Posted on 01/30/2026 7:45:24 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
(The Center Square) – A King County jury on Thursday found the city of Seattle negligent in its handling of the 2020 Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP, zone, awarding nearly $31 million to the family of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr., who was fatally shot during the protests.
Mays was shot by an unknown person(s) on June 29, 2023, in the chaotic, barricaded zone that was set up in Seattle in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin the previous month.
No suspects have been officially identified or arrested for May's murder.
A wrongful death lawsuit was filed by his father, alleging that the area was abandoned by police and that first responders were delayed in providing aid, causing him to bleed out.
The Center Square reached out to the Seattle City Attorney’s Office, asking if the city planned to appeal the verdict.
“Antonio Mays Jr.’s death was a tragedy,” a City Attorney's Office spokesperson emailed The Center Square. “We will assess the city's options going forward.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Fascinating. Law enforcement, but court precedent, has no obligation to protect. Seattle’s negligence is so great that the jury appears to have found otherwise, that the city had a duty to clean up the CHOP zone.
Comes down to liberal jury who thinks someone has to pay.
Related to this - Pre 1960s many states and cities had statues covering “inverse condemnation” under eminent domain laws, for riots, crime and civil unrest.
Meaning - if a city police force failed to do its job (especially due to political action), and a mob burned and looted a property, the owner could sue the city for damages. In effect, the government was taking private property, inversely, through incompetence, fraud or political action.
Such laws were removed by “progressive” governments throughout the 50s and 60s, just in time for the large wave of urban unrest brought about by civil rights cases, MKL murder, etc....
Good verdict but grossly excessive damages.
I can only imagine what Minneapolis will have to pay down the road.
In other words, the city is responsible for for allowing chaos.
Seattle is getting what it voted for, good and hard.
It’s too bad this isn’t a personal judgment against the Seattle officials who enabled and encouraged this behavior.
As it is, the cost will fall on the taxpayers. They deserve it because they elected the idiots who run seattle. But not as much as those idiots.
This kind of verdict would give pause to city officials in most jurisdictions.
Probably won’t make a dent in Seattle because officials there are retarded.
That’s obscene, unless he at 16 already had a dozen children. Even if he worked until age 75, he’d have to have become a millionaire in his twenties to have merited that much money; and clearly, just for having inserted himself into a rage-filled protest site, his judgment was already quite underdeveloped.
The family should get a reasonable payout, and lawyers will take a big cut, but the punishment award should go to a police training foundation with stipulations how it should be paid out over time.
The Founders warned about this — that our system would survive until people started rewarding themselves from the public purse. I give you jury awards, pandemic loans, Minnesomalia...
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