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Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman who suffered from mental illness, was shot dead by police in Illinois less than an hour after calling 911 for help, and a mere 32 minutes after letting officers into her home.
That’s according to an autopsy report released Friday by the Sangamon County Coroner’s Office, which confirmed the 36-year-old mother of two died from a bullet wound to the head earlier this month.
Massey dialed 911 at 12:49 a.m. on July 6, and said she was hearing strange noises outside her home in Springfield, about 200 miles southwest of Chicago. Officers arrived to investigate, finding nothing suspicious in Massey’s yard.
Massey let them inside at 1:15 a.m., after which things soon went awry. Amid a chaotic interaction involving a pot of water heating up on the stove, now-terminated Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson—who had worked for six different law enforcement agencies in the past four years and was discharged from the U.S. Army after 21 months for “serious,” but unspecified, misconduct—Grayson fired three shots at Massey, who immediately crumpled to the floor.
The lethal round slammed into Massey’s face beneath her left eye, states the report by forensic pathologist Nathaniel Patterson, M.D. It then perforated her left cheekbone, passed through the muscle tissue surrounding the base of the skull, and tore through Massey’s carotid artery, exiting through the back of her neck, according to the report. Massey also received “minor blunt force injuries of the right leg” during the deadly encounter.
Her manner of death was listed as a homicide. Medical examiners found “no soot or gunpowder stippling on the skin,” meaning the round was fired from a distance, not at extremely close range, which would tend to leave behind a telltale deposit of unburned gunpowder particles.
The official time of death is listed as 1:47 a.m.
In bodycam footage recorded by Grayson’s partner, whose name has not been publicly released, Grayson can be heard discouraging him from going outside to get his medical kit, telling him, “It’s a headshot… there’s nothing we can do.”
At one point, an officer—it is unclear whose voice it is—is heard telling the radio dispatcher that Massey’s wound was “self-inflicted.”
Grayson’s bodycam was off during the interaction with Massey; he reportedly didn’t turn it on until after the shooting. His employment with the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office was terminated July 17 following his indictment on first-degree murder charges. Since the shooting it’s emerged that Grayson twice pleaded guilty to DUI and was accused in divorce papers by his ex-wife of “extreme and repeated mental cruelty.”
“The actions taken by Deputy Grayson do not reflect the values and training of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office or law enforcement as a whole,” Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell said in a July 17 statement. “Good law enforcement officers stand with our community in condemning actions that undermine the trust and safety we strive to uphold.”
The Department of Justice has opened its own investigation into the shooting. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is representing Sonya Massey’s family as they navigate the harrowing aftermath of her death.
At a press conference on Friday, Crump went over Grayson’s checkered work history and DUI convictions, asking how so many apparent red flags were overlooked and questioned how he got hired by Sangamon County in the first place.
“How do you even have a driver’s license, much less get a job as a sheriff’s deputy?” Crump said. “[There are] many questions to be answered.”
In a statement after Massey was killed, vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said, “Sonya Massey deserved to be safe. The disturbing footage released yesterday confirms what we know from the lived experiences of so many — we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name.”
Grayson has pleaded not guilty.
