an altered mental state” was integral to their non-violent approach. Thirteen days later, those same people put a bullet in Antonio Mays, Jr.’s head, calling into question whether their de-escalation techniques were quite as sophisticated as the Washington Post had been led to believe.

When it comes to journalistic dishonesty about CHAZ, there are an endless number of articles one could cite. Rolling Stone called CHAZ a “realm of peace” 14 hours before Lorenzo Anderson was murdered and then never reported his death. The Associated Press ran the ridiculous headline “Trump fumes as protesters stake out festive zone in Seattle.” The New Yorker moaned that “multiple shootings, one fatal, have damaged the occupation’s hard-won peaceful image,” as if the real tragedy of multiple gunshot victims was that their injuries tarnished the protest’s reputation.

This kind of coverage couldn’t happen if right-wingers did anything remotely similar. Compare how the media reported on Ammon Bundy’s occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

In 2016, Bundy took over a government building in a county where cows outnumber people 14 to 1. The only death was that of an occupier who was shot by federal agents. The Bundy occupation received non-stop press coverage and articles are still written about it in major publications years later.

In 2020, the New York Times ran an article about Ammon Bundy’s Covid-denialism, but a search for Antonio Mays, Jr.’s name returns no results. CNN.com has published three articles about Ammon Bundy since 2021 and zero about Antonio Mays, Jr. NBC News ran an article in October 2020 about a high school football game getting canceled because Ammon Bundy wouldn’t wear a face mask, but hasn’t reported on Antonio Mays, Jr.’s murder since the day he died.

The point here is simple. Most American journalists lean left, and their political biases cause them to downplay obvious threats posed by leftists. Journalists assume the right is always more dangerous than the left. This results in absurd outcomes, like the press treating a right-wing occupation of a rural wildlife refuge as a greater threat to public safety than anarcho-Communists patrolling downtown Seattle with illegal firearms. When the anarchists inevitably murdered someone, journalists failed to recognize the newsworthiness of the story because it is harmful to their political agenda.

Antonio Mays, Jr.’s great misfortune is that he got shot by the wrong people. Journalists claim to care about black lives, but Mays was shot by leftists, so the press is completely uninterested in bringing his killers to justice. If a conservative shot him, we’d know his shoe size by now.

What is galling about this murder, out of all the 21,000 murders that took place in the United States in 2020, is that there has been no reckoning. Seattle is still a city of lawlessness that refuses to investigate Jenny Durkan for her felonious destruction of public records. The media still refuses to correct the prejudices and delusions that allowed it to systematically misinform its audience about what was happening in Seattle. Antonio Mays, Jr. is dead, with no marches in his name, no nationwide memorials, and no recognition of the corruption, cruelty, and mass hysteria that allowed a mob of demented anarchists to shoot him twice in the side of the head.

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

Antonio Mays, Jr.’s life doesn’t matter because powerful interests find his death too inconvenient, so everyone responsible—the killers, the politicians, and the press—all just get to move on. None of them should be allowed to. The killers should be found, charged, and jailed. Responsible politicians should have the ghost of Antonio Mays, Jr. haunting their every public utterance. The journalists most guilty of misleading the public should be named, shamed, and recognized as biased and untrustworthy forevermore.

If Antonio Mays, Jr. doesn’t get to just move on, then neither should any of them.