iHeartMedia and Double Asterisk Investigate The 2016 Murder of Ferguson Activist Darren Seals in Season Two of “After The Uprising”

For Immediate Release — June 11, 2024 — The NAACP Image Award-nominated true crime podcast “AFTER THE UPRISING”, a co-production of Double Asterisk and iHeartPodcasts, released a new 10-episode season today that may have solved the murder of rapper and Ferguson activist Darren Seals. The new season will be hosted by former Missouri state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal and series co-creator Ray Nowosielski, who together wrote, reported and produced alongside John Duffy, series co-creator, and Mallory Keenoy.

National headlines in 2016 asked “Who killed Darren Seals?” after he was shot dead and found in his torched Jeep Wrangler. Perhaps most famous among a number of mysterious tragedies that have befallen St. Louis activists who helped launch the national movement for Black Lives one decade ago, Seals was hailed as the successor to Malcolm X. He was also a rapper in D.O.A. and manager of the Bottom Boyz, hip hop music groups, posting on social media in his final weeks of a pending deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation.

Many in the activist community suggested white supremacists or law enforcement elements could be responsible, a suspicion seemingly bolstered by a witness report of the involvement of a white man with a ponytail, what appeared to be sloppy police work at the crime scene and the 2022 revelation that the FBI had been surveilling Seals during his final months. Police have never provided details of their findings, and no prosecution has ever gone forward in the case.

The “After the Uprising” team conducted their own two and a half year investigation into the matter. As their promotional materials describe, “They crossed a landscape of rap artists, protestors, gang members, cops, FBI agents and even a serial killer, from the violent streets of St. Louis to the elite headquarters of Roc Nation in New York City, from government offices to prison cells, picking up the trail left by Darren's murderer -- with an ending you have to hear to believe.”

Seals’ late mother Bonnie Otis sat down for roughly 30 hours of interviews for the podcast over four months in 2023, before her unexpected death in August. His brother Byron and many others across his personal and professional circles will also be featured.

All episodes of “After The Uprising” will be available today everywhere podcasts are heard. The season was made in association with True Stories. Executive producers are Nikki Ettore and Lindsay Hoffman for iHeartPodcasts, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski for Double Asterisk and David Cassidy and Ruth Vaca for True Stories.

“After The Uprising: The Murder of Darren Seals” is distributed by iHeartPodcasts.

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Double Asterisk** is the investigative media company of critically-acclaimed documentary filmmakers and journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski.
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