The Final Days of the Occupation

Heads up This episode contains explicit language and the sound of gun violence You'll also hear intense audio of confrontations between protesters and police, including the sound of flashbangs and other loud booming noises Previously on We Keep U safe Antonio Ji. left his home for Seattle on june twenty third, twenty twenty without telling his dad. He was shot and killed at the Seattle prrotest less than a week later You see a shadow. oututside the passenger door of the white Jeep. Unless you see any shells on the ground, pick those up, pocket them, takeang up At time protests were happening across the country. name. But Seattle was different Gby, you motherfuckers Protesterors' worst fears materialized. There was a car that started to accelerate. Oh God Jesus The violence protesters faced actually galvanized the movement. The police are now moving out The street is gonna open it up kind of sparked this idea of We should stay At the very beginning of chop, it felt like a giant exhale. The standoff was over Tear gas was gone The spot that for the past week had been a showdown between police and protestters was now a police free zone the heart of chop Big green city park. At night, you could see dozens of tents for people who were staying there And during the day, thousands of people converged on this space Protestters painted murals in the streets and set up a stage for speeches and protest songs Yeah yo, it' a beautiful beautiful thing to be alive right now, is it not My dad in the Philadelphia suburbs is watching The news and is afraid that Seattle has been taken over by radical anarchists and he calls me all freaked out And I'm like, dad, dad, it's okay. Let me Facime with you right now and I walked him through chop had dangled extension cords from windows. so Protesters living in the park could charge their phones There were all these tables and tents stacked with donations and bottled water We sing we want our world to change. We have to sing it like we want our world to change rightight here in through Seattle. Look. I want my world attention. I want my world attention It evolved into this community community of people that were coming together to serve the area that we were occupying better than the city was doing in our eyes This is where Shilah Levitt. One of ChOop's emerging leaders who we met in the last episode She says Chop was a place where protesters poured their energy into supporting each other and the homeless population staying in the park. We had soup kitchens We start in a community garden. There's lettuces over there Those looked like chives maybe. We were feeding everybody. Local restaurants were donating food. Lots of food and snacks. Again, this is all free. And protesters kept up their demands. They kept pushing for city leaders to cut the police budget by at least half and invest in social services. And so the demand that I put on the list is that we take some of the four hundred million dollars that we give to the Seattle Police Department every year And instead, we put the money into community services that know how to help people in crisis without izing I really want to stress that for a moment is utopia This guy Atris volunteered as a medic during the standoff and then he stuck around to see what this new thing would be like We're using his code name A lot of people went by codenames at chops. because he's worried about the professional consequences of using his real name I sent my wife and son up during the day to check it out because it was yeah, it was a place of beauty at first. yeah. We showed the world what it could be. And that's worth remembering. But amid all of these sunny feelings, there was already something more ominous growing beneath the surface Protestters felt this fragile new thing they were building could come under attack at any moment from right wing extremists or even the police Some of them decided they needed guns to protect the camp Cp existed for three weeks During that time, a conflict played out between these two aspects of it the gentler utopian side and the more extreme and dangerous one By the time Antonio Mays Jr. arrived, in Chop's final week The utopia had faded and the more dangerous side had prevailed. From NPR's emmbedded with KOW and the Seattle Times, this is We keepep U safe I'm Will James. and I'm Sidney Brownstone This is episode three There's a very clear moment that led to a lot of the fear and paranoia that would eventually take over Chop And it started on the night the police left the precinct and the occupation began. That night, protesters listening in on scanners Police say armed proud boys might be on their way. We actually got a hold of these recordings through a records request This confirms a fear Protesters were going to be attacked and this fear spread through the occupation. They just lived through an incident in which a car had driven toward a crowd of protesters and the driver had shot one of them And that was fresh on their minds as some protesters listened to the scanner that night Later that night, one protester seems ready to help defend the occupation This moment was caught on video Somebody over there ain'ten how to use a gun. Hey, I got you just don't say any names. Raz Simone is a local hip hop artist and one of the most recognizable protesters. He was even involved in talks with City Hall. In the video, you can see Raz popping the trunk of his white Tesla Taking out a rifle and passing it to someone T the b to the beacame You can hear someone off screen giving this guy tips on how to handle the gun They w to know why the guns tonight It' the energy isign right now. There's possible threaterv. It might be misinformation, it might be lies. So we're just this being ready This video goes viral There are pundits calling Raz a warlord, and it becomes a defining moment at Chop Pete Hagath and Tucker Carlson, both Fox News hosts at the time comment on it. This is a guy handing out assault rifles inside an autonomous zone taking over as a quasi police who thinks he's the leader. Raz Simone was an up and coming rapper Now he's a monarch boys never showed up that night And then the sun rises on this new occupation That first day, a couple of police officers venture into this new zone to try to figure out what's going on What they find is a bunch of makeshift barricades around What seems to be a border of chalk These rows of metal fences, they look sort of like bike racks are blocking off one of the main roads in the neighborhood The two officers walked past the barricades. and start chatting with the protestters At first it's pretty friendly. I got to recognize you. It's nice to see again. I'm Jeff. A group of people wearing kind of unusual outfits or approaches One is wearing paws and a tail. It's quite an outfit. I be you. Yeah. A lot of work on that tail I'm like self appointed saafety committee, community watch, just fucking sure. I've been since five PM walking around. These people describe themselves as a kind of neighborhood watch for the protest One guy comes up and gives a cop a fist bump And then another person shows uponous zone. I am sorry, we're just having a nice conversation. We' tal You can go and ask the mayor to come down here and talk to us. That's who we want to talk to. The person saying this seems to be a white man. He's wearing all black, black pants, black leather jacket, and he's armed. You can see a gun strapped around his right thigh. Why Why don't we talk up there? One of the other protesters tries to calm things down. let me escort you out of this facility right here. This is an autonomous zone and you're welcome to leave it right now. mean I wantan to talk just like you guys. I meanre You wantan to talk? Let's just talk. Let's up there on the other side of that barricade. Let's go. H happppy to walk up there. Let's go. Could you tell me who I'm talking to? So at least you're talking to a Seattle citizen No no, de escalation, de escalation,escal The two officers walked away But this moment helped determine the relationship police would have with Chop going forward The Seattle police decided to take a hands off approach and would only enter the zone for the most serious emergencies In the days ahead, guns and barricades would become an even bigger part of Chop. When we ask protesters today why they were so focused on securing the zone The most common answer we get is that it's because of those proud boys they heard about over the scanner Omari Salisbury, the journalist who live streamed the protests that summer, never forgot about that chatter He was still thinking about it a few months after Trump ended officer witness thirty proud boys, you know what I'm saying or thirty unidentifiable People with firearms going through downtown Seattle I said, I want to see the body camera footage that aligns with this radio call right here Omari filed a public records request And it turned out there wasn't any body camera footage of the proud boys This triggered an investigation by Seattle's Office of Police Acountability, and the agency concluded that police officers made it all up. This lie right here, this literally was a lie that went around the world Police told investigators they were just messing around on the radio, trying to make protesters think they were still using one channel When really they'd move their communications to a different one And they filled that fake channel with random conversation to keep it active so that protesters wouldn't get suspicious. We were just kind of feeding information more mundane routine kind of information over the radio. One echo is upset because he lost his vegetarian meal. chehecked for a disturbance for a male throwing live chickens into the roadway Units on Tack three be advised that the cookies are not nut free On that first night of chop, in addition to the random chatter, some officers started talking about the proud booys. Do you feel the goal was to create fear in the protesters who were monitoring the radio? down I think the majority of the fear was on our side at that time because we've been overrun on multiple occasions. I've never been attacked by the proud Boys. I have been at protest by Antif. So I think that focusing on the proud boys is not the right thing here Seattle's Office of Police Accountability ended up calling this an improper ruse that violated department policy Investigators blamed two officers for overseeing it, though they both left the department before any disciplinary action was taken We still don't know all the officers who participated or why. We asked Seattle pololice about this, but they declined to talk with us If the ruse was intended to scare protesters away, it backfired pretty dramatically Afterwards, Chop security expanded and Chop's borders hardened Throughout Chop's existence There were different factions calling themselves security. protesters volunteering to keep chops safe Some carried guns, some didn't I think Chop was a chaos magnet. that just attracted people someome with good, some with bad intentions Greg Scruggs is a reporter at the Seattle Times He sits maybe fifteen feet away from me and I'm pretty loud on some of my phone calls and he overheard me talking about chop came up to my desk and told me Hey, I wrote a freelance piece about chop security. I think it was for the Washington Post that I ended up. embedding with the job security and writing about that experience He said, Yeah, I'll give you all my tape What? My name is Josh. Josh, you want to sharing your last name? I'd rather not given the nature of the situation. I'll give you my face. Greg was reporting on chop security in its earliest days We're talking about the first week. So Greg saw the idealism, the free food and the mutual aid And then he noticed that there were people walking around looking like they were dressed for war. Can you tell me specifically, I'm not very familiar with fire AR fifty. That's an A fiftyty If they were carrying a gun openly That was usually an indication They were a self styled security person gear like I might have seen some bulletproof vests.. W that wouldould bulletproof be an accurate term to use? Yes, it would. Okay. And it just covers the vitals, the lungs and the heart. Right When Greg approached them, They seemed eager to talk about what they were doing to show off their gear Washington's an open carry state, so it's legal here to walk around with guns in public So, what's that This this is I think Husa bei gren Its not leh it just stays. Uhuh. I used to play with them as kids, Kind of a rowdy kid.. It was like they wanted to be secretive but also wanted to be seen How would you approach a violent crime situation like somebody you know an active shoot or kind of like the most extreme? If was an active shooter, I try and find someone who could eliminate the situation But what is a limit situation stop them and Options for stopping could include what Amed responsse There was a saying at Chop We keep us safe This phrase started years earlier with bllack activists. It was a vision for preventing violence that didn't involve police or prisons And it's been adopted by many different movements since then But at Chop We keep us safe seem to take on a specific meaning We're gonna to take security into our own hands One security group in particular that took this mantra to heart and it was mostly white They called themselves the Sentinels. This group popped up in the first few days of the occupation He took on the role of Garding Chop's barricads. They handed out radios, organized communications, coordinated who was stationed at the borders of this roughly eight block zone During ChOP, most people were introduced to the Sentinels through its most famous member a figure who went by the codeename James Madison James Madison has transitioned since twenty twenty, so you'll hear us using she her pronouns We reached out to interview her, but she declined to talk with us. Protestters back then probably remember someone who seemed to be a confident, almost brash young man to had one of the most iconic looks at chop She typically wore a face mask Oftentimes tan pants a bulletproof vest and usually carried around an AR fifteen style rifle All you ever really saw of James Madison's face was this little sliver of skin around her eyes. Like she was part soldier, part ninja and just a few days into this occupation Face would come to define chop nationally Fox News published an image of James Madison in full gear, photoshopped in front of a totally different image of smashed windows in downtown Seattle It fed into this narrative that Chop was a violent takeover of the city Fox News ended up apologizing for putting out this deceptive picture, but James Madison didn't shy away from the attention She kind of reveled in it ight of chop, she talkks for more than an hour with a podcast called Yeah, but stillill. I'm sure you've seen the photo of me running around the news in the phhotoshop job In these interviews, Madison brags about having this really hardcore military experience I did doorkicker things I did the stuff that our government doesn't speak of James Madison says this type of experience is necessary to defend the protesters at shop A lot of people out here think this is awesome. It's a nice little like summer street care kind of thing That's the vibes you get here during the day and stuff B It is a powdered day. But not even a powder tank because of the people here The enemies this group of people, it is the racists, it is the fascists that still live in this country This image of chop security that James Madison puts out there appeals to a lot of people At its peak, the Sentinels had dozens of volunteers But while volunteer security focused on the borders Chop medics were watching something else change from the inside. They needed as many people with actual medical skill as they could get Eron was a medic at ChHO We're using his middle name because he fears the repercussions of what speaking out publicly would do both for his career and his personal safety So I popped down there and was wandering around and I found a little medic tent and there a bunch of untrained civilians doing Really, really basic festival care, band aids, broken fingers, that kind of thing. I was like, Hey, I'm fully trained. You guys need some help. And they're like, yeah What Erin calls festival careare These are the injuries people sustain generally when they're having fun. They're throwing around a frisbee and they sprain a wrist. They take some ecstasy and forget to drink water These kinds of injuries may have started happening more at ChOP because as time went on It started to feel less like a protest and more like a festival Seatta has a feel a party in a free state It's like a black party. Similar to something like Oachella. Thousands of people had converged on the protest zone Itally burning man. Thiss we can chill and awesome. There were live streamers everywhere. What's up everybody. There was also, as time went on, they started dividing the houseless population in There was this facet of chop that overlapped very heavily with Seattle's street population. so unsheltered people marginal people veryery poor people Seattle at the time had the third largest homeless population in the country And more of those people were out on the streets because of the pandemic. shhelters had quarantined or had shut their doors completely. and then chop appeared and it had all this infrastructure like tents and food and medical care. peopleeople in need started going there And that population requires a ton of medical intervention and resources in many cases used really dangerous street drugs, synthetic drugs, and or had serious mental illnesses that causeed psychosis We started having to worry about overdoses and then the overdoses evolved into assaults. And along with drug use comes crime A Seattle Police intntelligence report said gang members were flooding into chobs stealing drugs, carrying guns, running into rivals. taking advantage of the absence of police for protesters heading into their second week of occupation This meant that As safe as Tot might have felt during the day It was a very different place at night Do not walk around by yourselves. Do not walk around in the dark. It is unsafe Very, very unsafe 's after the break On june nineteenth, twenty twenty, Antonio Mays junior was still three or four days away from leaving home So he wasn't there when the vibe changed at shop. We've talked to dozens of protesters and many of them say this day was a big turning point in the story of the occupation june nineteenth or juneteenth was a big party This is a holiday that commemorates the end of slavery, and we're at an occupied Black Lives Matter protest. So lots of people wanted to celebrate That night, sometime after two AM two teenagers in the area who had a history ran into each other at Chop One of them pulled out a gun and fired and the other teen was head His name was Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr.. A lot of people knew him as Forenzo He was nineteen years old As Lorenzo lies there wounded, the scene around him Rse unruly Dozens of people gather around to see what's going on Some of them pull out their phones and start calling nine hundred and eleven Number one, what is your emergency at a man bleeding out on the street right now. Meanwhile, others are trying to control the crowd and keep people back Mark Anthony, part of Chop's circle of leaders, was there that night. It says the whole time. We had medics. They put them over to the medic area. They tried to resuscitate them Chop's volunteer medics are working desperately on Lorenzo trying to keep him alive and people getting increasingly distressed and anguished as they realize The ambulance is not coming to get him I one yourirgen I'm not a cop callor, but somebody dinger. They're fucking bleoting out. Allright Hello, you have ao. Can you hear me? Now we need a pretty handless man fuck see any new information? just Ambulances won't enter the area of a recent shooting without a police escort And police haven't arrived. She do? Sir screaming into the phone's not gonna help. Oh my go, you I fucking wor it Do you anything changes or you to suspect I actually watched Lorenzo Anderson bleed out while we had to knowingly witness this ambulance sitting right around the corner waiting unt soil they just realized we got to get this man to the hospital or he's going to die. So they threw him on the back of a truck, tried to rush him over to the hospital By the time police in riotgeear marched into chop Protesters had already driven Lorenzo away themselves. He was pronounced dead at a hospital Years later, his dad would win a five hundred thousand dollars settlement from the city after suing over the city's handling of Chop and his son's shooting We asked Seattle police to explain their response to the juneteenth shooting They declined To this day, a lot of people in Seattle mix up Lorenzo and Antonio Mayays Jr. They were both black teens. They were both killed at chop. only nine days apart There are major differences between what happened to Lorenzo and what happened to Antonio Lorenzo's killer has been caught and pleaded guilty And we know that he was motivated by a personal dispute Whereas so much of Antonio's death remains a mystery He After Lorenzo was shot, protesters gather on the playfield, right across the street from where he had just lay dying It's the middle of the night and stadium lights shine down on the field Rashila Levitt, one of the people who's risen up as one of the leaders of this movement, takes a megaphone. and at first, her message to the crowd is, This tragedy will not derail Chump A you guys say We're not going to pay any attention to the negativity over there. We're going to come back to the circle and we're going to continue the dialogue. We're going to continue to list up the black voices that are hting right now. We're going continue to have a dialogue of what is happening. But then the stadium lights cut out and the tone shifts. The reality of what just happened seems to sink in This is a safety precaution. Now that the lights are off, it is imperative that if you do leave this area, you travel in a pair, do not walk around by yourselves. When we're done here, I advise you to go to your tents where you sleep in and to stay there. Do not walk around in the dark. It is unsafe. The megaphone gets passed around to other protesters And it's clear some resentment is brewing One of the protesterors blames this violence on the people who've shown up to party. Y. comeome on, man.. Sit, I've been telling to tell you guys day after day after day after day. takeake that party and sit to the party. This ain't the party, bro. This ain't Coachella Before Lorenzo's death, it had still been possible to ignore the signs that Chop was spiraling out of control But now that someone had died, No one could deny that chop had changed whole space felt darker and angrier A lot more just, Hey, this guy tried to stab me and I've got this bad cut or hey, I just got beaten or hey I'm just scared, can you help me A lot of people, like Eron, the medic we heard from earlier Remember juneteenth as the moment many of the more casual protesters finally bailed from jobs. It was also when a lot of the more experienced security and medical volunteers decided it was time to leave A lot of the warm and fuzzy groups that were peaceful quickly departed and it was a lot more militant the shop that saw thousands of people streaming in during the day That was over But there were still dozens of people staying at night Some of them had nowhere to go For others, maybe they wanted to take advantage of the chaos. And maybe some just couldn't let this experiment fail About a week after Lorenzo died, Rashilo was still there. I slept there. I ate there, showered when I could But her relationship with the movement had changed Early in the protests, she'd been willing to call out violence and property damage She'd talked to the media she'd sat across from the mayor in negotiations And this came at a cost More radical protesters came to see Rashiah as not hardcore enough Even kind of suspicious And this was happening all over Chop protestters turning on each other, accusing each other of being ops, of working for the police or the city government. I had personally started to hear peopleeople calling me a rat and saying that I was a police sympathizer. Some of them gave Rashilah the nickname boots. And at first I thought it was just because I was always wearing my boots. I have combat boots that I wear every Every day Some many have let me know that they were calling me that because they are calling me boot And I'm sitting here like, Rro whatch Rashila's response was to focus on protecting chop to keep trying to make this experiment work. after so many others had bailed. I most just, you know, help keep that area safe She started working with Chop security on the deescalation team If we're going to have security, then we need to have people out there that are good with people, that can talk to people, that can fop somebody down from a frustrating situation that can de escalate the situation Nine days after Lorenzo's death Rashaila says she was making the rounds with her de escalation partner. And they came across two teenagers getting into a fight on the playfield They moved in to break it up But Rashilte's partner took one teenager aside, and Rashilte took the other I talk to them like I talk for my nephews to be honest with you I was like, how could you have handled that situation differently? You know, what triggered you to react the way that you did? Rashila didn't remember what this kid was upset about, but she says he was worked up, He was angry He's like, I get frustrated sometimes. and he's like, I'm not really sure how to like handle it I remember him was saying something about like his friends and notot wanting to seem like a pussy or whatever or something like that And I holdld him, I was like You have to not get a fuck about what other people think about you where Shila had just lived through something like that herself. fellow protesters accusing her of being a rat. She knew firsthand how much other people's opinions can destabilize you. He talked about different ways that he could channel his own inner piece and try to find that quiet space within himself when he does get frustrated. I did like grab his hands when I said that. I was like, it doesn't matter here And I touched his chest right here. and I was then I reached on and I grabb a tamp. I was something it shouldn't matter Yeah. She was saying If it really doesn't matter in your heart It shouldn't affect how you act. Rashilah encouraged the boys to shake hands and they walked away And That was it. Rashila had no idea she just talked to Antonio Mays Jr be shot dead just a few hours later So what happened when Antonio got to chop How did this teenager who left home to fight for the cause end up fighting with other people That's on the next episode of We Keep U Safe We've got some new evidence on our website this week Check out a map of chop and listen to a recording of Seattle Police radio chatter. You can find that on npr d. org slash chop We Keep us safe from NPRs embedded is a collaboration with the Seattle Times and KOW The series is reported and written by me, Sidney Brownstone David Gutman and Will James This episode was edited by Louise Treas and Laura Grrenias with support from Katie Simons It was produced by Abby Wendell, Sarah Wyman, and Dan Germma Our senior producer is Adelina Lancienis Additional reporting by Greg Scruggs and Omari Salisbury, who contributed recordings to this project and live streamer, Joey Weiser research and fact checking Dana Soliman and Neil Oolf Robert Rodriguez mastered the episode Music by Audio Socket, Connor Moore from Seymour Sound. Romin Araui Susy Analog Tyle and rununning Dog music and Universal music production and a big thanks to our NPR plus supporters Embedded is where we do ambitious, long form journalism at NPR, and NPR plus helps keep that work going Supporters also get to listen to every embedded episode early Find out more at plus. npr. org If you'd like to email the show, you can reach out at embedded at npr. org. I'm Syidney Brownstone This is embedded from NPR Thanks for listening