A jury has awarded approximately $30 million to the father of Antonio Mays Jr., a 16-year-old shot and killed in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone in 2020, finding the city was negligent in how it handled the weeks-long protest area.
The family filed a lawsuit alleging Mays’ death resulted from unsafe conditions in the CHOP zone, which the city had known about for weeks by the time he was killed in late June 2020. The lawsuit alleged Mays had been “lured” into the CHOP zone by a statement from city officials who supported the area during the Black Lives Matter movement.
According to the lawsuit, Mays and his friend Robert West were driving around Cal Anderson Park in a Jeep when they were shot by civilian guards acting as CHOP security. CHOP medics pulled the boys from the Jeep and drove them to 14th and Union to rendezvous with Seattle fire crews, then drove them to Harborview Medical Center, where Mays died.
After the shooting, then-Seattle police chief Carmen Best said bystanders had been “in and out” of the jeep before detectives could access it. It was the fourth shooting in June at the CHOP zone. A week before Mays’ death, 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson was shot and killed in the CHOP zone. Marcel Long was convicted of Anderson’s murder in 2023 and sentenced to more than a decade in prison.
During a press conference Thursday, Antonio Mays Jr.’s father said his son was a hard worker and kind-hearted. As a single father, he had raised his son to be a young, proud Black man. “I love my kids more than I love myself. I live for my kids,” Mays said.
Lead trial attorney Evan M. Oshan said the city had yet to apologize to the Mays family. “To this day, the city has not assumed responsibility, and that is disheartening. No apologies, no I am sorry.” Oshan highlighted that the city failed to accept responsibility and never made an offer of even a dollar to the family. “He was a child, and he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
In a statement, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office said, “Antonio Mays Jr.’s death was a tragedy. We will assess the city’s options going forward.”
