SYDNEY BROWNSTONE, HOST:
Heads up, this episode contains explicit language and the sound of gun violence.
WILL JAMES, HOST:
Previously on We Keep Us Safe.
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DG: It's an execution. There's no better word for it than execution.
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OMARI SALISBURY: So somebody's lighting up the f***ing block right now.
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DG: These bullets are, like, whizzing over my head and going through these seats.
ERIC D'INTINO: And that's when I see someone approach the Jeep Grand Cherokee, like, point blank and just unload his clip.
JAMES: Was whoever shot Antonio really protecting the protest, and why do we still not know who they are or their motives all these years later?
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ASHLEY DORELUS: He was a big white man.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: See any shells on the ground, pick those up, pocket them.
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DG: What I heard is that they were ex-military, so these people are, like, really advanced.
JAMES: We'd heard about CHOP security before.
BROWNSTONE: They found a blog post.
JAMES: Saying they're members of this group called Sentinels.
JAMES MADISON: I did door-kicker things.
BROWNSTONE: Most people were introduced to the Sentinels through its most famous member, James Madison.
MADISON: I did the stuff that our government doesn't speak of.
BROWNSTONE: Throughout our investigation, there's been one video that we've watched over and over. Our colleague David Gutman was the first one to take a really close look at it back in 2020.
DAVID GUTMAN, BYLINE: It's a 90-second clip, and it's been online since the night of the shooting.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: [inaudible] .
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GUTMAN: You can hear the Jeep that Antonio and his two friends were in crashing into barricades. But it's right at the edge of the frame. You can only really see its headlights.
BROWNSTONE: You can hear gunshots, but you can't see who's firing them because the view is blocked by a tree. And afterward, you see a shadow hovering near the passenger side of the Jeep, as a mystery voice says, you're not dead, huh?
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Oh, you're not dead, huh? Yo, you want to get pistol-whipped?
GUTMAN: And then the video pretty much ends. And you watch it and you can't help but wonder, is this the same person that witnesses were talking about, the one who's shooting right into the Jeep? Is that the shooter's voice?
BROWNSTONE: We contacted the person who made that video. He lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building overlooking CHOP.
GUTMAN: It turns out that video - it was just a sample. This whole time, there was a much longer version that wasn't online. The guy who recorded it had two full hours of footage he'd never shared with anyone before. He said he'd never given it to police, but he said he'd share it with us.
BROWNSTONE: We had to follow up a few times, but months later, we got it.
GUTMAN: We were hoping this new footage could tell us something, give us a clue, help us understand who was there at the barricades when the shooting happened.
JAMES: All right.
BROWNSTONE: Am I OK with this mic here, Will, in sitting or...
JAMES: Yeah. Yeah.
BROWNSTONE: ...Do you want me to move?
JAMES: I was the first one to watch this extended two-hour video from the beginning. And I noticed something that I am dying to show Sydney and David. So I get us all together.
GUTMAN: There are 1,000 Google Docs open on your computer right now.
BROWNSTONE: You need to get rid of some of them. It's, like, stressing me out.
JAMES: The video starts at 1:37 a.m., just over an hour before the shooting that killed Antonio.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I see you, motherf***er.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Dips***.
JAMES: There are two people in the intersection near where the white Jeep will crash an hour later. They seem to be CHOP security, and they're trying to get someone who's throwing bottles from a nearby building to stop.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Stop being a little s*** and come out here right now so we can talk like men.
JAMES: One of the security people on the ground is instantly familiar.
Who does this look like to you?
BROWNSTONE: You're showing us someone wearing, like, a black long-sleeved shirt, a tan kind of vest.
GUTMAN: Bulletproof, like, tactical vest.
BROWNSTONE: And tan pants. And a tan hat.
GUTMAN: And appear to have, like, a black mask, as well, although it's hard to tell.
BROWNSTONE: Oh, James Madison.
JAMES: That's a code name. We've heard that James Madison was a leader of the Sentinels.
BROWNSTONE: I found an old blog post online from an anonymous writer introducing us to the Sentinels. It said they were a prominent faction of CHOP's volunteer security.
JAMES: The blog post alleged that the Sentinels played some kind of role in Antonio's death and then kept quiet about the shooting ever since.
BROWNSTONE: And here in this video is someone we've heard as one of their leaders, yards away from the shooting scene about an hour before it happened.
JAMES: James Madison isn't the only one there.
Look who walks on the screen.
BROWNSTONE: Is that Joker?
Joker is another code name from that blog post. There were photos of him in it, and the anonymous writer implied he was somehow involved in the shooting.
JAMES: This is a big, heavy guy - has something strapped to him that may be a long gun. I'm not sure.
GUTMAN: Looks like a rifle to me. Yeah.
JAMES: I'm pretty sure this is Joker.
BROWNSTONE: Yeah. That looks like Joker.
JAMES: He's white, dressed head to toe in Army fatigues with a cap and everything. He looks like he's in a war movie.
James Madison walks over to Joker. Looks like Joker to me hands him his gun, and James Madison is...
GUTMAN: Whoa.
JAMES: And James Madison walks away with the gun.
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JAMES: James Madison keeps walking all the way off-screen right toward the spot where the boys in the White Jeep will be shot less than an hour later. And that's the last we see of James Madison.
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BROWNSTONE: From the very beginning of our investigation, the three of us had been on a journey to figure out who the Sentinels were behind their code names and their masks.
JAMES: We reached out to every source we could think of.
BROWNSTONE: We filed public records requests.
JAMES: Connecting these code names to real names.
BROWNSTONE: We used off-the-shelf facial recognition technology to link their faces to other parts of the internet.
JAMES: And gradually, over the course of months, we pieced together this picture of who made up this group - names, phone numbers.
BROWNSTONE: Now it was time to call the Sentinels to find out where they were when Antonio was shot and if they know who did it.
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BROWNSTONE: From NPR's EMBEDDED, with KUOW and The Seattle Times, this is We Keep Us Safe. I'm Sydney Brownstone.
JAMES: And I'm Will James. This is Episode 7.
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BROWNSTONE: When we decided to reach out to the Sentinels, it made sense to start with the person we thought of as their leader, James Madison.
JAMES: And as we got ready to make this call, we were leaked a piece of audio that fleshed out our understanding of who this figure was. It was recorded secretly at a Sentinels meeting.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Then Durkan came to our house…
JAMES: This meeting happens a few days after Antonio was killed, and the Sentinels are planning to take over the mayor's house later that night.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: We're going to occupy her house for as long as possible. If she's not there, good. We want to make her feel unsafe to come back.
JAMES: The city has dismantled CHOP, and some protesters are mad. They want to retaliate. You can hear James Madison preparing everyone.
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MADISON: At this point, moving forward, we know SPD is going blatantly defy the law.
JAMES: In this speech, James Madison is saying...
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MADISON: They use flash bangs. They have tear gas at the ready. They can and they will use it and they give zero f***s.
JAMES: Police are going to use flash bangs. Police are going to use tear gas.
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MADISON: If you do not feel safe doing this, that is 100% up to you.
JAMES: If you don't feel comfortable being a part of this, there's no shame in backing out.
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MADISON: I commend you for stepping up and saying that and stepping back. That takes a lot of balls.
JAMES: Someone says they're worried about getting shot at.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: I am afraid that somebody's going to come out with, like, an AR who's not a friendly and target us because of that high-ground situation.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: There are a few of us who can neutralize that kind of a threat.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: OK.
BROWNSTONE: That's someone saying, there are a few of us who can neutralize that kind of a threat. They go on to discuss acceptable use of force.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Just really keep in mind proportional responses to proportional threats, OK? That's it.
JAMES: Then someone brings up this more strategic point, that the Sentinels need to be conscious of the image they're projecting.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: Be ready to get violent, but let's not look like we're ready to be violent.
JAMES: Be ready to get violent, but let's not look like we're ready to be violent. And James Madison chimes in.
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MADISON: What I was telling everyone from Day 1 up on the barricades, we're on the world stage. We need to mind our Ps and Qs. Hi. Hello. How are you? I hope we're not inconveniencing you. If we are inconveniencing you, what can we do to help?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: Smile and wave, boys.
MADISON: Smile and wave. Exactly.
BROWNSTONE: We're not sure what happened to this plan, but protesters never actually did occupy the mayor's house after this meeting. What it does show, however, is James Madison acting like someone who had military experience.
JAMES: You'll hear us use she/her pronouns for James Madison because she came out as trans since 2020. At CHOP, she often took charge of these stressful, dangerous situations.
BROWNSTONE: And we know that at CHOP, she would tell people she saw combat, that she'd been deployed overseas.
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MADISON: I've got three combat deployments under my belt. I have a rules of engagement.
BROWNSTONE: Here's a livestreamer talking with James Madison in 2020, where she brags about her deployments.
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UNIDENTIFIED LIVESTREAMER: You're military.
MADISON: Yeah. Seattle PD doesn't have a rules of engagement.
UNIDENTIFIED LIVESTREAMER: You probably have more training, like, in combat and that kind of stuff than they do.
BROWNSTONE: I wanted to find out more about these combat deployments James Madison was talking about. I put in a request for her military records, specifically for something called a DD214 form. It's a piece of paperwork that details her military experience. But according to James Madison's DD214, there's no proof of any deployments, let alone to a combat zone. She was a Marine reservist for about four years, and the only time she was ever on active duty was the year she spent training. She was assigned to a supply unit.
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BROWNSTONE: James Madison separated from the Marine Reserves on June 1, 2020, a week before CHOP began.
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JAMES: So we have a lot we want to ask James Madison about. What kind of experience did she bring to CHOP? Did she see it as a combat mission? And she's on video walking toward the barricades less than an hour before the shooting. What happened after she walked off-screen?
BROWNSTONE: After tracking down her contact information, I gave her a call. And to my surprise, she was totally open to talking, and, in fact, she told me that she had a video of herself that apparently exonerated her from being involved in the shooting. She was at work, though, and couldn't talk, so we agreed to follow up.
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BROWNSTONE: But a few days later, I got a message from James Madison. She said she'd changed her mind about speaking to us. Her message read, (reading) this decision is based almost entirely on the current geopolitical climate in the States and the risks associated with speaking publicly about past activism and potential retribution for doing so.
And she added something else. (Reading) I wish you luck in recording your episode and getting to the bottom of this and figuring out who murdered Antonio.
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BROWNSTONE: I tell James Madison we're sensitive to her concerns, but she appears on a video from the night Antonio was killed, and I want to hear her side of the story. But she tells me, no, she doesn't want to talk and to stop contacting her.
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JAMES: So James Madison went from one of our most tantalizing leads to a dead end. But she wasn't the only Sentinel we tracked down. So David, Sydney and I meet up.
GUTMAN: We're all sitting there in front of microphones, and we kind of just take turns going through the list.
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GUTMAN: One of us calls someone.
Hi. My name's David Gutman. I'm a...
DAVID GUTMAN == GUTMAN == JOURNALIST
BROWNSTONE: Reporter calling from The Seattle Times.
JAMES: Hey there. My name is Will James.
GUTMAN: The other two hold their breath and cross their fingers.
BROWNSTONE: We're really interested in speaking to some of the people who...
JAMES: CHOP security.
GUTMAN: You get a lot of voicemails.
JAMES: If you give me a call back, I could tell you more about the project.
GUTMAN: And then every once in a while, someone answers the phone, and the air in the room switches a little bit. And you're like, oh, is someone going to talk to us? I don't know if you could hear it, but she said, how in the hell did you get my name?
BROWNSTONE: I did hear that. You did a great job. You kept your cool.
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GUTMAN: And so, yeah, we're just taking turns, crossing people off the list.
JAMES: We're leaving some great voicemails.
(LAUGHTER)
GUTMAN: We are crushing these voicemails. Let's bang out the next one.
JAMES: David is calling Slate. This is a high-up Sentinel.
GUTMAN: Slate is someone we really wanted to talk to. We thought of them as James Madison's lieutenant, maybe a second-in-command of the Sentinels. And so they might be someone who would know what James Madison was up to the night Antonio was killed.
Hello. My name is David Gutman. I'm a reporter with The Seattle Times.
I call, and someone picks up. And I think they said something like, I'll think about it.
OK. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for considering. Take care.
JAMES: So what just happened?
GUTMAN: Someone answered the phone. And it was a really deep voice, like, so deep, it sounded like it was being altered.
JAMES: I could hear, like, a rumbling coming from your phone. It sounded like...
GUTMAN: Yeah.
JAMES: Yeah, like when TV news interviews someone with a voice distorter on.
GUTMAN: It is Slate. They think it over for a couple hours, and then they agree to talk on the phone.
I'd like to ask you about the night of June 29.
When they pick up again, their voice sounds normal.
Are you amenable to that?
We do know Slate's real name. Slate uses they/them pronouns. But what Slate basically said to us was, look, I'm worried about being doxxed. I'm worried about losing my job. I'm worried about my life being blown up online. And so we granted them anonymity.
Is it OK if I start recording now?
And so I kind of just want to keep them talking, to learn as much as we can learn about this whole operation. So before we get to the night of the shooting, we start there.
Tell me how you first got involved with the protests in 2020.
SLATE: I was there as, like, just covering everything.
GUTMAN: Slate says they first showed up to the protests as a journalist. They were there to document the standoff with police. But then they saw protesters arming themselves, and they say they got worried about where everything was headed.
SLATE: This is going to end really badly.
GUTMAN: So they tried to get some sort of organization going among all the people who were showing up to defend CHOP. And what Slate did was they got all these security volunteers on the same encrypted chat on the messaging app Signal.
SLATE: It was just a way to be like, hey, look out for this thing. Hey, look out for that thing. We're rotating the Signal group every day. So if you're not there - right? - you can't show up for one day, get added to the Signal group and then be able to see everything that's going on.
GUTMAN: Basically, CHOP security is just whoever shows up and gets handed a walkie-talkie on that day. I tell Slate that we'd heard that a lot of Sentinels came from these very specific subcultures around Seattle - club kids, furries, people who did circus tricks, live-action role players, who, you know, dress up and act out these Dungeons & Dragons-type scenarios.
Give me that list again.
GUTMAN: The LARPing community, the circus community, the furry community.
SLATE: Here's the thing, right? From my position, I can't say no to anybody. Like, this is functional anarchy. The LARPing community is because there were people that were showing up in full suits of armor for a while, and they could fight. Let me tell you. The circus community - sure, I believe that. The furry community. And here's the other thing, is that, like, when they're using these terms, they're using them as weapons, right? They're trying to use the mental image that you get from them to detract from what was actually happening. Like, you think furry, you're like, ew, furries, until you realize that, like, there is no such thing as the furry community. You don't get a membership card, right? There is no, like, furry agenda. None of these things are very real.
GUTMAN: So many people used code names. Most of them didn't seem to know each other outside of CHOP. And Slate said that after a while, some of them started to believe that CHOP was the real world and that these personas they'd created were the real thing, and they were in all-consuming.
SLATE: If you stay in the zone full time and you don't leave the zone, you will start to think that this is real life and that we don't have to integrate the world around us.
GUTMAN: Slate said they kept their CHOP identity really separate from their real identity. They have Slate on one side and real life on the other so that they could leave CHOP, leave that identity behind, and just go on with their life in the real world.
SLATE: Because Slate doesn't exist. They don't have to exist anymore. Maybe someday they will again.
GUTMAN: I asked Slate about James Madison.
What was your impression when you met them?
SLATE: That they're probably a narc (laughter). And that was very much the vibe I got from them initially.
GUTMAN: Slate might have thought James Madison was a narc or an informant because she claimed to be military. We'd been thinking of James Madison as the leader of the Sentinels.
SLATE: James Madison got involved to a degree.
GUTMAN: But Slate says James Madison was just the public face.
SLATE: This is somebody that I can, like - maybe I can put my trust into them, and I very quickly realized that, like, they don't have what I'm looking for.
GUTMAN: James Madison was, in Slate's words, not the politician that I was.
SLATE: They could supervise things, and I could trust them not to burn everything down, but I knew that if I, like, just handed the reins to them for a couple of days, it could go downhill.
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GUTMAN: The role Slate saw the Sentinels playing at CHOP, at least in the beginning, was protecting the protest from violent threats, things like Proud Boys or white supremacists.
SLATE: We're not here to sit here and try to control what happens in the zone. We're trying to keep the zone safe.
GUTMAN: And then Slate tells us essentially that the vibes inside CHOP started to shift.
SLATE: It just became an open-air just, like, festival of - like, anarchist festival. People would be like, hey, can we get help? There's a guy that's really drunk and he's trying to start fights with blah, blah, blah. And yet people are coming here, you know, taking LSD, doing all these drug and treating it like it's a music festival - is f***ing insane.
GUTMAN: Slate says, when CHOP started getting more violent and people started asking them for more help, the Sentinels stepped back, and they let other security groups take the lead.
SLATE: We're not here to be your personal army. We're here because the movement necessitated it, and now you're going to try to turn us into your, like, little, like, junior police force.
GUTMAN: But the Sentinels kept showing up, including Slate. So maybe Slate is telling me all this to distance the Sentinels from what came next.
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GUTMAN: On the night Antonio died, Slate says they were driving home from CHOP, and their phone started blowing up.
SLATE: And I was in the process of taking my kit off and getting ready to just go to bed, basically. And then I started getting this flood of messages about stuff.
GUTMAN: Reports of a Jeep driving around, reports of shots.
Are there reports saying it's, you know, CHOP security? - that - because a lot of what we've heard is that people thought there was - they were stopping a mass shooting.
SLATE: The reports I got from the ground was that there's an individual that had been there the last week - at least the last week. I talked to him a couple times. I only ever knew him as Steve (ph).
GUTMAN: Slate tells us it wasn't James Madison who walked up to the Jeep and shot at close range. It wasn't even a Sentinel. Slate says it was a guy named Steve.
What's Steve look like? What you know, race, hair?
SLATE: Shorter than 6 foot, bald, like, a goatee and facial hair. White guy. And the reports were that these kids had hit the barricade, and this guy comes up and, you know, yelled something. I couldn't tell you exactly what was said and then fired twice into the passenger side of the Jeep.
GUTMAN: This sounds an awful lot like what the two neighbors - the ones who called 911 - said they saw, that someone shot into the front passenger seat of the Jeep at close range.
Did police ever interview you about this?
SLATE: No.
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GUTMAN: Slate says they can't tell us who Steve is or how to find him. They dismiss Steve as just a guy who wasn't all there.
SLATE: He was kind of giving me the mentally not - the door wasn't closed in the house, right? Like, he was there. Lights were on a lot of the time, but there was something else going on. We don't have a connection with him because he was never part of our apparatus.
GUTMAN: Slate is convinced the Sentinels had nothing to do with Antonio's death.
SLATE: I didn't respond to it. None of my people responded to it. I didn't have to answer for it. We don't know anything about it, right?
GUTMAN: It did kind of leave us wondering, though. Who's this Steve? And is he the shooter? Or could he be some sort of cover story to deflect suspicion from the Sentinels?
JAMES: And the next person we talked to led us to some answers.
I've been looking to talk to you for a long time.
AUSTIN SHARP: (Laughter) Yeah. I wasn't trying to stay hidden.
JAMES: That's coming up.
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JAMES: After hanging up with Slate, we turn back to our long list of Sentinels. It's late in the day. We've been calling for hours, and we've burned through almost all of the names. We're not sure if we're any closer to figuring out who killed Antonio. So we have messages out to almost everyone on our list.
BROWNSTONE: Except?
JAMES: What I would suggest is that I give Joker a ring. We want to talk to Joker for a few reasons.
BROWNSTONE: He was one of the most heavily identified Sentinels in that blog post I found.
JAMES: We also now know that he shows up in that video shot from that fourth-floor apartment, the one where he seems to hand James Madison a gun about an hour before the shooting.
Hey there. Is this Austin?
Joker's real name is Austin Sharp.
SHARP: Speaking.
JAMES: Hey. My name is Will, Will James. I'm a journalist with KOW.
So I give him the spiel. I explain the podcast we're working on. And to my shock, he just starts talking right there.
How often were you there at CHOP? How often were you going down there?
SHARP: I spent six months there.
JAMES: Well, CHOP was there for about three weeks.
SHARP: Oh. It was only three weeks. That was a long three weeks.
JAMES: Austin tells me he's willing to meet up and talk. So I get ready to meet a Sentinel face to face for the first time.
This is Will. And I'm here to meet Joker in a few minutes.
I drive a couple hours outside Seattle to a rural part of Washington state, where Austin lives.
JAMES: Hey.
SHARP: Howdy, howdy.
JAMES: Austin?
SHARP: Yes, sir.
JAMES: Hey. I'm Will.
There's not a lot of meeting places around there, so we ended up meeting at the local library, amid the stacks of books and people walking around.
I've been looking to talk to you for a long time.
SHARP: (Laughter) Yeah. I wasn't trying to stay hidden. I was just...
JAMES: Yeah.
SHARP: I wasn't with the flow of things.
JAMES: He's a heavyset guy, probably around my age, maybe 30s or early 40s. And he's chill, disarming, the most open Sentinel we've reached out to. At the same time, we'd seen him on camera the night of the shooting dressed head to toe in camo, carrying a gun. And so I can't help but wonder if there's another side to him.
SHARP: This is the reason they called me Joker out there.
JAMES: Whoa. You have a tattoo in, like, stylized lettering that says Joker all down your forearm. The J has, like, a little jester hat. Yeah.
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JAMES: Austin says his entire journey to Washington state, and ultimately to CHOP, comes by way of the Juggalos. These are fans of the hip-hop group Insane Clown Posse - or ICP.
SHARP: I met up with some people on, like, an ICP website, and he offered me a room, and I've been here ever since.
JAMES: The Juggalos are a subculture of self-described outsiders, misfits, mostly from working-class America. The federal government has classified them as a criminal gang, a description Juggalos like Austin push back on.
SHARP: Juggalos aren't a gang. It's just a music group following.
JAMES: He's originally from small-town Florida, where he got into trouble with the law a few times. He has a felony on his record.
SHARP: The police know who the troublemakers are, and they will target you.
JAMES: Like James Madison, Austin says he's former military.
Can I ask what branch you were in briefly?
SHARP: Air Force.
JAMES: We asked the Air Force about Austin, and a spokesperson told us they couldn't find any record of him. Austin says he can't explain why they can't find these records. In any case, he ended up out in the Pacific Northwest to kind of try and start fresh. When the protest movement of 2020 erupted, Austin went straight to Seattle to be part of it. He says he volunteered to be a medic, not security.
SHARP: I stayed in CHOP.
JAMES: And he spent a lot of time at CHOP inside his white SUV.
SHARP: I slept in my vehicle.
JAMES: He let pretty much anyone tag it with graffiti, write things on it. And very quickly, this white SUV becomes covered end to end in writing and symbols and drawings. I want to ask Austin about that video we see of him at CHOP passing what looks like a gun to James Madison about an hour before the shooting. Austin says he can't legally own a gun because he has a felony record. So he says he was not armed at CHOP, and if he was carrying anything, it was a pepper ball gun.
What are pepper balls?
SHARP: So it's a paintball that's filled with capsaicin. And it's used for self-defense.
JAMES: He says that's what we see him handing to James Madison in that video, not a real gun, a pepper ball gun. And when I mentioned the Sentinels, Austin says he doesn't even recognize that name. It's not a term he knew when he was at CHOP.
SHARP: I pretty much stayed around James and Slate when I was interacting with CHOP security. I just randomly went to the different - I call them outposts but they're like guard stations, and made sure that they had water, and they were staying hydrated.
JAMES: It sounds like Austin was kind of at the fringes of CHOP security. After this interview, I checked with some sources, and they said, yeah, that's true, he was kind of a peripheral figure. But it turns out, fringe figure or not, Austin had a front-row seat to the shooting.
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JAMES: Austin says he's in his SUV, the one covered in graffiti, when he sees some teenagers driving off in the white Jeep that had been stolen minutes before. So he tries to box them in with his SUV, but they push past him in the Jeep and escape.
SHARP: They drove off, and I spent my time trying to find where they went.
JAMES: Maybe 10 minutes pass.
SHARP: Then I heard they were milling down inside of Cal Anderson field.
JAMES: So Austin heads toward the playfield. And suddenly, the white Jeep zips past him. We now know at this point Antonio and his friends are inside.
SHARP: And as I got to the main strip from that side road is when they drove past me.
JAMES: He starts to pursue it, and then another car joins the chase. It's the silver Pathfinder, the one we saw on video with people shooting at the white Jeep. All three cars pull out onto the road in front of the park, and Austin hears gunshots.
SHARP: I never saw a muzzle flash.
JAMES: Austin later found two bullet holes in his SUV, and he doesn't know where they came from. But now we know a video analyst hired by the city of Seattle found that shots were coming from the Pathfinder, but not from the white Jeep Antonio was in. The Jeep drives away with the Pathfinder on its tail, leaving Austin behind. He says he thinks, where should I be if the Jeep comes back? He's trying to be part of CHOP's defense, so he parks by the barricades outside the abandoned precinct and waits. Austin has no idea, but he has just parked his vehicle right near where Antonio and his friends would crash the Jeep moments later.
The kids' car comes around the corner. Do you see it coming around the corner?
SHARP: As soon as it swings around the corner, he floors it like his intentions were to hit that barricade as hard as possible. Because I didn't foresee it stopping at the speed that it was going, my fight or flight kicked in, and I already knew what was going to happen. I hid behind my - I hid in the front of my car.
JAMES: You ducked down?
SHARP: Oh, yeah.
JAMES: He braces himself for a shooting because that Jeep doesn't look like it's stopping, and armed CHOP security members assembling at the barricade are not going to let it get inside CHOP without a fight.
SHARP: And you can hear people that are sitting down at the barricade. It's coming around the corner. Get ready.
JAMES: So you're thinking...
SHARP: I'm thinking they were prepared. Let's be real about it. Anybody that came there with a gun you knew was going to be trigger happy about any situation that goes down.
JAMES: He's pointing to something real, something we've heard from other interviews - that for weeks at that point, people in CHOP had believed an attack was imminent. There had been other shootings at CHOP, and protesters had already lived through a car driving toward them early in the protests. Austin says CHOP security saw their purpose as preventing anything like this from happening again.
SHARP: I feel bad for the kids, and they didn't deserve what they got. But - I don't want to sound heartless saying it, though. So it's like my dad would say, you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. And unfortunately, them wanting a joy ride around the place ultimately cost them their lives.
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JAMES: For Austin, this was not an attack on CHOP. He says the boys were joy riding. But at the same time, he does share the basic narrative of a lot of protesters that what happened to the boys was their own fault. We can track Austin and his SUV covered in graffiti through a lot of the videos we have from that night. And as best we can tell, they match his story about the shooting.
SHARP: I emerged after the gunfire was done. I'm not Superman. I'm not about to step in front of all that.
JAMES: Austin says he wasn't really a part of what came next - pulling the boys out of the jeep, treating them, driving them to medical care. And he says, while medics worked on the boys, people started rifling through the crashed Jeep.
SHARP: Quite a few people were inside and outside of the vehicle. And from all my time watching, like, law shows, I'm like, oh, man. This is going to be so much more work for the police to figure out what happened.
JAMES: He noticed one guy in particular, a big guy who seemed to have kind of a biker look.
SHARP: He was wearing the leather vest jacket.
JAMES: In fact, Austin brings up a photo on his phone of a video game character he said reminds him of this guy, a game called Gears of War. And this video game character is, like, a kind of very classic looking tough biker guy.
SHARP: I'm pretty sure it's the guy, the biker guy, who tells them to start picking up all the rounds and all the casings.
JAMES: This sounds like the same guy captured on camera by Ashley Dorelus, that first livestreamer we talked to in our investigation.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Unless you see any shells on the ground. Pick those up. Pocket them.
JAMES: In Ashley's video, this guy is wearing the same kind of leather jacket, telling people to pick up his shells.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Because I want to get the fuck out of here.
DORELUS: Well, thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah. Hey, I'm sorry I got to take off.
DORELUS: No, I know.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: But I don't trust the cops, you know?
DORELUS: I don't - you needed to be here. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah. Y'all don't know who I am.
JAMES: Austin says he never got a good look at who was shooting, but he really believes the biker guy he saw picking up shells was involved. Could this guy be the shooting suspect Slate described as Steve?
Did you know his name at all?
SHARP: I tried not to learn anybody's names out there.
JAMES: Unlike what we've heard from Slate and lots of other people, Austin says he did talk to police in 2020. And he gave them his description of the biker guy.
SHARP: When I talked to investigators, they said that they may have found one or two gun shells.
JAMES: And that's all I get from Austin about the shooting suspect.
All right, Austin, anything we didn't talk about that is on your mind?
As I wrap up my interview with Austin, he starts telling me about LARPing - live-action role-playing.
SHARP: These are all the parks right here that are within the Washington area. The park that I reside at.
JAMES: It turns out this is a huge part of his life. He's about to leave town for a big meetup.
SHARP: In our kingdom alone, there's 11 parks - or lands - that are all scattered throughout Washington.
JAMES: He tells me about how everyone plays a role in their kingdom.
SHARP: You can play wizard, healer, paladin, anti-paladin, warrior, barbarian, bard, archer, scout, assassin, druid.
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JAMES: When I sat down to talk to Austin, I only knew him as a Joker, someone suspicious, maybe even dangerous. But after meeting him, I walk away with a completely different understanding. Austin came to CHOP to play a role, to feel like he was part of something, that he had skills that made him valuable.
BROWNSTONE: And that's true for a lot of people we talked to who gravitated to CHOP. You could show up there, leave your old identity behind and become someone new.
JAMES: In Austin's case, yeah, a combat medic. For others, a revolutionary, a soldier, even a cop.
GUTMAN: And like Slate said, for some people, these CHOP identities became real.
BROWNSTONE: Maybe more real and more important than what they came to fight for.
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JAMES: Another thing we walk away with after these conversations with Austin and Slate is a description of someone who might've shot Antonio.
BROWNSTONE: We keep running down this lead about Steve.
JAMES: And we discover that there's a photo of him sent by someone in the Sentinels to someone in the upper reaches of Seattle government.
GUTMAN: So do we have the picture?
BROWNSTONE: We do.
GUTMAN: And does it look like Slate's description?
BROWNSTONE: Hold on. Let me see.
Steve is starting to sound less like a cover story and more like a real suspect, coming up on the final episode of We Keep Us Safe.
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JAMES: You can see new video evidence from the night of the shooting on our series page. Visit npr.org/chop to watch.
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BROWNSTONE: We keep Us Safe from NPR's EMBEDDED is a collaboration with the Seattle Times and KUOW. The series is reported and written by me, Sydney Brownstone, David Gutman and Will James.
JAMES: This episode was edited by Luis Trelles and Laura Greanias, with support from Katie Simon.
BROWNSTONE: It was produced by our senior producer, Adelina Lancianese.
JAMES: Special thanks to Tom Bowman and Mick Wagoner, and to Marcus Kulik for giving us his livestream video from the night of the shooting. Research and fact checking by Dania Suleman and Miyoko Wolf.
BROWNSTONE: Robert Rodriguez mastered the episode.
JAMES: Music by Audiosocket, Connor Moore from CMoore Sound, Ramtin Arablouei and Universal Music Production.
BROWNSTONE: And a big thanks to our NPR+ supporters. EMBEDDED is where we do ambitious long-form journalism at NPR, and NPR+ 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@npr.org. I'm Sydney Brownstone. This is EMBEDDED from NPR. Thanks for listening.
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