Tomorrow, we drop the most explosive information in the unsolved killing of Antonio Mays Jr. since his death. We've been waiting for months to share something that changes our understanding of what happened to Antonio in 2020. It's in Episode 6 of our podcast, We Keep Us Safe.

In the summer of 2020, sixteen-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. traveled a thousand miles to join the racial justice movement of his generation. He arrived in Seattle during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, known as CHOP. Less than a week later, he was shot and killed there. The case remains unsolved.

In the summer of 2020, sixteen-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. traveled a thousand miles to join the racial justice movement of his generation. He arrived in Seattle during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, known as CHOP. Less than a week later, he was shot and killed there. The case remains unsolved.

A Black teenager was killed at a BLM protest in Seattle in 2020. Why is his death still unsolved? And who should be held accountable? NPR’s Embedded podcast investigates. Listen: npr.org/CHOP

Important podcast if you are looking for a good series and/or want to wonder about what really went down during Seattle’s BLM adjacent autonomous zone occupation pca.st/episode/3909...

Thanks to @theguardian.com for naming our podcast, "We Keep Us Safe," a best podcast of the week.

Throughout our investigation, former protesters have tried to convince us that Antonio Mays Jr. was a gang member or gang initiate who attacked the CHOP protest zone. It's a story that, for some, justifies or excuses the 2020 shooting that killed the 16-year-old...

CHOP is one of the most contested events in Seattle's history. What exactly was the protest camp? Was it innocuous? Triumphant? A disaster? In the latest episode of We Keep Us Safe, we trace CHOP's rise and fall across three weeks in 2020, and the forces that shaped it: www.npr.org/2026/06/18/n...

For three weeks in 2020, a protest encampment transformed one Seattle neighborhood. It ended in tragedy. KUOW reporter Will James and Seattle Times reporter Sydney Brownstone investigate the unsolved killing of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. on NPR’s Embedded podcast. Listen: npr.org/CHOP

Episode 2 of We Keep Us Safe is out today. Here, we trace the origins of Seattle's CHOP zone in the early days of the 2020 protests... and how decisions early on set the stage for Antonio Mays Jr.'s death three weeks later. Listen to it on @npr.org's Embedded podcast: www.npr.org/2026/06/11/n...

If you listened to @npr.org's Up First this weekend, you heard a local Seattle story that's haunted me and my reporting partners for years. Grateful that Up First aired the first episode of We Keep Us Safe, our podcast series investigating the unsolved killing of Antonio Mays Jr.

I'm proud that my reporting on the drug market at Seattle's 12th and Jackson has won a national @pmja.bsky.social award in the largest category, as well as a regional Edward R. Murrow @rtdna.bsky.social award. This reporting is sadly still relevant. Listen to it here: www.kuow.org/stories/fent...

A new podcast series from The Seattle Times, KUOW and NPR's "Embedded" investigates the unsolved killing that led to the end of 2020's Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.

We'll be uploading evidence, including videos, to our site after each new episode.

A 16-year-old was killed at a Seattle protest in 2020. Protesters claimed they shot him in self-defense. But is that the truth? Listen to “We Keep Us Safe,” a new true crime series from NPR’s Embedded podcast, @kuow.org and @seattletimes.com: n.pr/4e5Bj1C

Six years ago, a 16-year-old was shot and killed at a Black Lives Matter occupy-style protest in Seattle. Early reports from witnesses and protesters said the shooter(s) were self-appointed protest security defending the protest from an attack.

As reporters who covered 2020 in Seattle, this story haunted us. Black Lives Matter protesters said self-appointed protest security shot a Black teen in self-defense — that he was involved with a gang, attacking the protest. Some praised his killing online: “What a shot!" We always had questions.

NPR's award-winning audio documentary podcast Embedded is partnering with The Seattle Times and KUOW to launch We Keep Us Safe, a new series investigating the unsolved homicide of Antonio Mays Jr. The 16-year-old Black teenager was shot and killed inside Seattle's CHOP.

NPR's Embedded to produce We Keep Us Safe, a new series investigating the unsolved homicide of Antonio Mays Jr. https://podnews.net/press-release/we-keep-us-safe

I'm starting to think that the answers may not be here, on the computer

Today is a really hard day here at NPR. We're losing some good people, including people I'm very close to. The reasons for the layoff are complicated. We lost a lot of federal money, gained a lot of donations, but NPR isn’t sure how sustainable those donations will be in the future.

Late to this, but @kuow.org's podcast "Adults in the Room" is outstanding. Congrats to @isolde.bsky.social @willjames.bsky.social Jeannie Yandel @podcastalec.bsky.social and the whole team. www.kuow.org/podcasts/focus

I just finished listening to this podcast and it's an exemple of excellent journalism. Sexual abuse in high schools is extremely difficult to investigate. The journalists here started their quest for the truth about their teachers when they were still students. They were punished for it.

Dragged my 8-months-pregnant wife to the Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington show. She’s thrilled!

They put us in the newspaper.

If you're not listening to Adults in the Room, you're missing a lot. 4 episodes in, it explores a Seattle SD crisis 25+ years ago over abuse by a respected HS teacher and how fiercely communities and institutions attack those seeking accountability from the powerful www.kuow.org/podcasts/focus

Really enjoying this so far! Basically, what if you went back 20 years later and re-investigated "the incident" from your high school. www.kuow.org/podcasts/focus

As usual from this team, KUOW Focus's new podcast is excellent. If you were an AP kid or went to a high-performing high school around Y2K I think you'll find it particularly engaging.

I'm on episode three and damn. This is an incredible piece of journalism, reflection, and examination of things we take for granted.

KUOW is coming for you, Joe.

I’m utterly uninterested in “debates” about whether AI can do things well. I wouldn’t care if it could. 1. It stole from me. 2. I prefer me having my job to a computer having it. 3. I don’t teach “with” Lockheed or Raytheon; why wld I teach with Anthropic or OpenAI?

Hey look, a podcast made by a local public radio station is at the top of Apple Podcasts. Obey Apple and listen to "Adults in the Room" by @kuow.org.

I'm really proud to have helped produce this. It's the start of a new era of investigative, documentary storytelling at @kuow.org. "Adults in the Room" launches our new Focus podcast channel, where we'll drop more deeply-reported series — some of which are already in production. Subscribe!

To “remove writing from reporters’ workloads” is to remove reporters’ critical engagement with a topic. The writing is an inextricable part of the process. It’s hard. It takes time. That’s the point! There are no shortcuts for writing and reporting, and AI can hardly approximate it. Stop doing this.

I cannot stress this enough: writing is thinking.

New: One week ago, a jury ordered Seattle to pay more than $30 million to the family of a teen killed at CHOP. Today, a survivor of the same shooting filed his own lawsuit against the city. Robert West was shot in the head at age 14 and survived. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

My colleagues had me on the @kuow.org arts show Meet Me Here to talk about Infinite Jest lol www.kuow.org/stories/30-y...

I'm very excited to announce a new investigative podcast I've been a part of. "Adults in the Room" looks into a 25-year-old scandal at Seattle's elite Garfield High School that went unresolved... until my colleague Isolde Raftery revisited her high school years. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

There's a verdict in the Antonio Mays Jr. case, after nearly three weeks of jury deliberations and a month-long trial. Attorneys are assembling in the downtown Seattle courtroom. I'll thread the verdict below.

More and more, I feel incredibly lucky to have fallen into a media career that does not require me to post on social media all the time. It just seems bad. For the journalist, for the journalism, for the audience, who are tricked into believing they're consuming something more than empty calories.

I'm sitting in the King County courthouse, where a jury is deliberating in Antonio Mays Sr. vs the city of Seattle. Antonio Mays Jr., 16, was killed at CHOP in 2020; His death led the city to disband the protest zone. If there's a verdict, I'll post here. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Latest in the civil trial over the death of Antonio Mays Jr., the 16-year-old who was killed in Seattle's CHOP zone: Today, the lead detective in the homicide case unveiled evidence that was previously not public, as lawyers debated whether Mays committed a felony in the minutes before he was shot.

Omari Salisbury and I were on @kuow.org’s Soundside today to talk about newly unearthed footage of Antonio Mays Jr. from 2020. The footage, shot by Omari, shows Mays talking to a small crowd three days before he was shot and killed in Seattle’s CHOP. The case is unsolved. omny.fm/shows/sounds...

My colleagues and I have interviewed dozens of people about the death of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr., reportedly shot by CHOP security. Themes we often hear: He was up to no good. Security was protecting us. Here’s a video of Mays 3 days before his death. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

New from The Seattle Times and KUOW: Antonio Mays Jr. was capturing on video, speaking about police reform to a crowd of protesters, just three days before he was shot and killed at CHOP in 2020. This is a new data point in the 5-year-old question of who Mays was and what he was doing at CHOP.

A huge bookstore with a tiny/nonexistent horror section is a shitty, incomplete bookstore. I said what I said.

5 yrs after a Black teen was killed at CHOP, city officials + some protesters say he was firing a gun before he was shot. There’s no evidence of that in videos we’ve reviewed, including those filed by city to defend itself in a lawsuit from the boy’s father. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

We dug through many hundreds of pages of court documents to find some new clues in the unsolved fatal shooting of Antonio Mays Jr. at CHOP, an unhealed wound from the protests of 2020 in Seattle.

Every few days I think about a 22-year-old I met last year at Seattle's open-air drug market at 12th and Jackson. As our interview wrapped up, he urged me to dig into the foster care system and what it does to people like him. It is comforting to know that @claudiarowe.bsky.social did just that.

Did the attention economy make us weird? Or did it just expose us to how weird so many of us already were?