Carlin Casey first considered the idea of human starvation when he was seven years old. Back then, in 1992, his mother, Mary, read aloud to him and his little sister, Karina, from an unusual bedtime story, Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.” The family led a life of relative abundance. At their pueblo-style home in California’s Coachella Valley, Mary blasted Madonna in the kitchen as she made her kids burgers or big plates of spaghetti, lighting candles and burning essential oils (“for the vibes,” Carlin told me). Curled up in bed, listening to his mother describe Anne Frank’s privations, Carlin wondered, what was it like to experience a hunger so cutting? “Now, when I look back on it,” Carlin said recently, “I think maybe that was my mom’s way of trying to warn me—trying to prepare me for how cruel the world can be.”

The memory returned to Carlin years later, in August of 2022, when his then partner, Eric, drove him to Banner-University Medical Center, in Tucson, Arizona. The pair walked into the emergency room. There, Carlin found his mother, looking skeletal in a hospital bed, wearing a diaper. When he’d last seen her, that spring, Mary was a healthy hundred and forty-five pounds, her cheeks bright. Now she was so emaciated that Carlin gasped. “She looks like a famine victim,” he told Eric. He stepped closer.

Mary’s hair—once long and lustrous, a lifelong point of pride—was matted to her head, Carlin noticed. She weighed ninety-one pounds.

“What happened to you, Mom?” Carlin asked.

Mary could barely speak. She worried that Carlin wasn’t actually Carlin. She’d spent the whole night screaming in pain and fear. Her jailers, she believed, might come back for her. “You don’t understand,” she told her son, who she thought might be a robot, or a co-conspirator. “They’ll do whatever they want!”

Carlin told his mom that he would investigate. He’d figure out how she had wound up in such a dire condition, and he’d identify who, exactly, was responsible.

“They aren’t going to let you,” Mary replied. She tried to weep, but her body was too dehydrated to make tears.

Carlin had no idea he was stepping into a scandal that involved health-care corporations with, in at least one case, an annual revenue of roughly a billion dollars—a scandal that implicated core institutions of American public life and affected a shocking number of victims across the country. At its worst, the wrongdoing involved state-sponsored homicides of the most vulnerable citizens, covered up by private companies and county officials.

At the hospital, Carlin had a conviction he later came to regard as painfully naïve: that he could expose whatever horrible thing had happened to his mom, and put a stop to it.

“You wait and see,” he told Mary. Carlin trusted that he could bring about a reckoning.

More information can be found at Starved for Care.

Growing up, in San Diego, Mary Faith Casey could easily access delight. She’d accompany her mother, an amateur astronomer, to the planetarium, or spend long days with her older sister Michelle, climbing around the exhibits at the natural-history museum in Balboa Park, where their mom had a job playing reel-to-reel films. In high school, Mary grew interested in fashion. She’d sew miniskirts and halter-top dresses out of glittery fabrics she bought at a thrift shop, and she wore her shiny blond hair past her waist. Michelle noticed Mary’s depth of feeling. “She was a very sensitive, very kindhearted child, and empathetic to the point of extremes,” Michelle said. “She was also naïve to her physical beauty, so I often felt I needed to protect her.”

The girls’ mother, Phyllis, struggled with bipolar episodes, so Mary lived with her father, who’d served in the Air Force and worked in supercomputing. Mary’s siblings were scattered across various living arrangements. As Mary and Michelle grew older, they would visit their mom every other weekend in Pacific Beach, where the girls would walk to the ocean and sometimes hitchhike home without Phyllis seeming to mind. “It was Mary who fought to keep us together as a family,” Michelle said. “That was her rescuer instinct.”

When Mary reached her mid-twenties, her life took a glamorous turn. She fell in love with a handsome tennis player who coached celebrities at a local country club; they soon got married. The newlyweds designed a comfortable home, filled with Mexican pottery and delicate, cactus-patterned tile, and surrounded by bougainvillea blossoms and palm trees. Mary gave birth to Carlin in 1985, and to Karina four years later. The young couple went to parties at desert estates, for which Mary would blow-dry her feathered bangs and wear bedazzled jackets with shoulder pads. Through her husband’s tennis coaching, the two sparked a friendship with the Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife, who flew the couple to Europe on their private jet. In the summertime, the Caseys travelled to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where the kids splashed around in Hayden Lake and rode Jet Skis with their mom.

Mary’s personality began to palpably shift as the kids approached adolescence. Mary had brought her mother, who had suffered multiple mental-health crises, to live with the family; Phyllis then fell ill with metastatic lung cancer, and Mary served as her caretaker. Mary’s marriage deteriorated, and after her mother died, in 2000, she became severely depressed. Mary had experienced previous mental-health dips—two bouts of postpartum depression, for instance. But this time she began drinking heavily, and developed a new volatility from which she couldn’t seem to return. “Before, she’d have outbursts, but she could always get back into mom mode,” Michelle told me.

Mary and her husband divorced in the early two-thousands, when the kids were in their teens, and sold their house in the desert. Karina had gone to live with her dad, and Carlin with Mary’s younger sister Kaj. After her marriage ended, Mary fell for one physically abusive man after another. “It was self-punishment,” Michelle said. Mary lived off the funds from the sale of the house for a while, but soon she found herself sleeping in women’s shelters and hotels, and she landed in jail on vagrancy charges. She had been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and was later diagnosed as having schizophrenia. At times, she went on medication and, to family members, seemed more like her old self. But she was bothered by the attendant weight gain and lethargy. “I feel half dead, and I can’t be creative,” she’d tell Michelle. So she’d let her medication slip. Initially, Mary would have a flash of pleasure as “the natural high of her mania returned,” Michelle told me; she could stay up late using her collection of gel pens to craft vibrantly colored cards for people she loved. Inevitably, though, the same cycle of addiction and incarceration would repeat.

“I don’t want him to stop binge-watching and find you here.” Cartoon by Frank Cotham Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop

From jail, Mary would send sweet letters to her kids, festooned with hearts and stickers. “I love you,” she’d write Karina, “with the heart of a lion.” She’d often include an earnest token of maternal care: a rectangular card that promised, “This coupon entitles Karina to mucho hugs and kisses,” or a “Prayer for Stress” that read, “Quiet my anxious thoughts.” Both her children struggled. When friends from high school asked Karina where her mom was, she’d keep it vague—“San Diego,” she’d say. She and Carlin held out hope that their “real mom” would return: the good-natured woman who’d sewn their Halloween costumes by hand (a green T. rex for Carlin one year, and a sequinned disco queen for Karina), and who, whenever they were sick, held a Gatorade bottle to their lips and a washcloth to their foreheads. “When she was on her medication, her daily life was completely different,” Karina told me. “We could tell right away when she’d been off it. She’d go into a tunnel, and we had to protect ourselves.”

By the time the pandemic began, Mary, in her early sixties, was homeless. Carlin, now in his thirties, had recently moved to Tucson, and Mary followed him there. Carlin found this stressful. “She was good at disturbing my peace,” he told me. She hallucinated that Carlin had been kidnapped and tried to break into his home to rescue him. Police arrived at the scene, interviewed Mary, and let her go, but she wound up in police custody again the next day, after assaulting a man who’d tried to help her. She was released on probation, the terms of which required her to maintain an approved residential address. But Mary lacked a job and slept in a tent encampment in a park. She hadn’t fully processed that, in Tucson, her homelessness could be treated as a crime.

On April 30th, 2022, a security guard at a local business plaza called the police to report Mary as a nuisance. The police found an outstanding warrant for Mary, tied to her failure to register her address. Officers arrested her on a probation violation and drove her to the Pima County Jail.

Mary declared her mental-health troubles to jail-intake officials. An administrator logged her as “alert,” “responsive,” and “cooperative,” and recorded her affect as “flat.” Soon afterward, she told a nurse that she was “extremely disappointed” with herself, and was suffering from severe depression. When Michelle, who lived in Encinitas, California, learned of her sister’s latest arrest, she reached out right away to Mary’s public defender, Darlene Edminson, saying, “Tell Mary we love her, and we’ll do what we can to help.” Michelle and Kaj felt certain that they’d hear from Mary soon. Instead, the family was met with “radio silence,” Michelle told me. “That was the beginning of the end.”

If you’ve ever considered calling for help during a loved one’s mental-health crisis, you’ll know the potential terror of getting law enforcement involved. People with untreated mental-health issues are sixteen times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than others approached by law enforcement, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that works on behalf of people with severe mental illness. Your friend or family member might get harmed by police, or they might get jailed in the midst of a psychiatric episode—a far more common outcome than a police killing, but one that can also prove lethal. “This could honestly happen to anyone,” Carlin told me. “Mental illness doesn’t care how wealthy you are.”

For decades, America relied heavily on psychiatric asylums to treat—or, in many cases, to warehouse and neglect—people with serious mental-health conditions. Then the grand project of “deinstitutionalization” began. In signing the 1963 Community Mental Health Act, President John F. Kennedy promised that dysfunctional asylums would be emptied out and replaced with a robust, well-funded network of outpatient-treatment providers and community behavioral-health services. But the funding for that vision never materialized. Instead, new policies criminalizing poverty and addiction swept up people in severe psychiatric distress, who often ended up in county jail—where, with the rise of the cash-bail system, they might languish for months or even years, simply awaiting their day in court. The number of people jailed pretrial has nearly quadrupled since the nineteen-eighties; people with mental-health issues tend to be detained significantly longer than the rest of the population. Today, the nation’s three largest mental-health providers are New York’s Rikers Island, L.A. County’s Twin Towers Jail, and Chicago’s Cook County Jail. According to a recent report by the Pima County administrator, more than half the people locked up at the local jail have, like Mary, a mental-health condition that requires medication.

After Mary was arrested, Michelle and Kaj bought her items from the commissary online: a tube of cocoa-butter lotion, a pack of playing cards, some Kraft jalapeño spread, a flour tortilla, and a pair of reading glasses. Mary’s family also tried to put money in her online account for virtual messaging, but they were told that she wasn’t eligible for the service. Weeks passed, and Mary remained incommunicado. She had entered some mysterious vortex.

In May, Mary’s jailers brought her to a court appearance, where she admitted to her failure to reside at an approved address; the court found her in violation of her probation and sent her back to jail to await sentencing. Her jailers didn’t bring her to subsequent mandatory court dates, including a hearing in late July, to determine if she was mentally competent to be sentenced.

Six years after her son was killed by a Seattle police officer involved in multiple deadly encounters, a federal judge cleared the way for Rose Johnson’s excessive force lawsuit to move forward.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly set a tentative trial date of Sept. 15 after an appeals court this year rejected the officer’s claim of qualified immunity, the much-debated legal doctrine that can shield police officers from civil rights claims.

The ruling on March 3 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a sign of the incremental change unfolding in courts and statehouses across the country as legislative efforts to reform qualified immunity in Congress have stalled.

Rose Johnson and her son, Ryan Smith, in 1994. Family Photo

To Johnson, who filed the Seattle lawsuit after police fatally shot her son seconds after they kicked down his door on May 8, 2019, the panel’s decision was an important victory on a long and arduous road of trying to heal.

“Trying to move on and heal from the trauma of losing Ryan hasn’t been easier because six years have passed by,” she said of her son, Ryan Smith, 31. “He was — and is —my heart and soul.”

Johnson’s lawsuit, filed in 2022 after an NBC News investigation detailed her son’s case, alleges that the “willful and reckless” conduct of Officer Christopher Myers violated Smith’s constitutional rights and caused his death.

Seattle Police Officer Christopher Myers. Courtesy of Christopher Myers

The suit names a second officer as a defendant and accuses the Seattle Police Department of demonstrating “deliberate indifference” by not getting Myers — who fired his gun in four separate encounters from 2010 to 2019, three of which were fatal — “professional, mental, or other help to assure he stops shooting people.”

Myers has not been disciplined or charged with any crimes in connection with those shootings, though an appeals panel ruled in 2014 that there was little evidence to corroborate his account of the allegedly suspicious behavior that prompted one of them. Myers did not respond to a request for comment. He previously defended his use of lethal force, telling NBC News in 2021 that he never expects an encounter to escalate into a shooting.

“Unfortunately, some people don’t yield and sometimes force the situation,” he said.

Lawyers representing the officers and the police department did not respond to a request for comment. The attorneys previously sought to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming in a 2023 filing that city officials could not be held liable because they had not violated Smith’s constitutional rights. Smith posed an imminent and deadly threat when he was fatally shot, they wrote, and the officers were entitled to qualified immunity.

The qualified immunity legal defense, first adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, allows law enforcement officers to argue that claims of constitutional violations should be dismissed because the violations were not “clearly established” at the time they occurred.

“There was no (and is no) case that would put every reasonable officer on notice that shooting Mr. Smith would violate clearly established law,” the lawyers wrote.

Police killed Ryan Smith, 31, in 2019. Family Photo

Smith was fatally shot after his girlfriend dialed 911 and described a terrifying situation: Smith had a knife, and he was threatening to assault her and take his own life, according to a dispatcher’s log of the call included in the filing. She was barricaded in the bathroom, according to the call log, and Smith was scratching at the door. “There is blood all over the bathroom,” a dispatcher told responding officers.

City officials later acknowledged that that final grim detail was based on inaccurate information that the 911 call taker misinterpreted. The girlfriend actually told the operator that she did not need a medic but feared Smith had hurt himself and needed help, according to Johnson’s lawsuit.

But when Myers responded to the 911 call, he believed Smith’s girlfriend might be bleeding out, he told investigators. In the 2023 filing, the officers’ attorneys wrote that “any objectively reasonable officer would have believed this was a domestic violence emergency.”

Body camera video of what followed showed officers ordering Smith to open the door. Seconds later, after he did not comply, they kicked it down. In the video, Smith can be seen walking slowly toward the threshold with what appears to be a knife in his hand as the officers order him to put his hands up, to get on the ground and to drop the knife.

Within six seconds, Myers fired eight shots, according to the lawsuit. The second officer, Ryan Beecroft, fired twice. Smith was hit seven times, the lawsuit says.

According to the filing, the officers opened fire only after Smith refused to comply with their orders and advanced toward them with his knife in an “attack position.”

Smith’s mother has said her son struggled for years with depression, anxiety and alcoholism, and she believes he was having a mental health crisis the night he was fatally shot. In her family’s lawsuit, Johnson’s attorneys wrote that police did not follow de-escalation and crisis intervention techniques even though Beecroft had been to Smith’s apartment weeks before and was aware of his mental health issues.

In the March ruling, 9th Circuit Judge William Fletcher disputed the officers’ claims, writing that a reasonable juror could conclude that Smith did not pose an immediate threat and was not actively resisting arrest. He may not have comprehended the officers’ commands, “which were shouted at the same time and inconsistent,” Fletcher wrote.

“The officers gave no warnings and the use of a Taser might have been available,” he wrote. “Given this circuit’s case law, a reasonable officer should have been on notice that it was unreasonable to use deadly force solely because Smith was holding a knife in his right hand and raised that hand across his chest.”

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for July 18. The officers’ attorneys have sought to delay the September trial, which is scheduled to last five to 10 days.

She died by suicide after being fired. Her family is suing UW, saying superiors ignored her cries for help

Editor’s note: This article discusses suicide. If you are in crisis, please call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741. T he last messages 29-year-old Victoria Price sent to friends showed signs she was in trouble. “Goodbye. I can’t do this anymore,” Price wrote to a friend on Aug. 2, 2021. “I’ve thought about this for a while,” she wrote to another friend.

Alarmed, her friends called Seattle Police, who sent officers for two wellness visits to Price’s Capitol Hill apartment that day, police records show. The third wellness check the next day would result in officers finding Price dead in her one-bedroom apartment. Price’s mother, Jeanne Price, now says the suicide was preventable, according to a lawsuit filed against the University of Washington Department of Laboratory Medicine, her daughter’s employer at the time. Jeanne Price said leadership knew Victoria Price was struggling with her mental health — and that human resources acted quickly to fire her before her daughter could file for disability leave. She said that her daughter, who performed dissections for scientific research, was distraught after seeing a deceased friend at the morgue. RELATED: Trump team revokes $11 billion in funding for addiction, mental health care Jeanne Price said her daughter, who was a new employee, made attempts in July to secure time off, but either didn’t qualify or was told she’d have to wait. Two business days after she notified her supervisors that she planned to apply for disability leave, they fired her.

Hours later, Victoria Price died by suicide. Jeanne Price said that her daughter was provided an outdated list of therapists two weeks before she was fired, and campus resources a week before she was fired. In the Price family’s lawsuit, Jeanne Price alleged that the UW violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination by terminating her daughter after it failed to provide her with a reasonable accommodation, after it was requested. “It took me a long time to wrap my brain around what seemed unfathomable to me, that they would have been so callous,” Jeanne Price said. The University of Washington declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation.

RELATED: Whistleblower John Barnett’s family files wrongful death suit against Boeing “The University cares deeply for its employees and takes significant steps to support their physical wellbeing and mental health, including through voluntarily offering numerous supports, resources, and programs,” the Summit Law Group, which is representing the University of Washington, wrote in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. “The University is deeply saddened by Ms. Price’s tragic death and sympathizes tremendously with her family.” “As a matter of well-established Washington law, however, employers like the University do not owe a duty of care to avoid causing termination-induced distress and cannot be liable for the same.” The Price family had also sued the city of Seattle because police failed to enter Victoria Price’s apartment before the third wellness check. The lawsuit argued that officers should have known she was at heightened risk of self-harm. Callers told police Victoria Price had a history of suicidal ideation and a past suicide attempt.

“Seattle police officers must always weigh the circumstances of whether or not to enter someone’s private residence while respecting their Constitutional rights and adhering to [department] guidelines,” wrote Seattle Police spokesperson Eric Muñoz by email. Based on officers’ notes at the time, which stated that the apartment lights were turned off and there were no signs of injury or distress, Muñoz said it was “reasonable to believe that Victoria may have not been home.” The judge dismissed the city from the lawsuit in November.

Photo courtesy of Jeanne Price

Victoria Price had worked at the UW’s BRaIN Lab since April 2021, which required that she make frequent visits to the morgue, and use scalpels and bone saws to carefully remove brains from bodies for later research.

During one visit in May 2021, Victoria Price recognized a face in the morgue — her next door neighbor Joshah Mitchell. The pair had bonded over their shared experience in the service industry, and acted as a support system for one another during the dark days of the pandemic. Neither had family in Seattle. But she dismissed her fears, as she knew Mitchell was on a trip out of town. Only later did she learn — when she spotted people cleaning out his apartment — that Mitchell had died of an accidental overdose and the body she came across in the morgue was indeed her friend. For weeks Victoria Price, a woman her mother described as fiercely independent and resilient, crumbled under the weight of grief, according to a tort claim filed against the University of Washington, and obtained by KUOW. “She communicated to a number of friends and to her dad that it really accelerated her level of grief,” Jeanne Price said. “She was balancing her own needs of self care and she was trying to find a path through all of that so that she could keep the job, because she loved that job.” Her co-workers noticed. “I do feel strongly that she is struggling mentally,” wrote one supervisor to colleagues in management on July 24, 2021. “I just don’t know what to do, which is why I reached out.” In other emails, that same supervisor wrote that although Victoria Price did not threaten to hurt herself, she had described her struggle to find help. The supervisor wrote that Victoria “made references that no one cares about her.” The supervisor noted that Victoria Price had been making mistakes. “Maybe the quality control issues we’ve been having is all because she is not thinking clearly.” Victoria Price had asked for bereavement leave after she learned her neighbor died, but didn’t qualify, as that policy pertains to deceased relatives. She asked for unpaid time off on July 19. She was told it could not impact lab scheduling, which was difficult to do during the first post-pandemic vacation season. She would have to wait five weeks until Aug. 23 for leave. “The biggest thing she was asking for was a little time out of the vicinity of dead bodies,” Jeanne Price said. She said her daughter “just tried to suck it up and keep going.” Behind the scenes, management planned to fire Victoria Price, records show. In one email exchange a department human resources manager alerts concerned co-workers that he had met with Victoria, notified her of campus resources for those in crisis, and provided her with disability resources and paperwork. “If Victoria is expressing suicidal ideations, she needs to call 911,” he wrote. The next day, the same human resources manager was helping leadership prepare to fire Victoria Price. “In preparation for the *possibility* of termination, I would encourage leadership … disseminate the following narrative to Victoria via email.” Emails show the human resources manager also worried that Victoria Price would file for disability before her dismissal, and reached out to campus human resources about it. “The problem is that if the UW has prior notification (in any form) of an accommodation request and terminated the employee without addressing the request — it would be very risky for the UW,” campus HR wrote back. Jeanne Price was appalled at what she read in the records she received. “You can’t give someone a three-year-old list of mental health service providers, and then, eight days later say, ‘Well, that didn’t improve anything,’ because it would take more than eight days to get your foot in the door with anybody who was taking new patients,” she said. The morning of her death, Victoria Price went to work. Later that morning, she was fired. At 12 p.m., after Victoria Price texted her friends goodbye, police showed up outside apartment 303 and knocked on her door, leaving after no one responded. Seattle Police policy states that police could enter without a warrant under circumstances, such as “preserving life.” An autopsy would later put her time of death at about 12 p.m. But, records also show that she had been sending text messages as late as 11:45 a.m.

Photo courtesy of Jeanne Price

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By the time he was a teenager, Antonio Mays Jr. knew all about the struggle for civil rights and Black liberation.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Nat Turner, the Watts riots — Mays’ dad taught him the stories because he wanted his son to know his history, the history of being Black in America.

In 2020, 16-year-old Antonio watched the next chapter of that history begin to unfold from his home near Los Angeles. The murder of George Floyd on May 25 had sparked what would become the largest sustained protest movement in American history. So Antonio left a note telling his father he was going to make him proud, that he was going to accomplish something. And he left home for Seattle, a place he’d never been, a city where he had no known connections.

He was drawn, his father said, by news coverage of CHOP — the Capitol Hill Organized (or Occupied) Protest — an eight-block area that police had largely abandoned after weeks of often violent clashes with protesters.

But Antonio never came back.

He was killed a week after he left, shot in the CHOP zone while in a stolen Jeep. Two days after his death, then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered CHOP shut down.

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CHOP existed for about three weeks as a protest space but created a much longer-lasting mark on both the city’s and the nation’s consciousness.

In its earliest days, CHOP’s “cop-free” blocks around the abandoned East Precinct felt like a respite from the nightly clashes with police, tear gas and blast balls that had enveloped Capitol Hill for more than a week. But then the zone took a darker turn, attracting guns, drugs, people with mental health issues and people with nowhere else to go. National news organizations and political influencers flocked to the scene. Right-wing agitators threatened to descend on it.

CHOP became, fairly or not, a symbol of liberal cities’ perceived lawlessness. Two days after CHOP’s creation, President Donald Trump, after watching Seattle protest coverage, called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and told him to “act fast and hard” because the city was going to be taken over. Last fall, CHOP was still on his mind: He brought it up in both presidential debates.

But in Seattle, CHOP’s scars have mostly vanished from public view. There have been no charges filed in Antonio’s death, no answers as to who killed him. The Police Department and City Attorney’s Office have declined to answer questions about the case.

In 2023, Antonio Mays Sr., frustrated by the city’s silence, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, alleging the city’s negligence created the conditions that led to his son’s killing.

The city has argued in court filings that it doesn’t bear legal responsibility for Antonio’s death because he was driving a stolen Jeep and shooting a gun before he was killed. City attorneys have filed in court a partially redacted police report about the theft of the vehicle and a livestreamer’s video in which the livestreamer can be heard saying gunshots were coming from the Jeep. Yet neither confirm the allegations that Antonio was driving or shooting.

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Mays says he was told another narrative about the night his son died. Mays said a Seattle police detective on the case told him in 2020 that Antonio wasn’t driving and there was no evidence of him shooting a gun. But police have not clarified the facts.

Now Mays and his attorney are making another push to get answers from the city leaders they believe enabled CHOP’s descent into violence. In a letter to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent last week, Mays’ attorney urged Congress to probe the creation of CHOP and the status of the police homicide investigation.

Antonio’s death represents a challenge to Seattle’s identity as a bastion of progressive values. A Black teenager was killed at a protest against police killings of Black people. And according to videos taken during and after the fatal shooting, he may have been killed by armed protesters who’d appointed themselves as security in the absence of police.

“If it meant that I’d have my son back, I wouldn’t teach my son Black history,” Mays said through tears from his home in Orange County, Calif. “Because I want to have him back right now.”

There were dozens of people around when Antonio and a 14-year-old boy he was with were shot. A handful of people were filming, livestreaming the shooting and its immediate aftermath. That footage remains online, available to anyone with an internet connection, but much of it is shot at a distance or pointed at the ground to avoid identifying protesters.

Seattle police say the case remains active and have denied public records requests seeking further information. The shooting deaths last year of six teenage boys in Seattle also remain unsolved. Several of those killings also had multiple witnesses present.

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Mays says he hasn’t heard anything from the police since 2020.

“I couldn’t get a hold of anybody,” he said. “Everything went silent.”

Seattle police and the City Attorney’s Office have declined to answer reporters’ questions about the events of June 29, the Jeep and the police investigation of Antonio’s death, citing ongoing litigation and an “active” police case.

In the absence of that information, many questions remain. A Police Department response to a public records request said Detective Alan Cruise was assigned to the homicide case. In late February, the department declined a request for an interview with Cruise and did not specify how many, if any, other detectives are working on the homicide investigation.

Five years later, Mays and his attorney have written to Congress because they want accountability from Seattle’s former mayor, police chief and others who they say have simply moved on.

“I’m hoping that they bring the previous administration back to answer for their wrongdoing,” Mays said. “And to provide answers as to who was the de facto police in that zone.”

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In an emailed statement to The Seattle Times last week, former Mayor Durkan called Antonio’s death a tragedy and described it as “part of an enduring cycle of violence that has traumatized families and taken too many young people like Antonio.”

Durkan said that as mayor, she addressed gun violence and its disproportionate impact on Black boys and men by working with public officials and community members to drive down murders in 2021.

A spokesperson for current Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell wrote in a separate emailed statement that while Antonio’s death occurred before Harrell took office, “we express our sympathies to the family for the tragic loss of their son.”

Harrell’s office cited investment in the city’s Police Department, new crisis response tools and additional resources for marginalized communities as part of its commitment to public safety and advancing racial equity, but said it would defer to police and the City Attorney’s Office for details about Antonio’s case specifically.

“My God, look at him go”

With no answers, Mays is left with memories:

Memories of Antonio, a voracious reader, engrossed in fantasy novels that he’d carry around in his pockets. Of Antonio learning his father’s barbecue business — slicing onions, cleaning the grill, lighting the smoker.

Mays, who raised Antonio as a single father, remembers his son coming alive at farmers markets and festivals, where the family would sell chicken, brisket, sides and homemade sauce.

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At the 626 Night Market in Orange County, a massive event with hundreds of vendors at a fairground, Antonio came along to help out. But he didn’t just staff the register or pour drinks. At 13 or 14 years old, Antonio was responsible for cooking up the asparagus side dish — charred asparagus, onions, jalapeños, a creamy garlic sauce — to hundreds of customers.

They’d brought 120 pounds of asparagus, and Antonio cooked it all, a couple of handfuls at a time in a cast iron skillet. Chopped, blistered, seasoned, tossed, over and over again.

“And it’s flying out the window,” Mays said. “I’m like, ‘My God, look at him go.’”

Mays remembers how Antonio would saunter over to the DJs at night markets and end up on the mic, singing and dancing, carrying on.

“It was just, it was a blessing to be able to be a part of his life,” Mays said. “And guide him and watch him have a good time and socialize and teach him along the way.”

In Seattle, people who walked through CHOP in its early days described it in similar terms to a buzzing fairground — a place with free food, activities and a “festival” vibe. Less than three weeks before Antonio was killed, Mayor Durkan speculated that CHOP could turn into a “summer of love.”

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But by the early morning hours of June 29, CHOP had changed. Guns and drugs were out in the open. The space had transformed into something much more volatile.

A 19-year-old had been shot and killed nine days prior. A year later, police arrested the shooter, who subsequently pleaded guilty. The city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit from the victim’s family.

Mays said he filed a missing-person report with his local police department after his son went missing and he found Antonio’s note. But Mays had no idea his son was in Seattle and only learned of his death a week later when police officers showed up at his door.

‘You’re not dead, huh?’

There were dozens if not hundreds of people in the CHOP area around 3 a.m. on June 29. Some were sleeping in tents. Some were milling around. Some were patrolling, acting as security for protesters scared by reports of possible right-wing violence.

At 2:54 a.m., gunshots rang out. About a dozen, within 30 seconds.

They roused Marcus Kulik in his fourth-floor Capitol Hill apartment overlooking the protest zone.

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A video game artist, he’d been largely shut inside in the early days of the pandemic and had started broadcasting live footage of the protest area, using a camera perched at his window.

When he heard the gunshots, he grabbed a longer lens to see what was going on.

“I’m not used to living in a place where shootings happen right outside my window,” Kulik recalled. “I’m like, ‘OK, I want to record this. I want to see what’s going on if I can, but I also want to keep myself safe.’”

In Kulik’s video, shouts can be heard from the streets below.

“Everybody down, everybody down!”

“Eyes up, eyes up, eyes up!”

“Anyone with weapons, I want them behind this barrier … multiple vehicles, multiple vehicles, stolen white Jeep!”

Three minutes later, tires screeched and a white Jeep Cherokee traveling up East Pike Street turned left on 12th Avenue, headed toward the encampment of protesters outside Seattle police’s abandoned East Precinct.

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A scream, then a gunshot, then two more. People ducked behind barricades and fled. The Jeep hit either a concrete barrier or a portable toilet at the edge of the protest area. Six more gunshots.

The Jeep backed up briefly, then drove forward again and hit the barrier and the toilet. Ten more gunshots.

Someone appeared to approach the Jeep.

“Oh, you’re not dead, huh?” someone said. “Yo, you want to get pistol-whipped?”

Kulik said Seattle police have never contacted him or asked about his video.

Both Antonio and the 14-year-old were pulled from the Jeep and bandaged by volunteer medics. They were then taken from the scene in private cars because Seattle police and paramedics refused to enter the zone. The car with the 14-year-old drove straight to Harborview Medical Center, while the car with Antonio attempted to meet Seattle Fire Department medics at a rendezvous point a few blocks away.

This resulted in a 24-minute delay in getting Antonio professional help, according to a review of the incident from Seattle’s Office of the Inspector General. A video from the car with a bleeding Antonio shows paramedics drove away from them. The driver pursued the paramedics and eventually met them in a parking lot, but by that time Antonio had died.

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A Fire Department spokesperson said in the inspector general review that paramedics perceived the car with Antonio inside as a “threat” because it was driving erratically with a person on the roof. However, participants in the review, published in 2022, said the Fire Department should have been prepared to treat emergencies like this at agreed-upon rendezvous points. Seattle police had told the Fire Department that a car with Antonio was trying to reach them, the review said. Reviewers didn’t understand why the ambulance drove away.

The white Jeep sat just outside the abandoned East Precinct, pocked with bullet holes, its windows shattered, its interior splattered with blood. Videos of the aftermath captured at least two people walking with AR-15-style rifles. The morning after the shooting, the vehicle used to transport Antonio was parked inside CHOP in the middle of 12th Avenue and smeared with blood, according to a Seattle Times reporter on the scene.

Ashley Dorelus, who had come from the Bay Area to join and film the protests, ran two blocks from Cal Anderson Park to the site of the shooting, livestreaming on Instagram.

Her video captured someone next to the crashed Jeep saying, “You see any shells on the ground, pick those up, pocket ’em, take ’em home.”

“Hell yeah, no evidence, no evidence, pick that (expletive) up,” Dorelus responds on the video.

“Did anyone witness?” someone asks.

“No, and nobody is going to witness anything,” Dorelus responds.

About a week later during another protest, police pulled her off a downtown street corner as onlookers filmed. She was arrested for investigation of rendering criminal assistance but never charged with a crime.

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Dorelus, in a recent phone interview, said she’d been scared that the occupants of the Jeep were shooting at protesters and was caught up in the moment. She said police asked for her video after she was arrested in 2020, but she hasn’t spoken with them since.

Dorelus is also confident that the person in her video telling people to pick up shell casings “absolutely is the shooter,” although she doesn’t know his identity.

“I agreed with him like, ‘Oh yeah, if I shot somebody, yeah, I would collect the bullets.’ But not thinking I was stupidly just saying that out loud,” she said. She said she didn’t actually touch any bullets or shell casings.

Police said the crime scene was disturbed.

Looking for answers

Mays’ lawsuit against Seattle is scheduled for trial in November. His attorney, Evan Oshan, has also filed a personal injury lawsuit against the city on behalf of the then-14-year-old who was shot alongside Antonio but survived with a serious brain injury.

Seattle’s attorneys argue the city is not responsible because Antonio and the other boy were allegedly driving a stolen vehicle and shooting from it before they were shot. The teen who survived, however, was never charged with a crime. Mays maintains that Antonio, who had never been in trouble with the law, wasn’t driving or shooting from the vehicle.

A man who said he was the owner of the Jeep said he was attacked by two males with a pickax about 2:30 a.m., roughly half an hour before Antonio was killed. He said they took his backpack, phone and car keys. In a police report filed with the city’s defense to the wrongful death lawsuit, the man claimed the people who attacked him were “involved in the shooting in CHOP.”

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Mays said a Seattle police detective told him in 2020 that the man reported being attacked by a group of kids. It is unknown whether Antonio was one of them.

In its legal defense to Mays’ lawsuit, the city is invoking what’s known as the state’s “felony bar” statute, which shields governments from wrongful death or personal injury liabilities if plaintiffs were committing a felony that was the cause of the injury or death. Activists have sought to reform this statute in recent years because they say it has been used to block courts from examining police use of force.

In 2021, those activists succeeded in making a change to the law to limit its use to cases where it has been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” that plaintiffs were committing felonies.

The City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on its defense.

Oshan said that while the Mays lawsuit could win a settlement for the family, it’s unlikely it will yield the answers Mays wants. That’s why they’re seeking a separate inquiry by Congress.

“My goal here is to find out, if not who killed his son, let’s have some direction of what’s going on,” Oshan said. “It’s been almost five years.”

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Anyone can request a congressional inquiry, and lawmakers could simply ignore the plea.

But there are reasons to believe Congress may be receptive to the idea, including Trump’s lasting interest in this chapter of Seattle’s history.

In Antonio’s case, the ongoing silence has added to his father’s perception that Seattle’s establishment wants to forget the protests of 2020, despite families like his continuing to live with the fallout.

“I can’t believe that there’s no answer,” Mays said. “This is not like a serial killer kidnapping somebody and stashing a body.

“This is open, in your face,” he continued. “How are there no answers?”

All three reporters reported from CHOP in 2020.

Can’t see the form below? Visit st.news/chopsurvey.

They were determined to have died two days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. The Pennsylvania State Police has said it is believed “not to be a random act of violence.”

Ten days after the Zajkos’ bodies were discovered, Pennsylvania state troopers showed up to a Candlewood Suites near the Philadelphia airport with a warrant to search the room and car of the dead couple’s daughter, Michelle Zajko. One of the troopers later testified in court that they were looking for the handgun believed to have been used in the killings.

The troopers knocked on Zajko’s hotel room door and took her into custody. As they were leading her out of the hotel, she called out to staff at the front desk and told them to tell a Daniel Blank that she was being detained, a trooper, Matthew Gibson, said in court, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News.

The troopers knew Blank. They had previously interviewed him in connection with the double homicide, Gibson later testified.

The troopers made their way to Blank’s room and banged on the door. Blank answered but refused to open it, Gibson said, prompting the troopers to return to their barracks to seek a search warrant for his hotel room.

When they returned with the warrant, no one responded to an order to open the door. So the troopers forced it open and found Blank and a second person in the bathroom, Gibson said in court.

The troopers arrested Blank and marched him out of the room. Things did not go as smoothly with the second person, identified in court papers as LaSota, the person also known as Ziz.

Richard and Rita Zajko. Pennsylvania State Police

Troopers issued commands to LaSota, but LaSota “did not do anything,” Gibson later testified, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News.

“He had his eyes closed. He would not speak,” Gibson added. “He was just laying almost unconscious as if he was dead on the ground.”

LaSota was ultimately charged with obstructing the investigation and disorderly conduct, according to a criminal complaint. The Alaskan native continued to play dead when a mugshot was taken.

Jack LaSota. Delaware County PA

In June 2023, LaSota was released from custody after posting $10,000 bail, but then failed to return to court, leading the judge to issue a bench warrant. Her whereabouts are unknown.

Friedman said he hadn’t heard from LaSota since 2022, and he had no idea where his former client might be.

“I represent vegans. We believe in nonviolence,” Friedman said. “All of this is just crazy.”

Neither Blank nor Zajko, the dead couple’s daughter, has been charged in connection with the killing of her parents. But Zajko’s name would soon pop up in a separate murder investigation.

In January of this year, an employee of a hotel in the northern Vermont town of Lyndonville contacted law enforcement to report concerns about two guests.

The pair were dressed in “all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment,” according to an FBI affidavit, and the woman was carrying a gun in an exposed holster. They were later identified as Bauckholt, the German national, and her traveling companion, Teresa Youngblut.

Teresa Youngblut at Newport City Inn and Suites in Vermont. Newport City Inn and Suites in Vermont

By then, Bauckholt had been gone for over a year, and her friends in the New York area had stopped trying to contact her.

As a high school student in Freiburg, Germany, Bauckholt had been a national math champion. In 2014, she won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the most prestigious high school coding contest in the world, and later earned a scholarship to study pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Two of Bauckholt’s college friends said in interviews that she was a “passionate math student” who was also “fun” and “very positive.” She was an enthusiastic member of several college groups, including the computer science club and pure math club, according to the two former classmates.

“These are the kinds of people who read math textbooks for fun and do math problems on the chalkboard for fun,” said Lily Horne, who graduated with Bauckholt in 2019.

Ophelia Bauckholt. via LinkedIn

While still in college, Bauckholt interned at Jane Street Capital in New York, an elite quantitative trading firm, according to her LinkedIn page.

After graduating from Waterloo with honors, she landed a job as a quantitative trader, leveraging complex mathematical models to identify investment opportunities, with a different New York firm, Tower Research Capital.

Bauckholt was making more money than most of her friends, but she didn’t live large. She made sure to spend no more than 10% of her pretax income, her friends said, and donated a significant amount to charity. She considered herself an effective altruist, a person who believed in donating much of what she earned to causes that will have the largest impact on the most number of people.

In 2018, she posted on Facebook that she donated $5,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation. She said that she had just finished her first tech internship and wanted to “pay some of it forward.”

“The money will be used to distribute ~1100 nets, which is estimated to save ~1.4 lives,” Bauckholt wrote in the post, which was shared with NBC News. “If you too are earning more money than you’ll need, I urge you to consider giving some of it away to cost-effective charities as well.”

Ophelia Bauckholt. Obtained by NBC News

Bauckholt was highly calculating in other aspects of her life as well. She approached it like a math problem, deducing the precise number of hours of sleep she needed and what to avoid — soda, coffee — to be at her best.

Astra Kolomatskaia, Bauckholt’s former roommate, said Bauckholt’s day revolved around “super micromanaged decisions to make sure her state of mind was in the right place to perform as well as possible at work.”

Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who was involved in the Berkeley rationalist scene, met Bauckholt at an event in New York City in 2022. Bauckholt struck Taylor as bright but a bit weird and socially awkward, which wasn’t an unusual set of characteristics at rationalist events.

They hung out several times over the course of that year. At some point, their discussions became centered on Ziz. Taylor said it was clear that Bauckholt was enthralled with certain Zizian tenets, such as the importance of altruism and ethical veganism.

And Bauckholt seemed to not be bothered by some of the more extreme positions Ziz took, like the “importance of retribution under some circumstances,” Taylor said.

“It seemed like she considered the group more legit than other people did,” Taylor said.

Taylor said she warned Bauckholt to steer clear of Ziz and the Zizians, whom she considered to be part of a “death cult.”

That was sometime in late 2022. Taylor now knows that Bauckholt failed to heed her advice.

Bauckholt and her traveling companion, Teresa Youngblut, had been under surveillance for several days this past January before U.S. Border Patrol agents pulled over their Toyota Prius for an immigration check, according to federal prosecutors in Vermont.

Border Patrol Agent David Maland. Courtesy Joan Maland via AP

The circumstances of the shooting that followed are still under investigation. Prosecutors have not said whether they believe David Maland, the fallen agent, was struck by one of the bullets Youngblut allegedly fired or by a shot from a fellow agent.

Youngblut, 21, has pleaded not guilty to two federal weapons counts. Her lawyer has declined to comment.

Prosecutors have said that Youngblut and Bauckholt were traveling with a large collection of weapons and tactical gear, including 48 rounds of .380-caliber jacketed hollow point ammunition, a ballistic helmet and night vision equipment.

In seeking to convince a judge that Youngblut should remain in jail, prosecutors said in court papers that she had been associating with people “suspected of violent acts.” The handguns possessed by Bauckholt and Youngblut were purchased by a “person of interest” in a double homicide in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

That appears to be a reference to Michelle Zajko, the daughter of the dead couple.

An alert sent to licensed firearms dealers in Vermont by the U.S. Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, said the agency was “asking for your assistance in identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”

The alert was first reported by a local news outlet, VTDigger.

Michelle Zajko. via LinkedIn

According to property records and court documents, Zajko owned land in Orleans, Vermont — located about 10 miles from the scene of the border agent shootout.

Vermont prosecutors said in Youngblut’s detention memo that she and the person who bought her gun have been in “frequent contact” with an individual who was detained in Pennsylvania during the double homicide investigation — a possible reference to LaSota.

Prosecutors also noted that this same individual was a “person of interest” in yet another crime: a murder in California.

The two people charged in the sword attack on Lind, the older California landlord, are slated to go on trial this April, and Lind was set to be a key witness.

But on Jan. 17, Lind was stabbed to death on his property in Vallejo, police said. A Seattle man, Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested a week later and charged with murdering Lind. Prosecutors said in court papers that Lind was killed to prevent him from testifying against the suspects accused of attacking him with a sword.

Curtis Lind. via GoFundMe

The murder occurred three days before the border agent shootout. Snyder was well known to one of the suspects, Youngblut. The pair, who had gone to the same elite private high school, had filed a marriage application in November.

Snyder was set to be arraigned Thursday, but the hearing was postponed after his attorney told the court she was no longer representing him. The court docket indicates that he has yet to hire a new lawyer.

Back in Vermont, residents are trying to come to grips with the dizzying revelations of coast-to-coast crimes that prosecutors say are linked to associates of the two people involved in the border agent shootout.

“It’s just a shocking situation,” said Vincent Illuzzi, a longtime prosecutor and former state senator for Essex County, Vermont, which neighbors the county where the border agent shooting took place.

Illuzzi said he suspects the individuals involved in the border shootout and their associates saw his rural and remote corner of the country as an ideal place to hide out.

“It’s not off the grid, but it’s the next best thing to it,” Illuzzi said. “Rural people leave you alone. There’s no one down the street watching you come and go.”

In the days and weeks after the shooting, Bauckholt’s friends have spent hours digging deeper into the so-called Zizians and comparing notes on conversations they had with the person they knew as Ophelia.

They suspect that she didn’t recognize the warning signs as she gradually became more entangled in the group’s nefarious activities.

“I know Ophelia well enough to know that she would not have voluntarily ended up in the situation that she did,” said Kolomatskaia, her former roommate.

“This came as a result of a long string of bad decisions that were made on the basis of her falsely thinking that she didn’t have other options.

“She is very naive, altruistic and trusting,” Kolomatskaia added, “and that makes her exploitable.”