Seattle CHOP trial: Jury deciding if city is liable in teen’s death

January 09, 2026 / 8:39 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.

A King County jury is now tasked with deciding whether the city of Seattle bears legal responsibility for the death of Antonio Mays Jr., the 16-year-old whose unsolved killing led to the shutdown of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone in summer 2020.

Attorneys for the city and Antonio Mays Sr., the teen’s father, made their final appeals to jurors Thursday in a monthlong civil trial that, in the absence of any arrests, has been the only public airing of facts around the shooting. Witnesses claimed in the immediate aftermath that Mays Jr. was killed by armed protester vigilantes known as “CHOP security,” but in the five years since his death, no one has been charged. Police say the homicide case remains open and active.

Mays Sr. sued the city in 2023 after he said Seattle police stopped responding to his inquiries about their investigation into the death of his son. His lawsuit claimed the city failed to exercise reasonable care in its response to the shooting that killed his son when first responders refused to enter the protest zone and an ambulance drove away from a private vehicle that was attempting to flag paramedics down for help.

caption: Seattle police Detective Alan Cruise shows evidence collected at the scene when medics were trying to save the life of Antonio Mays Jr. and another boy, on the third day of the Mays vs. City of Seattle trial, Monday, Dec. 15. Antonio Mays Jr. was shot and killed in CHOP in 2020.

CHOP sprung up in an area comprising roughly eight square blocks within and surrounding Cal Anderson Park after a weeklong standoff between protesters and Seattle police ended with the department abandoning its East Precinct. Police then refused to enter the protester-occupied zone unless there was a “critical life safety” emergency.

But even when Mays Jr. and another teenager were shot, police refrained from entering the protest zone for nearly five hours.

Livestreamed videos of the early morning hours of June 29, 2020, show that after Mays and 14-year-old Robert West were shot in a white Jeep Cherokee at the barricades of the protest zone, civilian volunteer medics tried to treat the boys before private vehicles attempted to take them to professional medical care. Witnesses called 911, and video taken within the vehicle that carried Mays shows passengers tried to flag down a city ambulance, but it drove away as Mays lay bleeding in the back seat. That same private vehicle then met city paramedics in a nearby parking lot and passed Mays to them. Attorneys for the city and Mays Sr.’s attorney, Evan Oshan, debated how many minutes transpired. Oshan argued that the city’s delay in responding to Mays robbed him of the chance to survive. Medical experts for the plaintiff testified that Mays could have lived, even with a gunshot wound to the brain, because his cause of death was not the brain injury but blood in his airway, which could have been treated with prompt care.

“The delay caused Antonio’s death, the confusion, the chaos, the failure to accept responsibility by the city of Seattle,” Oshan said.

The city defended the actions of emergency responders and argued that Mays’ injuries were so severe that he was overwhelmingly likely to die whether he got immediate care or not.

caption: In this 2020 photo, an image of George Floyd is seen on a barricade near the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, at the edge of CHOP, a day before Antonio Mays Jr. was killed.

“Someone was out there with murder in their hearts that night, and they shot Antonio eight times,” said Joe Everett, one of two attorneys arguing the case for the city. “We were trying to prevent his death.”

Everett called Oshan’s arguments “an utter travesty” and said they were based on incomplete information and falsehoods.

“Antonio’s injuries from the shooting were so severe, so devastating that he had no real chance of survival,” he said during the city’s two-hour closing statement.

Jurors are now weighing two questions: Whether the city was negligent in its response to the shooting and, if so, whether that negligence caused Mays’ death. Oshan asked the jury to award $100 million if the answers are yes.

The jury had 10 minutes to deliberate Thursday. They will resume discussion Friday.

An eliminated defense

Late in the trial, King County Superior Court Judge Sean O’Donnell ruled that a key defense for the city could not be considered by the jury: the question of whether Mays played a role in stealing the white Jeep in which he was later fatally shot. State law shields municipalities like Seattle from legal liability in wrongful death cases if the person died because they was committing a felony — the so-called “felony bar” defense.

caption: Antonio Mays Sr., whose son was shot and killed at the Capitol Hill Occupied (or Organized) Protest.

The city argued that Mays and West stole the Jeep, but evidence was mixed. The victim of the car theft told police two teenagers assaulted him with a pickax and threatened him with a “brass knuckle knife.” The city presented evidence that a similar knife was found near where the boys were shot.

But the victim also said the teens who robbed him looked racially ambiguous; both Mays and West were Black. And the victim said one attacker had an Ethiopian accent, which neither boy had.

On Wednesday evening, O’Donnell ruled that jurors could not consider the city’s felony bar defense, making the question of Mays’ culpability in the car theft irrelevant to the trial. The judge wrote that, even if the city proved Mays stole the Jeep beyond a reasonable doubt, there’s no proof the person or people who shot him knew that or that he was killed because of it.

“There’s no possible justification for shooting the crashed car,” O’Donnell told attorneys Wednesday afternoon.

Controversial testimony

West, who survived the shooting with a brain injury, did not appear in court. Jurors watched a video interview West did with attorneys last year in which he says he and Mays Jr. did not steal the Jeep. Mays Sr.’s attorney cited the fact that West survived a gunshot wound to the head as proof Mays Jr. could have lived if he’d received care more quickly.

“Robert received timely medical treatment,” Oshan said in his closing argument, referring to West. “Robert was taken straight to the hospital. Robert has three children. He’s living his life.”

Witnesses called to the stand included Rashyla Levitt, a onetime CHOP leader who was one of four people in a Nissan Pathfinder trying to rush a gravely wounded Mays to get help. Jurors watched a video Levitt recorded from inside the Nissan trying to flag down a fleeing ambulance while Mays struggled to breathe.

Two paramedics who had been in that ambulance testified they felt threatened by the Nissan, which they said was traveling erratically with someone clinging to the roof, and they didn’t know Mays was inside.

Witnesses for both sides seemed to misrepresent video evidence. Levitt denied someone was on top of the Nissan, but video clearly showed someone lying prone on the roof. One of the paramedics testified that the person on the roof had a gun strapped to his back, but the video seems to show only a backpack.

The city’s attorneys also showed video evidence that the same Nissan carried people who were shooting at the Jeep minutes earlier, before it crashed at the CHOP barricades. Attorneys for the city claimed a “gun battle” broke out between the Jeep and Nissan, but one of the city’s own witnesses — a forensic video analyst — told the courtroom there was no evidence that any gunfire came from the Jeep.

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