How an anti-police violence protest ended in a teen’s death

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Our story today starts in the summer of twenty twenty. Remember, that's when protests were happening all over the country after the killing of George Floyd. But in Seattle, something happened that didn't really happen anywhere else in The US. A standoff with protesters went on for days, and then the police actually abandoned a precinct in the middle of the city in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. They just left. And once they were gone, protesters set up an Occupy style camp around it. The camp was called CHOP, the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. It was an experiment in a different kind of world with its own medical teams and its own armed security. People there believed they were building a better version of society, one that rejected police violence. But three weeks in, that experiment ended. There was a shooting at the camp and the gunfire came from the people who were actually trying to defend the camp. A black teenager died. Six years later, the case remains unsolved. In a new eight part series from NPR's embedded, reporters Will James and Sydney Brownstone take us inside CHOP to find out what happened the night of the shooting and how violence came to occupy this anti violence occupation. Today, we're bringing you the first episode in the the series, and new episodes will be released weekly over the coming months in the embedded podcast. One more thing before we start. This episode includes explicit language and the sound of gun violence. Okay? Here's Sydney and Will. I remember the shooting happened on a Monday morning, a few blocks from where I used to live in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. An editor called and asked if I could go down and report from the scene. So I get dressed, and I run out of my apartment. Everything looks normal at first. People are walking their dogs. They're grabbing their fancy coffee drinks. I'm walking by rainbow crosswalks and a leather daddy bar. This is Seattle. But then I cross over onto 12th Avenue, and it's like stepping into a different universe. I end up walking into CHOP. CHOP was an Occupy style protest that included a field of tents. There were crowds, art installations, and makeshift barricades. All of it took up about eight square blocks of my neighborhood. It had been there for three weeks. But this morning, the morning of 06/29/2020, this isn't just a protest, it's a crime scene. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Crowds of protesters are screaming in the middle of the street. You know how you fucked up. You and your fucking partner. One of them seems particularly frazzled and is carrying around a baseball bat. There are members of the black clergy there praying over a blood smeared car. Enough is enough. Enough killing is enough. We have to stop this. Even they must even. Here's what I learned. …