The Daily Mail is reporting that the 16-year-old killed in Seattle’s so-called “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” (CHPP) zone June 29 was a homeless runaway who had allegedly carjacked the white Jeep Cherokee in which he was shot, and was advised by a friend to “drive to the police precinct in the CHOP for safety.”
Instead, that teen—identified by the Daily Mail as Antonio Mays Jr.—died in a hail of bullets apparently fired by so-called “CHOP security.” About 48 hours later, Seattle police moved in to reclaim the six-block area of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, arresting dozens of people and reclaiming the abandoned East Precinct.
The Daily Mail quoted Ciara Walker, 25, who asserted Mays and a 14-year-old companion had been living with her and her husband in a tent at Cal Anderson Park, where other protesters had also set up tents and were stubbornly resisting requests to move.
It was Mays’ death and that of a 19-year-old nine days earlier, that prompted the early-morning raid by more than a hundred Seattle police with support from the FBI and Bellevue police. They moved in at 5 a.m. July 1, giving CHOP protesters only minutes to leave.
According to an account in the New York Post, Walker said the two boys had carjacked the Jeep and were being pursued and shot at. She was apparently speaking to the teens via cellphone when she heard shots fired and one of them screamed he had been hit and yelled “I don’t wanna die.”
This was the incident that capped days of violence in the CHOP zone, where protesters took control after demonstrating outside the East Precinct police headquarters. Police abandoned the precinct in mid-June and largely stayed outside the zone boundaries until the shootings and killings began.
Fox News, quoting Washington Times columnist Tim Young, suggested the portrayal of the zone as an area of peaceful protest was essentially a fabrication.
“CHOP violently seized six blocks of downtown Seattle,” Young stated, “guarded the area they stole with semi-automatic rifles and appointed a leader who called himself a warlord and the media spun it as a fun time with ‘free snacks.’”
According to Fox, “The spin by the Seattle Times and national outlets that covered it belied the violent and dangerous origin of the area.”
Seattle officials had also described the CHOP protest as a peaceful occupation, but following the July 1 evacuation by police, reports to the contrary from business people in the zone appear to refute that description.
Writing at MyNorthwest.com, KTTH conservative talk host Jason Rantz, who now shows up regularly on Fox’s Tucker Carlson show, observed, “It took two dead Black teenagers before Durkan moved to finally clean up CHOP. It was always dangerous but (Seattle Mayor Jenny) Durkan, playing politics, pretended CHOP was a street fair that would turn into a “summer of love.” The residents and businesses in and around CHOP dealt with the dangerous activism for weeks, but Durkan did nothing.”
Liberty Park Press reached out to Seattle police to find out if officers had recovered any weapons known to have been carried by so-called “CHOP security” but did not get an immediate response.
Protesters clashed again with police Wednesday night, after the CHOP had been cleared out.
