New NPR Series: "We Keep Us Safe" from the Embedded podcast

In the summer of 2020, after an intense standoff with anti-police brutality protesters, police abandoned their own precinct in Seattle. Protesters stayed and began occupying about eight city blocks, setting up tents, a mutual aid station, a stage for speeches and music. They called it Chop — the Capitol Hill Organized Protest — a place with no police. "For a moment there," the podcast narrator says, "It was Utopia." But then one night, a Jeep drove into the camp. Protesters, fearing an attack from right-wing activists, shot at the vehicle. When the shooting ended, one of the Jeep's passengers was dead: 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr.

This is the setup for "We Keep Us Safe," a new investigative true crime series from NPR's Embedded podcast, produced with the Seattle Times and KUOW. Reporters Will James and Sidney Brownstone spent more than a year sifting through rumors, digging up new witnesses, and uncovering never-before-seen evidence to understand what happened that night. Six years later, the case remains unsolved, and no one has been able to explain how a place built to protect Black life ended up killing a Black teenager.

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