A man who was shot outside of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHOP) is calling the attack a “hate crime” and attributing it to the “Proud Boys or KKK.”

DeJuan Young, 33, was shot in an area right outside CHOP over the weekend after attempting to flee the sound of gunshots, which ultimately left one teenager dead.

Young said he heard the first shooting and attempted to get away from the area and head home when a group of four men approached him. He claims they uttered a racial slur before shooting him and believes it was a racially motivated attack.

“So basically I was shot by, I’m not sure if they’re ‘Proud Boys’ or KKK,” Young said, according to KIRO 7. “But the verbiage that they said was hold this [N-word] and shot me.”

Young did not clarify whether the men actually grabbed hold of him but said that the force of the shots “pushed him onto the hood of the car,” according to the local report.

“And they stood over top of me and continued to fire,” he claimed, without explaining how his assailants were above him on the car, apparently firing from point-blank range, without fatally wounding him. “I tried to protect myself and got shot in the arm. And they got away.”

Volunteers in the area transferred Young to Harborview Medical Center, where he is being treated for his injuries. Young has uploaded videos from his hospital bed to TikTok, saying that he was “shot five times in the stomach” in addition to his arm. He suggested he was making the video because he wanted the world to know “his story” — specifically, that Seattle police “left me out there for dead.”

Young said in another TikTok that he provided “security” for CHAZ/CHOP “every night” and explained that he was leaving the area when the incident occurred.

“I’m out there every night. I’m out there doing security. Where are y’all at? Home,” he said, adding that police should have helped him because he was “technically outside the zone.”

He told everyone who had something “slick” to say — regarding the fact that he is patrolling a supposedly police-free “autonomous” zone but demanding police to respond in times of need — to “suck a big one.”

He confirmed in another video that he has been “down at the protests every day”:

The local reports on Young caught the attention of Kalen D’Almeida, the co-founder and field reporter for Scriberr who was allegedly attacked in CHOP earlier this month after filming rapper Raz Simone, the area’s unofficial leader. He has identified the man as one of his attackers based on photos uploaded to Young’s social media accounts:

Young continued in speaking to local news outlets this week, telling King5 that he is “positive this was a hate crime.”

“I understand everybody’s going to say, ‘Oh, it was the CHAZ zone and y’all asked for the police not to be there, so don’t act like y’all need them now,’” Young said.

“But technically I was outside that area,” he added. “I was in Seattle streets. So what’s the excuse now?”

King5 reported:

Seattle Police have since released five minutes of video footage. The footage was released after the department claimed police were met by a violent crowd that prevented emergency responders from getting to the victim.

Young said he holds strong to his belief of the need to defund the police.

[…]

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best accused protesters of thwarting the efforts of police and other first responders, saying that a 19-year-old shot and killed in CHOP may still be alive had police been allowed to enter.

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said just weeks ago that police response times have tripled due to the situation with CHOP, formerly known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ):

Police abandoned the East Precinct after the city “relinquished to severe public pressure,” Best said in a message to fellow officers this month.

Best later said during an appearance on CNN that police are “still responding to every single call in every area of the city” but noted that barricades around CHOP “prevent us from going in as quickly and as efficiently as we’d like to.”

“And certainly, because we’re not in the precinct, response times across the entire east precinct area have increased,” she added.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) this week said that officers will return to the East Precinct in the “near future.”