I watched the video of this yesterday and it made me sick.
Sonya Massey’s last words before a Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputy shot and killed her in her Springfield, Illinois, home earlier this month were, “I’m sorry.”
The 36-minute body camera footage released Monday depicting her July 6 killing showed her interaction with the officers she called for help began calmly enough. At times, it even appeared to veer into light-hearted conversation as they responded to her 1 a.m. local time report of a possible home invasion. But the tone changed suddenly just under 15 minutes into the exchange after the 36-year-old Black woman went to remove a pot of boiling water from her stove at the direction of Deputy Sean Grayson, who informed her with a laugh as she did so that he was distancing himself to get away “from your steaming hot water.”
“Away from the hot steaming water? Oh, I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” she replied with a seemingly playful tone before repeating the phrase more neutrally in response to the officer’s confusion.
“You better f**king not or I swear to God I’ll f**king shoot you in the f**king face,” Grayson said suddenly, drawing his firearm.
Massey crouched behind the counter with her hands raised. She apologized, though nothing she had done up to this point appeared to warrant one. Still, it didn’t matter. Within seconds, Grayson fired three shots, striking her just under the eye. He’d go on to make clear to his colleagues he believed he’d opened fire on an imminent threat, call her a crazy “f***ing b***ch” and reject the other deputy’s attempt to render aid to Massey because “she’s done.”
“From looking at the bodycam footage, it’s clear that the space is not a space of distress in the sense that it’s somebody’s home. The pace and everything about the video that I saw did not seem that the police officer was under distress, either,” said Christen Smith, a professor of anthropology and African American studies at Yale whose research focuses on gendered anti-Black state violence. “It just seems to me that the threat that was perceived was simply the threat of a Black woman and not anything else, and that’s something that we need to really think about.”
In a press conference Monday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Massey’s family, said that she had previously experienced mental health challenges but did not show any aggression. Massey’s family also confirmed she had previously been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, according to The Guardian. “She needed a helping hand,” Crump said. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.”
Just as her family and community mourn their loss and Americans decry the brutality she faced with cries of “Say Her Name,” Massey’s killing underscores the disproportionate amount of police violence that Black people and disabled people face in the United States — and the reality that Black disabled Americans, like Massey, bear the brunt of it.
She had called them to look for a prowler. They didn’t find one but came into her house and demanded that she produce ID for some reason. She couldn’t immediately locate it and went to the stove to remove the pot of water. And that’s when it happened. The fcop was all the way across the room. This frail woman couldn’t have hit him with the water if she wanted to and it really didn’t seem she did.
It’s horrible. Horrible.
The officer had a history of bullying behavior. No surprise there. And Trump wants to give police officers like this one, who clearly overreacted and killed this poor woman, rather than simply back out of the room if he felt threatened, immunity. No.