Seattle CHOP verdict: City must pay $30.5 million to family of slain teen

After deliberating for 12 days, a King County jury has found that the city of Seattle was negligent in its emergency response to the fatal shooting of a teenager at the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, in 2020.

Jurors decided to answer “yes” to two questions the court posed to them: whether the city was negligent in its response to the shooting and, if so, whether this negligence caused Antonio Mays Jr.’s death. The city of Seattle will have to pay Antonio Mays Sr., the teen’s father, more than $30.5 million in damages.

The jury awarded about $4 million to the estate of Antonio Mays Jr. and about $26 million to Antonio Mays Sr.

Mays Sr. became emotional and hugged his lawyer as the verdict was announced.

The monthlong civil trial was the first public airing of facts around the June 29, 2020, shooting at CHOP, the protest zone that took over eight square blocks of Capitol Hill and lasted three weeks after Seattle police abandoned their East Precinct during the nationwide racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd.

Witnesses in the immediate aftermath of the shooting claimed armed protesters known as “CHOP security” killed the teenager, but no arrests have been made nor charges filed in the five and a half years since Mays’ death.

There were signs that deliberations were tense. On the second full day of discussions, a juror emerged from the jury room to get coffee.

“It’s getting to the point that I’m going to lose my sanity if I have to be around certain people,” the juror said to the courtroom bailiff.

On the third day of deliberations, jurors asked the judge for more clarity on a legal term – “superseding cause” – signaling they may have wrestled with whether the city’s actions were the cause of Mays’ death.

Mays had traveled to Seattle to join the protest after leaving a note for his father explaining he had left their home in Southern California to join in the civil rights movement. He did not tell his father where he was going, only that he wanted to make him “proud.” Mays Sr. filed a missing persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department the same day he found the note.

Less than 10 days later, Mays was dead after being fatally shot in a stolen white Jeep that crashed into CHOP barricades just outside of the abandoned East Precinct.

After he was shot alongside 14-year-old Robert West, who survived, volunteer protest medics attempted to treat the boys’ wounds. Witnesses called 911, but because first responders wouldn’t come to the zone, they decided to transport the boys via private vehicles. One took West to Harborview Medical Center while another attempted to meet with paramedics outside the zone.

One day after the shooting that killed Mays and injured another teen, then-Mayor Jenny Durkan issued an executive order declaring the protest an unlawful assembly. The following morning, police re-entered the zone, cleared encampments and arrested more than 40 people for failure to disperse or on suspicion of obstruction.

At one point during the trial, jurors were shown video of passengers in the vehicle carrying Mays trying to flag down a city ambulance that drove away from them.

Attorneys for the city and Mays Sr. presented contradictory testimony from medical experts. Experts for the plaintiff, including a neurosurgeon and pediatric critical care doctor, explained that even though Mays had been shot through the brain, his age and neuroplasticity meant he still stood a chance of survival. The brain injury wasn’t the fatal wound, they said, adding that if his airway had been properly cleared, he could have survived.

A forensic pathologist for the defense, however, argued that Mays’ injuries were so severe that he was unlikely to survive, regardless of whether the city provided more immediate care.

City attorneys initially argued that Mays Jr. was committing a felony – that he stole the Jeep – and therefor the city could not be held liable. But King County Superior Court Judge Sean O’Donnell ruled jurors could not consider that defense.

Even if the city proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mays Jr. had stolen the Jeep, O’Donnell ruled, there’s no proof that he was killed because of it, or that the person or people who shot him knew that.

Much of the testimony presented at trial also focused on who Mays was: a hardworking, home-schooled teenager poised to take over his father’s barbecue business. In the years since Mays’ death, the business stopped selling its goods at night markets as a result of Mays Sr.’s grief, according to his testimony.

Mays Sr.’s lawsuit, filed in 2023, originally sought to hold the city accountable for allowing CHOP to form and persist for three weeks, taking aim at Durkan, former Police Chief Carmen Best and other officials. However, before the case got to trial, O’Donnell threw out those arguments and removed those defendants, narrowing the case to a question of whether the city failed in its emergency response.