“I’ll Fucking Shoot You in the Face”: the Police Murder of Sonya Massie
Deputy Sean Grayson didn’t turn on his body camera until after he’d shot Sonya Massey three times. This is probably why he thought he could get away with saying he killed Massey in self-defense, as she was charging toward him with a pot of boiling water. What Grayson didn’t realize is that his partner’s body cam recorded the entire fatal encounter, showing that the diminutive, unarmed Massey was hiding from the Springfield deputy, when Grayson walked around the kitchen counter, shot her in the face and left her to bleed out. Then he lied about it…lies that were caught on tape and exposed as lies on tape. More
The post “I’ll Fucking Shoot You in the Face”: the Police Murder of Sonya Massie appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Grayson fires three shots at Sonya Massey, while his partner watches with gun drawn.
Deputy Sean Grayson didn’t turn on his body camera until after he’d shot Sonya Massey three times. This is probably why he thought he could get away with saying he killed Massey in self-defense, as she was charging toward him with a pot of boiling water. What Grayson didn’t realize is that his partner’s body cam recorded the entire fatal encounter, showing that the diminutive, unarmed Massey was hiding from the Springfield deputy, when Grayson walked around the kitchen counter, shot her in the face and left her to bleed out. Then he lied about it…lies that were caught on tape and exposed as lies on tape.
Grayson should never have been hired as a cop. His record contains one blemish and red flag after another, starting with his abbreviated career in the US Army. Sean Grayson joined the Army in May 2014, but his career as a wheeled vehicle mechanic lasted less than two years, before he was discharged for “misconduct, (serious offense).” During his time in the Army, Grayson pleaded guilty to charges of driving under the influence. Shortly after his discharge, he was arrested again for drunk driving. On his application for a job with the Logan County Sheriff’s Department, Grayson said he had been drunk “a lot” in his life.
Despite this dubious resume, Grayson received his law enforcement certification in 2021 and over the next three years was hired by six different law enforcement agencies: the town police departments of Pawnee, Kincaid, Virden and Auburn, Illinois and the sheriff’s offices in Logan and Sangamon Counties. For the first couple of years as a cop, Grayson was only paid $17.50 an hour, but he was compensated by gaining the authority to exert power over people making much more or nothing at all.
While working as a deputy for Logan County, Grayson was disciplined by the department for a high-speed vehicle chase that resulted in him wrecking his cruiser after hitting a deer. It was determined that Grayson had violated department policy on vehicle pursuits.
Two complaints were filed against Grayson during his short stint in Logan County, one by a woman who accused him of “inappropriate behavior” during an arrest and another by a jail inmate who claimed Grayson had “abused his power” during an interrogation in his cell. Neither complaint led to any charges or disciplinary action.
In another incident last year, Grayson became irate when Wayman Morrison, police chief of Girard, Illinois, refused to call child protective services on a woman outside of Grayson’s mother’s home. “He was acting like a bully,” Meredith told CBS News. “He was wanting me to do stuff that was not kosher.”
Audio recordings obtained by CBS News show that two years before he shot Sonya Massey, Grayson was reprimanded for falsifying information in his police reports while working for the Logan County sheriff’s office.
“If we can’t trust what you say and what you see, we can’t have you in our uniform,” a supervisor can be heard telling Grayson on one of the tapes. “The sheriff and I will not tolerate lying or deception…Officers [like you] have been charged and they end up in jail.”
Grayson had been fired by the town of Kincaid’s police department because he refused to live within ten miles of the city limits and he left his job with the Virden police department without giving any notice. “He just stopped covering shifts,” a department spokesman said. He spent less than a year with the Auburn police department before leaving that post to Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, where he was employed on the night he got the call about a possible prowler outside Sonya Massey’s house in Springfield, Illinois.
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Grayson interviews Sonya Massey on her porch.
A little before one in the morning on July 6, Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman struggling with emotional issues, called 911 to report that she believed an intruder was trying to break into her home. Grayson and his partner, still unidentified, pulled up to the address, parked their cruiser and searched the front and backyards of Massey’s house. Finding no one or any sign of a break-in, Grayson and his partner went to the front porch. Grayson pounds four or five times on the door and brusquely, yells: “Are you coming to the door or not? All right. Hurry up!”
Massey finally opens the door, holding a cell phone.
Massey says, “I called for help.”
Grayson, who looms over her, replies: “What do you want help with?”
“I heard somebody outside,” Massey says.
“Yeah, we checked your house,” Grayson says. “We checked your backyard. I walked all the way through all these backyards. We checked the front yard. We didn’t see nobody. Nobody’s out.”
Massey, a thin woman in a nightgown who weighed only 110 pounds, seemed to be calm, as the deputies questioned her about her 911 call and a car in her driveway. Massey told the two cops that the car, a black SUV with a smashed window, wasn’t hers. The unidentified deputy leaves for a couple of minutes to write down the license plate number of the car and call it into the station. After he returns to the porch, the deputies enter the house with Massey. Once inside, Grayson asks Massey, who is sitting on a sofa, for her ID, “A driver’s license will do, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
Grayson and his partner ask Massey for her ID, then tell her to remove a steaming pot from her stove.
While the other deputy searches the house, Massey rummages through her purse and then flips through a stack of papers looking for her license. “I’ve got papers, I’ll show you my papers,” Massey says, anxiously.
Looking a little confused now, Massey, who was recovering from a recent surgery, asks Grayson to hand her a Bible. Whatever the deputies are thinking at this point, they haven’t read Massey her Miranda Rights or placed her under arrest. In fact, Grayson tells her, “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.”
One of the deputies notices a pot of steaming water on the gas stove in Massey’s kitchen and asks her to turn it off, saying “We don’t need a fire while we are here.” Massey gets up walks into the kitchen, turns the burner off and removes the pot of water. As she’s holding it, the unidentified deputy takes a couple of steps backward.
Massey ask why the cops are moving back, as she turns off the stove and removes the pot of water.
“Why are you going?” Massey asks.
“Away from that steaming water,” the deputy says.
“Oh, the steaming water?” Massey says. “Then I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
“Huh?” the deputy asks.
“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Massey repeats.
“You better fucking not or I swear to God I’ll fucking shoot you in the fucking face,” Grayson yells, as he draws his 9MM gun (not his TASER or his mace) and points it at Massey. The other deputy, who is standing to Grayson’s right, also draws his gun.
Grayson aims his gun at Massey as she says, “I’m sorry.”
Massey puts her hands and says, “I’m sorry.” Then she ducks behind a breakfast bar.
Grayson moves a couple steps to his right, yells: “Drop the fucking pot, drop the fucking pot.” Then he fires three shots. One of the shots hits Massey in the face below her left eye. As he stands over her body, Grayson again yells, “Drop the fucking pot.” The other deputy shouts into his radio, “Shots fired. Shots fired.” At this point, the cops had been in Massey’s house for less than three minutes.
Grayson’s partner radios dispatch: “Headshot wounded female. 1078.”
Only now does Grayson turn his body camera on.
The deputy puts his gun in his holster and tells Grayson,” I’m going to go get my [medical] kit.”
Grayson says, “Nah, she’s done. You can go get it, but that’s a headshot.” Then Grayson tells his partner, “I’m not taking boiling water to the fucking head and look it came right to our feet, too. God damn it.”
“Are you good,” the deputy asks Grayson.
“Yeah, I’m good. Let her fucking just…What are you going to do, man?”
The deputy leaves to get his medical kit. Grayson walks back into the living room and paces around muttering. He makes no attempt to render any medical aid to Massey.
When the deputy returns and applies pressure to Massey’s bullet wound, he tells Grayson she has a pulse and is gasping for breath.
Finally, Grayson walks out of the house to the patrol car. He comes back with his medical kit and asks if there’s anything he can do. When he’s told no, Grayson responds, “All right, I’m not even gonna waste my med stuff then.”
When the paramedics arrive, the two deputies struggle to remember Massey’s name. The paramedics tell the cops, they’d been there earlier in the day. Massey had been recovering from a recent surgery.
When other deputies arrive at the scene, they ask Grayson if he’s doing okay. He says, “Yeah, I’m okay. This fucking bitch is crazy.”
Grayson tells another deputy at the scene, “She set it up on purpose, so it is what it is.”
“Where’s the gun?” one deputy asks Grayson.
“No, she had boiling water and came at me with boiling water,” Grayson says. “She said she was going to rebuke me in the name of Jesus and came at (me) with boiling water.”
Crime scene tape is deployed around Massey’s house, as Grayson falsely tells his fellow cops that she charged toward him with a pot of boiling water.
One of the last images on the body cam footage shows the deputy who, unlike Grayson, tried to save Massey’s life standing at the back of his patrol car, wiping her blood from his hands. Another deputy asks him, “You good?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m going to chill in my car for a second. Camera’s off.”
Sonya Massey, mother of two, was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, making her the 701st person killed by police this year. (Another 59 people have been killed by police since Massey’s death on July 6.)
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For days after the killing of Sonya Massey, her friends and family don’t know how she died. Some of her family, including her, father James Wilburn, were led to believe by the police that she had committed suicide. Others that she was killed by an intruder in her house.
The idea that Massey had killed herself originated with the deputies on the scene. When asked by a police dispatcher, “Just to confirm: self-inflicted?” one of them replied, “Self-inflicted.”
Massy’s son, Malachi Hill Massey, said police told him that his mother “had been shot in the eye and it came out her neck.”
“They didn’t tell me who,” Malachi said. “They were just saying it was ‘somebody.’”
The cops told Massie’s ex-boyfriend, and the father of one of her kids, that a neighbor had shot her. Other cops told her father that she’d been killed by an intruder.
“I was under the impression that a prowler had broken in and killed my baby. Never did they say that it was a deputy-involved shooting until my brother read it on the internet,” said Wilburn at a news conference arranged by the family’s lawyer, Ben Crump. “We were led to believe that the intruder – or someone from the neighborhood – may have killed her. We were absolutely shocked to find out that it was a deputy who shot her.”
A week after the killing, the Illinois State Police released 36 minutes of body camera footage documenting the search of Massey’s house, her interactions with the deputies, her shooting and the aftermath of her shooting. The video demolished Deputy Grayson’s version. At no point was Massey aggressive toward either officer. She didn’t threaten or run at them with boiling water. Grayson wasn’t defending his life. Massey was crouched behind the counter when she was shot, the pot she was holding, already drained of water.
An investigation of the shooting was initiated by the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, which soon turned the case over to the Illinois State Police, who finished their review in less than 10 days and turned it over to the prosecutors. The police investigator concluded that Grayson wasn’t justified in his use of deadly force. According to a court filing, “he likened the scenario to an officer intentionally and unnecessarily putting himself in front of a moving vehicle and then justifying the use of force because of fear of being struck.”
On July 17, a grand jury in Springfield handed down indictments against Grayson for first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. Grayson was remanded without bail and fired from his job. But what about the people who hired Grayson and put him out on the streets of Springfield night after night?
The quick action against Grayson is the exception. Since 2005, fewer than 2% of officer-involved shootings are ever prosecuted and less than half of those end in guilty pleas or convictions.
If Donald Trump has his way, this percentage will drop to zero. He wants police to enjoy the same immunity for “official acts” that the Supreme Court says he enjoys. A couple of days after the release of the damning body cam footage of the murder of Sonya Massey, Trump was in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where the felonious ex-president told the crowd.
“I want to give immunity to police to do their job. I’m giving federal immunity to police officers so they can do their job.”
The “job” of policing in America results in the killing of nearly four people every day across the country. In this case, it meant shooting Sonya Massey in the face, a woman who had called the cops for help and only a few minutes after they knocked on her door was killed in her own kitchen for holding a pot of steaming water the deputies had ordered her to take off the stove.
The post “I’ll Fucking Shoot You in the Face”: the Police Murder of Sonya Massie appeared first on CounterPunch.org.