Sonya Massey's death: How race, police and mental health collided in America's heartland

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Three times, Sonya Massey's name floated into the evening air amid bunches of star-shaped purple balloons.

"Say her name," her friends and family yelled. "Sonya Massey."

A month earlier, a sheriff's deputy shot and killed Massey, 36, inside her small home after she called 911 to report a prowler. A Black woman who had a mental health illness, according to her family, Massey was home alone when the two deputies from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office arrived.

"Say her name," her friends and family yelled. "Sonya Massey."

Bodycam footage shows Massey, in a thin dressing gown, apologizing to the white deputy as he drew his gun when she picked up a pan of hot water, and then said “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” seconds before the deputy fired.

"Say her name," her friends and family yelled. "Sonya Massey."

The deputy once called "too aggressive" by his own boss now faces first-degree murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty and said he acted in self defense.

In addition to the trauma for her family, Massey's death has triggered a fresh wave of anger, frustration and exhaustion in her hometown and across the country as the United States continues to grapple with its long history of racist treatment of Black residents, systemic inequality, and lack of access to mental health care.

Experts say Massey's death reflects a longstanding reality in many police departments: A shoot-first mentality when it comes to interactions with the Black community.

But the response has also demonstrated there's been some measure of progress for a nation still reckoning with the implications of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police four years and 500 miles away. 

Civil rights experts say they are increasingly hopeful that both the deputy and the system that trained, hired and deployed him will be held accountable. Friday, Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell announced he would retire amidst calls for his resignation.

"We just need to get some justice and that's all this is about," Donna Massey said at the balloon-release ceremony marking the one-month anniversary of her daughter's death. "It's thousands of us (who) have been killed by the hands of the police."

A link to history and race riot of 1908

Although she was born in San Diego, Massey's 600-member family has deep roots in Springfield, pop. 114,000, a historic cornfield-surrounded city in central Illinois.

Family lore says they're related to William K. Donnegan, a shoemaker and conductor on the Underground Railroad who helped enslaved Black Americans flee the south. Among Donnegan's customers was not-yet President Abraham Lincoln, who practiced law nearby.

A white mob lynched the elderly Donnegan in 1908 after growing angry that two other Black men accused of violent crimes were removed from the local jail before the mob could attack them.

At least five people were killed in the race riot, which destroyed many Black or Jewish-owned businesses, and led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, now known as the NAACP.

More than 100 years later, Massey was pronounced dead in the same hospital Donnegan was.

A mother of two, Massey for a time worked as a home healthcare aide, her family said, traveling the streets of Springfield that are filled with reminders of the city's racist past - and its efforts to overcome them. Excerpts of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation wrap around monuments, and a statue of Lincoln overlooks downtown, which is dotted with plaques explaining the 1908 race riot.

Springfield is also where Barack Obama in 2007 declared his history-making candidacy for the White House.

"This community is very similar to others. We're families, multigenerational, nontraditional, all trying to do the best we can," said Dr. Nicole Florence, 55, who moved to Springfield when she was a child. "But just like other communities we need to be more cognizant of how we move among each other, and the words we use to talk to each other."

Massey lived in a neighborhood known as Cabbage Patch. It's physically within the city limits but not legally part of the city, and is instead part of surrounding Sangamon County.

Crystal Chalmers remembers taking long walks with her “God-fearing” cousin around the city's east side, where the effects of historic mortgage redlining are still apparent in the size differences in homes on the city’s north and west sides. No matter how much time passed between visits, Chalmers said they would never miss a beat when they reconnected.

"She was just a happy person all the way around. I've never seen her upset or angry, and she would always do what she can to help anybody that was in need,” Chalmers said.

Another cousin, Kevin Holmes, remembered Massey was a quiet, serious child who sang along from the pews at Second Timothy Baptist Church whether she knew the words or not, and listened with rapt attention to the pastor’s every word.

Massey stopped coming to the church in recent years, but Holmes said it was clear she carried the faith instilled by her mother into adulthood.

“And the fact that she said ‘I rebuke you in the name of Jesus’ as she lost her life, I feel almost like she was martyred,” Holmes said.

Massey was petite - about 5'3" and 112 pounds according to the autopsy report - and had had boundless energy, recalled Jimmie Crawford Jr., the father of Massey’s youngest daughter, Jeanette "Summer" Massey, 15.

Crawford remembered thinking Massey was "a ball of spice" when they first met more than 17 years ago.

"Sonya was bold," Crawford said. "She was sweet and then she was spicy, just like her daughter."

Several family members recalled Massey as a mom who preferred to be home with her kids. She didn't love to go out, but she loved to do hair and cook for family barbecues, especially mac and cheese. She also had lupus, an autoimmune disease, for which she had received government disability payments after stopping work.

While several family members said Massey had a mental health illness, they declined to discuss the specifics. Lupus can also cause headaches, confusion and memory loss.

Neighbor Theresa Mercado, 37, said her kids often played with Massey's children in the narrow paved road between their houses in the year and a half they were neighbors. Mercado's 11-year-old daughter, Maleyah, recalled once asking Massey for honey while she was making tea with some friends.

"She was sweet, always nice," Mercado said.

Troubled days before the shooting

In the days and weeks leading up to the shooting, Massey appeared to be in crisis. 

Springfield police on July 5 told a sheriff’s deputy Massey had talked with the mobile crisis team, a co-responder program between Springfield Police and Memorial Behavioral Health, three times in the two weeks before her death, according to details of her interactions released by the sheriff's office. The relatively new program allows mental-health workers to accompany police officers on calls.

Massey told her family repeatedly that she was going to die, her mom said, and family members in turn worried they were agitating her. Malachi Hill-Massey, her 17-year-old son, told reporters he and his sister had been living with their fathers prior to the shooting because Massey was seeking mental health treatment at a facility near St. Louis. Hill-Massey said she was supposed to stay there for 30 days but was released after two.

Two days before Massey's death, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, a woman calling from Donna Massey's house told 911 dispatchers someone was trying to hurt her. When asked who was trying to hurt her, the woman replied “a lot of them.” Sangamon County Central Dispatch System Director Chris Mueller said in a statement that he could not confirm whether the caller was Sonya Massey.

The next morning, Massey’s mother called 911 to say her daughter was having a “mental breakdown.” She stressed Massey was not a danger to herself or others and pleaded with the dispatcher not to send any "combative policemen who are prejudiced.”

Her mother told the dispatcher: "I'm scared of the police. Sometimes they make (the situation) worse."

Massey initially told the Springfield Police officers who responded to her mother’s home that she did not want treatment and two emergency medical technicians at the scene checked her out and "cleared her," according to a report filed by the Sangamon County sheriff's office.

But just hours later, another 911 call from Sonya Massey's address to the sheriff's office appeared to capture an expletive-laden conversation between Massey and a neighbor. Sheriff's deputies responded and Massey went to a hospital to “seek treatment for her mental state,” a deputy reported.

There, she told a deputy she’d recently been released from the mental hospital near St. Louis and showed him paperwork from the mobile crisis team. The sheriff's office said Springfield police reported the city's mental-health co-responder team had met with Massey three times in two weeks.

Massey’s daughter, Jeannette, said she was supposed to stay at her mother’s house the night of July 5 into July 6, but decided to have her father bring her over in the morning because she “knew something was off.”

Both of Massey’s children told reporters she reached out to them that night, including texting her son that someone was at her back door.

Complaints, questions about Grayson

When Massey called 911 just before 1 a.m. on July 6, dispatchers assigned Deputy Sean Grayson to the call.

Hired by the department in May 2023 and paid just over $56,000 annually, Grayson, 30, arrived in Sangamon County with a litany of missteps to his name, including two DUIs, a discharge from the U.S. Army for "serious misconduct," and complaints against him from the people he policed as well as from law enforcement officers. 

He'd also had five law enforcement jobs since 2020, some of them part-time and overlapping with each other.

The Sangamon sheriff's department's own hiring interview warned that Grayson "needs to slow down to make good decisions."

They hired him anyway.

A few months before Grayson started at Sangamon County, he was working for the Logan County Sheriff's Office the next county over. In December 2022, a female inmate complained that he tried to force her to remove drugs hidden in her vagina in front of him, and that he only stopped when a female deputy intervened.

Then when a doctor was called in to remove the drugs, Grayson “flung the curtain back and exposed me to him," inmate Chelsey Lowe wrote in a complaint. “I felt very violated on both occasions."

After Lowe complained, Grayson visited her partner, George Wisehart in jail.

“He did this simply b/c Chelsey Lowe filed a report on him,” Wisehart wrote in his own complaint. He said Grayson appeared to be trying to intimidate him and make other inmates think he was collaborating with police: "He is now harassing me and abusing his power and putting people in danger."

Grayson denied both their claims and then quit the Logan County Sheriff's Office, records show. A month earlier, his supervisors confronted him about discrepancies between his written reports and what video recordings captured on another case.

"If we can't trust what you say and what you see, we can't have you in our uniform," one unidentified supervisor told Grayson in a recording obtained by USA TODAY. "I'm calling you on your integrity. How's that make you feel?"

Other departments and supervisors expressed similar concerns about Grayson, including the clinical psychologist who conducted a screening interview for Sangamon County.

“Mr. Grayson scored low on the cognitive assessment,” wrote Dr. Thomas R. Campion, who expressed caution after noting Grayson passed the assessment.

“He knows he can move too fast at times,” Campion wrote. “He needs to slow down to make good decisions.”

Separately, a Sangamon County Sheriff's Office lieutenant reported in a background investigation on Grayson that Chief Steven Snodgrass of the Virden Police Department, where Grayson worked from May to December 2021, said Grayson “did not demonstrate good officer safety skills.”

An investigator for Logan County reported that Auburn Police Chief Dave Campbell "expressed concern" that Grayson was "too aggressive" in performing his duties, according to a background check obtained via open records request.

Grayson worked for the Auburn department from July 2021 to May 2022, according to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board.

Unidentified Logan County officials expressed doubt that his issues policing could ever be solved in a recording obtained via open records request. One of the two officials said Grayson committed a “mountain of policy violations,” some of which were “pretty egregious."

The other official on the recording added: “We can guide you. We can mentor you. We can provide you documentation or training or whatever, but the only person that gets to put it in play in context is you.”

Officials at Logan County, and the Auburn, Virden, Kincaid and Pawnee police departments where Grayson worked in the past four years either declined or did not reply to requests for comment.

The shooting

Because Massey's house in Cabbage Patch is technically not part of the city, it was sheriff's deputies, not Springfield police who came to her house on July 6.

Shortly after 1 a.m., as leftover July 4 fireworks cracked and popped in the distance, Grayson and his partner arrived at Massey's house. Body-worn camera footage captured by the unidentified deputy shows him checking the backyard, and then respectfully tapping and knocking on Massey's door.

She didn’t answer immediately.

Then Grayson strode over to the door and, in the video captured by his partner's bodycamera, declared he'd "love tap" it before hammering on it with his fist at 1:12 a.m. He banged several more times and yelled at Massey to "hurry up."

It took Massey four minutes to answer the door.

When she opened it, the bodycam footage shows her staring up at Grayson, who stood more than a foot taller and outweighed her by more than 150 pounds. Unlike his partner, Grayson didn’t have his bodycam running until later.

Appearing at times confused and looking at her cellphone instead of answering some of Grayson's basic questions, Massey often responded with "No, sir."

At 1:18 a.m., having determined there was no prowler, Grayson followed Massey into her house as his partner checked on an SUV parked in her driveway. The footage shows two broken windows on the side of the vehicle, but Massey told deputies she didn’t know whose car it was.

Exactly what happened to the vehicle remains unclear. 

The day before, Massey told a sheriff’s deputy that a neighbor smashed her front driver’s side window with a brick, and then she herself broke the back driver’s side window in an attempt to get inside, scraping her arms as she reached through the broken glass.

A neighbor later told a deputy Massey threw the brick through her own window, according to the sheriff’s office. It’s unclear why Massey told deputies the vehicle wasn’t hers.

In a report written after he shot Massey, Grayson said he had asked her “if she was doing okay mentally” because “it seemed as if Sonya’s mind was all over the place and not able to focus or have a conversation.”

Grayson repeatedly asked for her name or identification, and Massey instead said she wanted to show him some paperwork. Massey asked Grayson to hand her a Bible as she searched through her belongings.

“Just a driver’s license will do and I’ll get out of your hair,” Grayson chuckled.

Responded Massey: “I want to show you all my paperwork… I got some paperwork.”

As she dug through her purse, Grayson pointed out the pot of boiling water on the stove and Massey hurried over to grab it. 

For a moment, body camera footage shows the group seemed to joke about Grayson’s partner moving away from the “hot, steaming water.”

Then as Massey picked up the pot, she said the words Grayson claims made him fear for his life: "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus."

Dropping his hand to his gun, Grayson shouted back, “you better f------ not or I swear to God I will shoot you right in the f------ face.”

Grayson drew his gun and Massey clutched the pot tighter to her body, apologized and then ducked down away from the gun pointed at her. Grayson and his partner moved toward her as Grayson yelled “drop your f------ pot.”

He then fired three times, hitting her in the head.

Steam rose from behind the cluttered kitchen counter as the deputies discussed whether to fetch a medical kit from their patrol vehicle, after radioing for EMTs to respond. It took deputies two minutes from the time they shot Massey to physically check on her body, as a pool of blood spread across the kitchen floor.

“Goddamnit,” Grayson repeated.

In his written report summarizing the shooting, Grayson said he thought Massey was threatening him with the pot of hot water she’d taken off the stove. His body camera footage of what happened is partially obscured, but appears to show Massey stood back up and grabbed the pot as Grayson opened fire.

“What else do we do?” Grayson asked his partner, the video shows. “I’m not taking hot boiling water to the face.”

Reasons to dig deeper 

Some critics of the sheriff's office say the rush to fire and prosecute Grayson risks allowing the law enforcement and area political leaders to avoid accountability for systemic failures in hiring, training and operations.

The fact that Grayson moved between so many agencies in quick succession should have given Sangamon County pause, said Brian Higgins, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey.

“Moving from police department to police department is not the norm, and it is usually a reason for you to dig deeper,” said Higgins.

He said it’s often easier to simply ask an officer to quit than to follow the formal process to fire them: “If you have a cop who’s really a bad egg, someone you want off the job, you make a deal: ‘We won’t put anything negative on your background, but just leave,’” Higgins said.

Grayson’s DUIs and non-honorable discharge also should have been red flags, Higgins said. He said about 60% of the officers he hired as chief were veterans but he never considered hiring anyone with anything less than an honorable discharge.

The records don’t say exactly why Grayson was discharged. The paperwork noted the reason was “misconduct (serious offense).”

His first DUI came in August 2015, six months before he was discharged, though military experts were skeptical that a DUI he got in Illinois hundreds of miles from Fort Riley where he was stationed in Kansas would be cause for discharge.

Grayson’s stint in the Army lasted from May 2014 to February 2016, a 21-month total that would be the longest he ever held a job aside from his position at the Zone, a gym in Illinois where he worked for three years.

His second DUI came in July 2016 in Girard, Illinois, according to court documents.

Higgins said based on what he's seen about Grayson, the sheriff's office should never have hired him. But he said the departments Grayson used to work for also bear some responsibility: "It falls on them too," he said. "If there’s somebody bad enough you don’t want to employ them, why do you let them loose out on the world?"

Marc Ayers, who sits on the 29-member Sangamon County governing board, said the sheriff’s office has trouble retaining deputies because they often leave for better-paying agencies like the Springfield Police Department, where the starting salary is tens of thousands of dollars higher.

“The attrition rate is really high because we cannot pay these deputies the same amount,” said Ayers, a Democrat. “That is a problem that is leading to these awful hires.” 

While Campbell said he was unaware of the red flags in Grayson’s past, the young officer came highly recommended by Scott Butterfield, a decorated former sheriff's deputy close to Campbell.

"Mr. Butterfield describes Mr. Grayson as a mellow, non-confrontational person who has good communication skills," a Sangamon County background investigator relayed.

Butterfield is also the father of Grayson’s live-in girlfriend.

“The good ole boys club is alive and well in Sangamon County,” Ayers said. “That seems to get more attention than their background, and that is wrong and that needs to change.”

He added: “If our community can’t trust the department and trust they can call law enforcement for help, that’s a big problem.”

Racism and questions of justice

Florence, a Springfield doctor, said the city is more open about its racist history than others. But she said that hasn't done much to change the reality that racism exists daily for Black women like her, racism that manifests in ways big and small.

“I’m not surprised when these things happen. I’m more surprised when my white majority says ‘I can’t believe this happened,’” Florence said.

People living in Massey's neighborhood die almost 10 years sooner than the statewide average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and Florence said race-based health inequities play a major role.

"For me, that’s where some of the exhaustion comes from. I don’t feel like we've made any of that progress," she said.

Florence's sister Tracey Meares was denied the title of high school valedictorian - even though she had the highest grades - when she graduated from Springfield High School in 1984. At the time, she would have been the school's first Black valedictorian. 

Meares is now a law professor and helped found the criminal-justice reform group the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.

Florence said she has a family member with mental illness, and knows what it’s like to make the heart-wrenching decision to call 911 for help. Florence said she knows and trusts many police officers and sheriff's deputies, but knows there are risks in asking for law enforcement's help when a Black family member is having a mental-health crisis.

"Do I hesitate before I make those calls? Absolutely," she said. "You’re playing Russian roulette with who shows up at your door and whether they will escalate or deescalate the situation."

Black families across the country make those calculations every day, said Rashad Robinson, the president of civil rights advocacy group Color of Change. The group, which has 7 million members, has long sought to highlight how police routinely shoot Black men and women in situations they wouldn't shoot a white person.

Robinson said there is a shift occurring: Campbell swiftly fired Grayson, who was then jailed, with little opposition from police unions or traditional "law and order" advocates, unlike in similar cases where officers were permitted to remain free for months pending investigations.

"By no means will justice ever truly be served, but we are watching the systems respond quicker, and in a new and different way," Robinson said.

According to the group Mapping Police Violence, law enforcement officers have killed 739 people in 2024, putting the year on track to be the deadliest since the nonprofit that catalogs deaths at the hands of officers began in 2013.

Officers killed 1,247 people in 2023 - the current record - and 1,203 people in 2022, the previous record, according to the nonprofit.

More and more of the killings are also coming at the hands of sheriff's department officers, according to data from the nonprofit. In 2013, sheriff's department officers nationally accounted for 26% of all deaths; in 2022, they accounted for 31%. 

As the deaths continue to rise, so too has the number of police officers charged with violent on-duty crimes, including murder, manslaughter and assault. But charges like Grayson’s remain rare and convictions rarer still, data shows. 

The number of convictions is vanishingly small, according to Mapping Police Violence. Less than 2% of killings by police result in an officer being charged and 1% result in an officer being convicted.

Grayson is awaiting trial on three counts of first-degree murder, along with two other charges.

Campbell, the county sheriff, announced Friday that he would retire by the end of the month. His announcement was an about-face from his comments shortly after Massey's death, when he said he would not resign and asked for the public's forgiveness. He said in a packed church on July 29: "We failed Sonya and the community . . . We did not do our jobs."

On Friday, he said he felt he did his job as well as he could. "While it is painful to say goodbye, I do so knowing I have fulfilled my duties and served to the best of my ability," Campbell said in his retirement announcement.

Like other experts, Robinson said the rush to blame Grayson risks allowing local officials to avoid responsibility for creating and perpetuating the system that hired him.

"Giving people a gun, badge and authority and sending them off is part of the problem here. To place this all on an individual is a way to avoid talking the larger power structures that make all of this possible," Robinson said. "As long as the public feels like they can turn away, as long as politicians feel like they don't have to answer questions about it, as long as police departments are able to use taxpayer dollars to pay off civil penalties, this will continue to happen."

Letting go

Donna Massey, wearing a purple shirt emblazoned with photos of her daughter and the words "forever loved," was among the last to let go of her balloons as loved ones embraced her during the vigil. 

As the purple balloons floated into the evening sky above Massey’s front porch, her mother spoke of the hope the family feels for reform, but also of the exhaustion that comes from generations of fighting to be treated equally.

“She is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because the camel can only take so much," Donna Massey said through tears, as a relative wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "She is the straw that broke the camel's back. We're done. We're tired."