This has to be a bittersweet moment for this family, but it sounds like at least partial justice to this author:
JUST IN — A jury has found the City of Seattle negligent and liable for the 2020 CHAZ/CHOP killing of Antonio Mays Jr.
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) January 29, 2026
The family has been awarded roughly $30 MILLION.
Watch as Antonio Mays Sr. breaks down in tears after hearing the verdict. pic.twitter.com/m1lZkzjjiF
Regular readers might remember that during the BLM/Anti-FA riots of 2020, these fascist thugs purported to set up multiple autonomous zones in America, where they declared that federal and state law no longer applied. At the time this sounded pretty secessiony to this author. And that is weird, because we keep being told that there was some kind of party switch between 1850 and today, so that all those secessionist Democrats played political musical chairs and ended up joining the party that won the Civil War for the North. Yet here they were, in the year of our Lord 2020 purporting to secede from the union and even their own state.
It was like the Free State of Jones for dummies. (A pretty good movie, by the way.)
One of those zones was CHOP/CHAZ, so named because they were initially called the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (sometimes substituting Organized for Occupied) and later called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, because nothing says spontaneous protests/riots like organized branding. In any case, Komo News has more details, as well as video of the father’s statement:
A jury has awarded the father of a teen who was shot and killed in the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) zone in Seattle in 2020 approximately $30-million after finding the city was negligent in how it handled the weeks-long protest zone.
— KOMO News (@komonews) January 30, 2026
The family of Antonio Mays Jr., 16,… pic.twitter.com/xpJCRlS8jr
The cut off text:
The family of Antonio Mays Jr., 16, filed a lawsuit alleging his death was the result of unsafe conditions in the CHOP Zone, which the city of Seattle had known about for weeks by the time he was killed in late June of 2020.
From the article:
A jury has awarded the father of a teen who was shot and killed in the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) zone in Seattle in 2020 approximately $30-million after finding the city was negligent in how it handled the weeks-long protest zone.
The family of Antonio Mays Jr., 16, filed a lawsuit alleging his death was the result of unsafe conditions in the CHOP Zone, which the city of Seattle had known about for weeks by the time he was killed in late June of 2020.
The lawsuit alleged Mays had been ‘lured’ into the CHOP zone by a statement from city officials who supported the CHOP zone during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
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 who were acting as CHOP security.
Defund the police, but set up your own extra-legal police who murder innocent civilians: It’s leftist logic at its finest. And as you will see in a moment, ‘murder’ is the correct word:
After the shooting, then-Seattle police chief Carmen Best said bystanders had been ‘in and out’ of the jeep before detectives were able to 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.
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A link in the article reveals that the murderer was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Good lord, he murdered a young man in an attempt at secession and he only got fourteen years in prison. That isn’t justice. That’s a slap in the face.
And neither is this approximately $30 verdict. The officials who let this nonsense go on won’t pay a penny out of it let alone see any prison time for their gross negligence. The people of Seattle will pay the bill, and this author won’t assume that regular Seattleites were down with allowing such lawlessness. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. As for the officials, maybe this will motivate the people to throw them out in the next election, but we aren’t holding our breath.
Of course, the natural question is why they weren’t suing the man who pulled the trigger, too. Just based on experience, the lawyers probably determined that the killer didn’t have enough assets to make it worthwhile and they probably didn’t want the jury to dump the blame on the killer because they wanted to give Seattle the biggest bloody nose that they could.
Daviscourt had apparently been following the case closely, and wrote a thread on the case. We will selectively highlight bits of it, such as this exact breakdown of the award of damages:
Monetary breakdown
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) January 29, 2026
Antonio Mays Jr (deceased):
Economic damages: $1,209,044
Non-economic damages: $2,838,500
Antonio Mays Sr:
Economic damages: $567,712
Non-economic damages: $25,962,652https://t.co/p38vhRJg7J pic.twitter.com/F99UHHGZAH
She also linked back to her previous coverage, here:
🚨 Breaking: CHAZ/CHOP trial — Antonio Mays v City of Seattle.@SeattlePD homicide detective Alan Cruise testifies to the Court that he was given direct orders NOT to enter the CHAZ/CHOP zone following the shooting of Antonio Mays Jr.
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) December 11, 2025
Cruise said that the orders came from SPD… pic.twitter.com/5IHlePAJXj
You see the plaintiff’s attorney try to get Mahaffey to speak to his views or feelings about the order to abandon that section of the city, and city’s lawyer successfully objects. But his disgust is written all over his face. He clearly did not like that order and we doubt that the jury missed that.
She also links back to this:
🚨BOMBSHELL — CHAZ/CHOP TRIAL — Antonio Mays v City of Seattle
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) December 23, 2025
Rashyla Levitt, a leader of the former 2020 BLM-Antifa autonomous zone, testifies that she and other CHOP leaders met with City officials off-site during the deadly insurrection to discuss “designated casualty… pic.twitter.com/kmb2yY2JDY
The cut off text:
Rashyla Levitt, a leader of the former 2020 BLM-Antifa autonomous zone, testifies that she and other CHOP leaders met with City officials off-site during the deadly insurrection to discuss ‘designated casualty zones.’
Levitt said these zones— intended for emergency personnel to treat injured protesters— were set up two-blocks outside of the CHAZ, and were created by former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, and Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.
The meeting was conducted a few days after the first homicide occurred in the zone.
Levitt testified that she called 911 dispatch to report the shooting of Antonio Mays. She was then instructed to transport Mays to the 14th and Union designated casualty zone, but when she arrived, Seattle Fire Medics immediately fled.
And the negligence apparently went further than merely letting these criminals run rampant, but because even EMS (Emergency Medical Services) personnel were not allowed to enter the area. That in turn delayed care for Mays that might have saved his life. Good lord, this must’ve been very hard for the family to hear:
🚨CHAZ/CHOP TRIAL — Medical expert testifies that Antonio Mays Jr. would have SURVIVED gunshot wounds if he received emergency aid sooner.
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) December 17, 2025
The expert cited CHAZ/CHOP barricades (installed by the City of Seattle) in delaying treatment, as well as medics “abandoning” the patient… pic.twitter.com/o53UKwT94j
The cut off text:
The expert cited CHAZ/CHOP barricades (installed by the City of Seattle) in delaying treatment, as well as medics ‘abandoning’ the patient after fleeing the premises of the ‘designated casualty area,’ which was set up by the City outside the zone for emergency responders to collect injured protesters.
It took Antonio Mays Jr., who was struck several times by gunfire, more than 25 minutes to get into the care of medics—at the direction of dispatch. He was struck in the head, jaw, chest, and extremities.
The medical expert testified that the teen did NOT die from a gunshot wound to the brain, but died from obstructed airways, citing medical records.
She told the Court that ‘it was not the brain injury that was the lethal event,’ and if medics had cleared his airways sooner, the teen would have ‘survived.’
He had a ‘survivable wound’ and died a ‘catastrophically painful’ death, the medical expert said. Antonio Mays Jr. was breathing and had a pulse when CHOP medics arrived at the designated casualty zone.
Seattle Fire medics testified that they fled the zone due to ‘perceived danger.’
The medical expert’s testimony bolsters the plaintiff’s argument that the City of Seattle created a ‘state-created danger,’ leading to Antonio’s death and rendering the city liable in the wrongful death lawsuit.
So, with the understanding that this author is not a medical expert, this plaintiff’s expert seems to be saying that if EMS had been able to get breathing tube into Mays quickly, he probably would be alive today. Instead, he waited hours and basically choked to death.
Did he say ‘I can’t breathe’ like George Floyd? Asking for a friend…
Finally, we hear from the father on the stand:
🚨JUST IN: CHAZ/CHOP TRIAL — Antonio Mays v City of Seattle.
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) December 31, 2025
Antonio Mays Sr., the father of killed black 16-year-old, breaks down in tears while testifying about his murdered son.
He revealed that his son left behind a note announcing he was leaving home in California to… pic.twitter.com/Hd19rLipIj
The cut off text:
He revealed that his son left behind a note announcing he was leaving home in California to participate in the Seattle ‘summer of love’ festival, feeling moved by what he falsely believed was a peaceful racial justice gathering.
Mays immediately reported his son missing to police and was notified days later about his death.
His son meant the world to him.
Mays raised Antonio as a single father, bringing them out of homelessness by starting a BBQ sauce company called Scratch. Antonio was his sole business partner, chopping veggies at age 7 to help sell the sauce at festivals around California.
The pair lived and breathed Scratch, giving it their all to have a roof over their heads.
Their dream was to have their sauce be sold in grocery stores. After roughly a decade of trying, large grocery chains finally picked up their sauce — but only after Antonio was gunned down, his life taken before getting to see his dream come true.
Mays said Antonio was drawn to participate in the CHAZ/CHOP because it was described by Seattle city officials as a ‘festival.’
As a bit of inside baseball, this looks like testimony designed to establish damages—i.e. how much money that he deserves. We think the strongest part comes after the nine-minute mark when he talks about how he has to push down his pain in front of the family that remains. One suspects he is the kind of person who puts on a brave face in public and absolutely breaks down when he alone. Godspeed, Mr. Mays and may the Lord heal your heart and the hearts of everyone who loved your son.
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