CHOP trial begins: Seattle ‘abandoned Antonio Mays Jr.,’ lawyer says

David Gutman / The Seattle Times

December 11, 2025 / 11:02 am

caption: Before the jury is allowed in the courtroom, Antonio Mays, Sr. holds a picture of himself and his son, Antonio Mays Jr., in Superior Court at the King County Courthouse Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. Before the jury arrived in the courtroom, the judge requested that he put the picture down so they wouldn’t be influenced by seeing it.

On the first day of a trial scrutinizing Seattle's actions during 2020's racial justice protests, a lawyer for the family of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr., who was killed at the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, argued that he died because Seattle police, paramedics and emergency officials failed to respond appropriately after he was shot.

"The City of Seattle abandoned Antonio Mays Jr.," Evan Oshan said Wednesday during opening statements. Oshan is representing the teen's father, Antonio Mays Sr., in the civil lawsuit against the city that seeks unspecified damages.

Antonio Jr. had come to Seattle from his Southern California home just a week before he was killed, drawn by the protests that had engulfed the nation after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.

At 3 a.m. on June 29, 2020, Antonio was in a white Jeep Cherokee that was being chased and shot at by another vehicle when it crashed into barriers outside Seattle police's abandoned East Precinct. A shooter or shooters on the ground then unleashed a barrage of gunfire at the Jeep, resulting in Antonio Jr.'s death.

The killing remains unsolved more than five years later. Unless Seattle police identify and charge a suspect, the civil trial may be the only public airing of the facts surrounding Antonio Jr.'s death, which led to the city's dismantling of the protest zone that had galvanized the city and become a national symbol of liberal cities' perceived lawlessness. Seattle police says it remains an open and active investigation.

The trial, which is expected to last more than a month, will focus not on Seattle police's abandonment of their precinct or the creation of CHOP, but on the actions of Seattle emergency responders after that hail of gunfire.

At the King County Courthouse in downtown Seattle, Oshan and attorneys for the City of Seattle presented the jury of 11 men and four women (including alternates) dueling timelines about what happened in the frenzied minutes following the fatal shooting. King County Superior Court Judge Sean O'Donnell presided.

Police and paramedics staged nearby, outside the protest zone, as protesters and volunteer medics scrambled to get Antonio Jr. to an ambulance. Police didn't approach the shooting site until hours later.

"When there's a mass shooting, you don't stop at the CHOP zone, you go in, you go in with police, you go in with paramedics," Oshan said. "Evidence will show they didn’t do that."

Alexandra Nica, a Seattle assistant city attorney, argued that police and paramedics responded en masse to the shooting and that the city is not to blame for what she called a tragedy.

"We did not pull the trigger," Nica said in her opening argument. "Did someone other than the city cause Antonio Mays Jr.'s death? The clear answer there is yes."

Nica also argued that Mays Jr. was committing a felony when he was killed, which if proven would mean the city is not liable. State law shields governments from wrongful death lawsuits if plaintiffs were committing a felony that was the cause of injury or death.

Antonio Jr. and another boy, Robert West, were driving a stolen Jeep when they were shot, but whether they stole it is disputed.

Also disputed is who was driving the Jeep. Oshan said Wednesday (and two witnesses have said the same) that West was driving, but the city said it was Antonio Jr.

Nica also argued that Antonio Jr.'s eight gunshot wounds, particularly one that she said entered at his temple, were unsurvivable, regardless of the care he received. Antonio Jr. was eventually transported by ambulance to Harborview Medical Center, where he died.

"No one is saying that Antonio Mays Jr. is a bad person or had no value or didn’t deserve treatment or care," Nica said. "Antonio Mays Jr. was committing a felony that night, but he did get care and he did deserve care. He did not deserve to be shot. But the city is not responsible for what happened to Antonio Mays Jr."

The trial's outcome could depend on how jurors interpret a frantic effort by protesters to drive Mays Jr. toward professional emergency care. In a video referenced by both sides in court Wednesday, protesters in a silver Nissan Pathfinder chase an ambulance which appears to drive away from them.

"You’ll see a video showing them running away from good Samaritans that were chasing them, at the direction of the 911 operators," Oshan said.

Nica argued that the video is not so simple. The Pathfinder transporting Mays, she said, was the same vehicle that had shot at Mays' Jeep earlier in the night, giving paramedics reason to fear it. What's more, she said, there was a person hanging onto the roof.

"That's like a scene from 'Mad Max,'" she said. "Remember this is a scene of violence, there's an active shooter, that car might be the active shooter."

Oshan spent much of his 80-minute opening statement introducing the jury to who Antonio Jr. was.

He showed pictures of him goofing around with his little sister. Pictures at karate practice, at the beach and proudly displaying his family's barbecue sauce.

"Doing what kids do," Oshan said.

He also read to jurors from the note that Antonio Jr. wrote to his father right before he left for Seattle.

“I am leaving because with everything that is going on in the world I have been feeling this need to partake and stand up for our people,” Antonio Jr. wrote.

His father, who was in the courthouse Wednesday, was not "on board" with him leaving, Oshan said.

"His dad sternly said no," Oshan said. "But his son, who you will get to know, he had a mind of his own. And like 16-year-olds don’t fully understand or appreciate the dangers that go along with a protest."

Seattle Times investigative reporter Sydney Brownstone and KUOW reporter and producer Will James contributed to this report.

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