Illinois County to Pay $10 Million After Fatal Shooting of Black Woman
An Illinois county has agreed to pay $10 million to the family of Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman who was fatally shot by a white sheriff's deputy last year after she called 911 because she thought a prowler was outside her home.
The Sangamon County Board voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve the settlement following intensive negotiations with representatives of Ms. Massey's family, it said.
'No price paid can take back the actions of a rogue former deputy, but this agreement is an effort to provide some measure of recompense to the Massey family for their unimaginable loss,' Andy Van Meter, the board chairman, said in a statement on Wednesday. 'The county remains committed to working with the community to strengthen policies to try to ensure tragedies like this never happen again.'
Ben Crump, a lawyer for the Massey family, called the settlement 'bittersweet.' He said in an online news conference that the family was also seeking legislative changes and a criminal conviction of Sean Grayson, the former Sangamon County sheriff's deputy who has been charged with murdering Ms. Massey, 36, in her home in Springfield, Ill., on July 6, 2024.
Ms. Massey's family has said that she was experiencing a mental health crisis when she called 911 to report a prowler outside her home. A day earlier, Ms. Massey's mother, Donna Massey, called 911 to say that her daughter was having a mental breakdown and asked the police to recognize that she was in a vulnerable state.
'I don't want you guys to hurt her, please,' she told a dispatcher.
When Mr. Grayson and another deputy responded to Sonya Massey's call the next day, they searched outside her home and then followed her inside.
After she provided the deputies with identification, she went to the kitchen, removed a pot of water from the stove and put it on the counter. As she was handling the pot, several feet from the deputies, Ms. Massey told them, 'I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,' body camera footage shows.
Mr. Grayson told Ms. Massey that she 'better not,' using expletives, and threatened to shoot her in the face.
Seeing the gun, Ms. Massey put her hands in the air and said, 'I'm sorry' while ducking behind the counter, prosecutors said. Mr. Grayson approached the counter with his gun, and Ms. Massey stood up, grabbed the pot and tossed out the water, they said.
Mr. Grayson fired three shots, striking Ms. Massey once in the face, prosecutors said.
He then discouraged his colleague from getting a medical kit from his vehicle because of the severity of Ms. Massey's injury, prosecutors said. The second deputy still rendered aid and stayed with Ms. Massey until help arrived, prosecutors said.
Mr. Grayson, who was fired after the shooting, was charged in July with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. He has pleaded not guilty.
The Sangamon County sheriff, Jack Campbell, resigned in August under pressure from Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and members of the public, who had called on him to step down.
Mr. Campbell had hired Mr. Grayson, even though he knew that the deputy had two convictions for driving under the influence, including one that had led to his premature discharge from the Army in February 2016, according to personnel records released by the county.
Ms. Massey's father, James Wilburn, said at the news conference on Wednesday that the family was urging Illinois lawmakers to strengthen background checks for prospective police officers.
Mr. Wilburn said the deputy who shot his daughter 'should have never been hired.'
Last month, just days before President Trump took office, the Justice Department resolved a civil rights investigation into Sangamon County's policing practices that it had opened after the shooting.
The department said it had not found that the county was providing police services in a discriminatory manner.
Still, as part of an agreement to end the investigation, the Justice Department said that the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office and emergency dispatch operation must review and update their policies and training.
The county must also create a mobile crisis team that includes trained behavioral health staff.
At the family's news conference with Mr. Crump on Wednesday, Raymond Massey, Sonya Massey's uncle, said her death had 'affected our family in ways that are unimaginable.'
'We know that this is the beginning of the fight,' he said. 'And we're willing to do the work and put the work in until we seek full justice for the murder of Sonya.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
‘Where was God?' The Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting 10 years later.
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up This was quite remarkable, because less than 48 hours earlier, on the night of June 17, 2015, Sanders had just closed her eyes in benediction — during Bible study at her beloved Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — when she was jolted by an explosion of gunfire. The 57-year-old woman, a fourth-generation member of 'Mother Emanuel,' the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, dove under a table and pulled her 11-year-old granddaughter down with her. She squeezed the child so tightly she feared she might crush her, instructing her to play dead as a 21-year-old white supremacist methodically assassinated nine of the 12 Black worshippers in the basement fellowship hall. Those she watched die included her 26-year-old son, Tywanza Sanders, who had tried vainly to distract the shooter, and her 87-year-old aunt, Susie Jackson, who was shredded by 10 hollow-point bullets. At one point, Sanders smeared her legs with the blood pooling at her feet so that the killer might think he had finished her off. It worked. What happened in court two days later, a procession of forgiveness by Black victims for a remorseless racist murderer, both awed and befuddled the world. Many found it to be the purest expression of Christianity they had ever witnessed and could not imagine ever being graced in any such way. With the help of a soaring and melodic eulogy for the victims by President Barack Obama, the church known as Mother Emanuel soon became an earthly emblem of amazing grace. FILE - Tyrone Sanders and Felicia Sanders comfort each other at the graveside of their son, Tywanza Sanders, on June 27, 2015, at Emanuel AME Cemetery in Charleston, S.C. (Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP, File) Grace Beahm/Associated Press Now fast-forward to December 2016. Felicia Sanders is back in court, the lead witness in the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof. She is under cross-examination by Roof's attorney, who is trying to establish that Roof threatened to kill himself that night, a desperate stab at a psychiatric defense. This time there is no nod by Sanders at forgiveness, no prayer for the soul of her son's unrepentant executioner. 'He say he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that,' Sanders responds coolly in her Lowcountry lilt, glaring at Roof from the stand. 'He's evil. There's no place on earth for him except for the pit of hell.' Roof's lawyer, blindsided, tries once more to prompt Sanders about Roof's suicidality. She is having none of it: 'Send himself back to the pit of hell, I say.' Had something changed about Felicia Sanders? Had she, in the 18 months between the Emanuel murders and the trial, forsaken the commitment to forgiveness that was such a hallmark of her faith and that had so moved the world? Not in the slightest, I concluded, while researching a book about the history of Mother Emanuel and the meaning of forgiveness in the African American church. To the contrary, Sanders and other church stalwarts helped me understand that the forgiveness expressed toward Dylann Roof had not been for Dylann Roof but rather for themselves. Those who appeared at Roof's bond hearing did not speak for everyone in the congregation, or even in their families. A decade later, some still describe the path to forgiveness as a journey they travel at their own pace. But the grace volunteered in June 2015 grew organically from the fiber of African Methodism, a denomination two centuries old. It obviously had deep scriptural roots — 'Forgive us our trespasses' and 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' But it also was an iteration of a timeworn survival mechanism that has helped African American Christians withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship, and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls and their sanity still, somehow, intact. One year after the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., relatives and friends of the slain gathered to honor their lives. Grace Beahm/Associated Press Churches like Emanuel, which has roots in antebellum Charleston, have long served as physical and spiritual refuges from the scourges that confront Black Americans. Its own long history, a two-century cycle of suppression and resistance, illuminates the relentless afflictions of caste in the city where nearly half of all enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Emanuel's predecessor congregation, which formed in 1817 after a subversive walkout from Methodist churches by free and enslaved Black Charlestonians, faced immediate harassment from white authorities. The police raided services and jailed worshippers by the scores. When an incipient slave insurrection plot was uncovered in 1822 and traced back in part to the church, 35 men were led to the gallows, nearly half of them from the congregation. The wood-frame building was dismantled by order of the authorities and the church's leading ministers forced into exile. Emanuel's founding pastor after the Civil War, Richard Harvey Cain, used its pulpit as a springboard into politics, winning seats in the state legislature and Congress in a career that mirrored at first the heady hope and then the stolen promise of Reconstruction. During the depths of Jim Crow, Charlestonians assembled at Emanuel to voice outrage over lynchings and jurisprudential travesties. Its civil rights era pastor, Benjamin J. Glover, also led Charleston's NAACP, staged peaceful protest marches from the church, and was repeatedly jailed. Congregants were urged to action there by Booker T. Washington (1909), W.E.B. DuBois (1921), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1962), and then, a year after King's assassination, by his widow, Coretta Scott King (1969). She came to support a hospital workers' strike that bore eerie echoes of the sanitation workers' strike that had drawn her husband to Memphis. Nearly five decades later, the first person shot by Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015, was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a remarkable prodigy who had been the youngest African American elected to South Carolina's legislature and was serving his fourth term in the state Senate. A horse-drawn carriage carried the casket of the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney past the Confederate flag and onto the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, S.C. on June 24, 2015. REUTERS The weight of it all takes the breath away. And for many, forgiveness might seem an inadequate response, given available options like anger, bitterness, hatred, revenge, retribution. A more natural one, perhaps a more human one, might even be 'Where was God?' But in interviews over the years, each of the six family members who spoke mercifully toward Dylann Roof explained that they did so for their own spiritual release. They depicted the moment in mystical terms — unpremeditated, unexpected, the words just flowed, it was God talking. But none said they meant for their words to be read as a grant of exoneration or a pass from accountability. No slate had been wiped. Indeed, some did not care much whether Roof lived or died (he remains on federal death row in Indiana, one of three inmates whose sentences were not commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the close of his term). Rather, the mothers and children and widowers of the dead described their brand of forgiveness as a purging of self-destructive toxins, a means for reversing the metastasis of rage, and at its most basic a way to get out of bed each morning in the face of it all. It served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a method not only of moral practice but of emotional self-preservation. Because the choice to forgive was one dignity that could not be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment. It might be mistaken for submission, but in Charleston it resurrected agency for victims who had been robbed of it. 'He is not a part of my life anymore,' the Rev. Anthony Thompson, the widower of Bible study leader Myra Thompson, told me in explaining his forgiveness of Roof. 'Forgiveness has freed me of that, of him, completely. I'm not going to make him a lifetime partner.' This may be disconcerting for some white Americans who found reassurance in the notion that those who forgave Dylann Roof were, by association, also forgiving — or at least moving beyond — the four-century legacy of white supremacy that contributed to his poisoning. They decidedly were not, and the question of whether we make serious progress toward eradicating the psychosis of race in this country and the inequities it bequeaths in wealth, education, housing, justice, and health, not to mention hope, awaits an answer on the 50th or 100th anniversary of the massacre at Mother Emanuel.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Oakland Post editor's confessed killer paroled after years in prison
The man convicted of killing an Oakland newspaper editor who was investigating the finances of a Black empowerment group in 2007 was released from prison last week, officials told the Chronicle. Devaughndre Broussard was released into parole supervision on June 5, according to a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson. No other details regarding his release were immediately provided. Chauncey Bailey, the editor of African-American weekly the Oakland Post, had been investigating the bankruptcy proceedings of Your Black Muslim Bakery before he was killed. Broussard, a member of the bakery group, testified in 2011 that its leader, Yusuf Bey IV, had ordered him to learn where Bailey lived and 'find out his routine,' according to a Chronicle report. 'He wanted us to take him out before he wrote that article.' Broussard confessed to killing Bailey with three shotgun blasts on Aug. 2, 2007 as Bailey was walking to work at 14th and Alice Streets in downtown Oakland, according to a previous Chronicle report. A federal judge ordered the bakery to liquidate its assets amid debt and management problems the week following Bailey's killing. Broussard was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of involuntary manslaughter for the slayings of Bailey and Odell Roberson, 31. Roberson was the uncle of the man who shot and killed Bey IV's brother near the former San Pablo Avenue bakery. Broussard promised to testify against Bey IV and Antoine Mackey, a former bakery associate, who was also a suspect in Bailey's killing. Bey IV was sentenced in 2011 to spend the rest of his life in prison for ordering the killings of Bailey, 57, Roberson, 31, and Michael Willis, 36. Jurors decided that Bey IV was guilty of murdering Bailey because he had ordered Broussard to pull the trigger. Mackey was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for Bailey and Willis's killings, the Chronicle previously reported. In 2015, a state appeals court denied Bey IV and Mackey's motion to overturn their convictions, dismissing claims that their trial should have been moved from Alameda County due to negative publicity.
7 hours ago
Diddy trial day 25 recap: Prosecutors try to drop a juror over 'lack of candor'
A surprise controversy surrounding a juror erupted Wednesday as the 25th day of Sean Combs' sex trafficking trial opened. U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian told a hushed court that he is considering removing one of the 12 jurors after prosecutors suggested the man demonstrated a "lack of candor" with the court. Neither the judge nor the attorneys in the case detailed the specific issues at work. Defense attorneys, however, took issue with the possibility that Juror No. 6 might be thrown off the panel. Noting that the juror is a middle-aged Black man from the Bronx, Combs' lawyers accused prosecutors of a "thinly veiled effort to dismiss a Black juror." It's not the first time Combs' lawyers have accused federal prosecutors of attempting to unfairly remove Black jurors. During the first week of testimony in the trial, when both sides finalized the jury, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo accused federal prosecutors of bias after most of the government's nine peremptory strikes were used on Black prospective jurors. The judge rejected the defense's challenge, saying the government had provided "race-neutral reasons" to strike the jurors. The judge told Combs and the attorneys that he would decide what to do by Friday and then Combs' lawyers resumed their cross-examination of a woman who accused the rap mogul of coercing her into sex during their three-year relationship. The woman, testifying under the pseudonym "Jane," told jurors during questioning from prosecutors that Combs strung her along for years in what she thought was a loving relationship. In reality, she testified that she was used by Combs to satisfy his extreme sexual appetites that played themselves out through days-long orgies she called "hotel nights." She testified that the drug-fueled sessions allegedly required her to have sex with male prostitutes while Combs watched, directed and masturbated to scenes of his own design. Jane told the jury that Combs threatened to stop paying her rent or to release sexually explicit videos of her if she refused to participate in the sexual escapades. Prosecutors argue that Combs used his wealth, status, and business empire to coerce both Jane and the singer Cassie Ventura -- another ex-girlfriend who was the prosecution's star witness -- into first participating in the sex parties then forcing them into silence. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. His lawyers argue that all sexual encounters were consensual and that Combs led a "polyamorous" lifestyle that was strictly legal. Defense attorneys spent most of Wednesday trying to use Jane's own words in text messages to show that she was a willing participant in Combs' sex life, not the victim of force or coercion. Defense attorneys paint Jane as a willing participant Combs' attorney Teny Geragos spent the better part of the day grilling Jane by showing the jury multiple text messages between Jane and Combs that suggested she was initiating sexual conversations. "What are you doing, baby?" Jane wrote to Combs in one message read for the jury. "Horny for me?" In one message, Geragos was able to extract from Jane the testimony that Combs obliged one time when Jane said she did not want to engage in a sex performance with a male prostitute. During another part of her testimony, Jane told the jury about two other instances when she declined to have sex with other escorts because she was not attracted to them. Jane also testified there was a two-month stretch in 2022 when there were no "hotel nights." When they were engaging in the sex parties, she testified she would buy matching shorts for Combs and the escorts to wear as well as erection pills. After Jane complained to Combs about him spending time with another woman, she said Combs invited her to leave the relationship. "It's not right how you're treating me right now and how you're doing me and the last thing I'd expect from you is coming at me sideways about a girl you like," Jane wrote. "You completely had your way with me." The message concluded, "You have me feeling so taken advantage of." Combs' response was not read aloud but Geragos characterized it as, "He was saying if the relationship was as toxic as you say you were welcome to leave, right?" Jane replied, "That's what he was saying." Defense tries to cast doubt on Jane's earlier testimony about "hotel nights" During days of direct examination, prosecutors used Jane's words to try to highlight a pattern when Combs would allegedly host Jane for a romantic weekend -- which she said she believed would not involve having sex with male escorts -- before pressuring her to participate in so-called "hotel nights." She told jurors that she regretted going on a trip in 2023 to Turks and Caicos because Combs pressured her to have sex with a male escort named Paul. On cross examination, defense attorneys introduced evidence showing Jane expressed gratitude for Combs during the trip. "You are truly a blessing in my life. have never had a man take care of me like you," Jane wrote in a text to Combs during the trip. "I feel blessed to have you in my life and I only wish to be a blessing in yours." Jane became emotional and cried as she testified about the text, saying she could not continue reading the entire message. She also testified about being pressured to have sex with three male escorts in Miami after Combs invited her to celebrate her own birthday. "I am given my gift, I'm taking a pill and awaiting an entertainer," Jane said, describing a pattern that she testified defined her relationship. Combs' attorneys, though, seized on a text message Jane sent to Combs on her way home: "Just wanted to say I loved and appreciated every detail you put together for my birthday." "You tell him you love and appreciate every detail, right?" Geragos asked.
