When 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. left home to join Seattle's occupied, racial-justice protest zone in the summer of 2020, he was fighting for a cause he said he deeply believed in.
Less than a week later, he was shot and killed there.
We Keep Us Safe, the new 8-part series from NPR’s Embedded podcast, The Seattle Times, and KUOW investigates the circumstances around Antonio’s killing, a death that has remained unsolved for six years.
Hosted by Seattle Times reporter Sydney Brownstone and KUOW’s Will James, of the award-winning NPR Network podcast Lost Patients, the series probes whether Antonio’s death was an act of self-defense by protesters or a killing in cold blood — and who should be held accountable.
As locals who lived in the neighborhood where the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP, played out, the reporters have spent over a year digging deep into the case from different angles. They’ve interviewed nearly 100 people, including new witnesses, and uncovered evidence that’s never been public until now.
“The killing felt like a moral injury,” says Sydney. “Both for us as reporters and for the city. The fact that so few people wanted to talk to us about this pushed us to dig into the painful parts of this story other people didn’t want us to know.”
Told through a true-crime lens, We Keep Us Safe re-investigates the case while unpacking the broader implications for protest movements, accountability, and political identity in America today.
“We had a feeling that this unsolved case had something to teach us about our city and about America right now,” says Will. “And it did. It’s a story about uncomfortable truths and the lengths people will go to protect themselves.”
How did a place that was built to protect Black life end up killing a Black teenager?
The first episode of We Keep Us Safe drops today in the Embedded podcast feed, with new episodes each Thursday. NPR+ supporters get early access to every episode. Sign up at plus.npr.org and binge the first two episodes today.
And keep an eye out for bonus features on the series page, like an explainer video and virtual evidence locker, where new evidence will be added each week.
