In July of 2024, Deputy Sean Grayson entered Sonya Massey's apartment in Sangamon County, a part of central Illinois. Within minutes of going into her home, he shot her three times after telling her to drop a pot of boiling water. Sonya was an unarmed Black woman, murdered while preparing a meal.
But this wasn't the first time Deputy Grayson had been violent towards a civilian.It turns out that this man left a trail of victims in his wake, and had a
lengthy track record of inappropriate and downright abusive behavior. In fact, he had a
history of misconduct in at least 3 previous departments. But that didn't stop him from getting jobs as a police officer at six different departments in four years.
Sign now to tell the Department of Justice: investigate every police department who hired this deputy and allowed this conduct, and fix the broken system that allows officers like this to slip through the cracks!Why was this deputy repeatedly hired when departments knew that
he had a history of breaking rules and victimizing civilians, particularly women in custody?Grayson had two DUIs on his record before obtaining his various police positions. He was described on the record by one of his departments as
"aggressive." He was
caught lying about a high speed chase he initiated with a woman when
the report he wrote didn't match the dashcam footage.A female detainee filed a complaint after
Grayson told her to expose herself to him when she mentioned she had inserted drugs inside herself. A female deputy luckily stopped this from happening, but then
Grayson walked in on the detainee in an exposed state when she was having the drugs removed in a hospital room.
The long list of offenses only becomes more concerning when you realize how easy it was for them to slip through the cracks;
the systemic issues that allow officers like Grayson to continue to do harm are to blame.If someone had taken these complaints seriously or there was a better system in place for recording and passing along these reports of abuse, Grayson would have never gotten a job in law enforcement again.
Maybe, in that case, Sonya would even still be alive and with her family today.Sign the petition now to demand justice for Sonya and all of the other women victimized by this deputy! The Department of Justice must investigate how Grayson was allowed to abuse his power for so long, eventually killing an innocent woman.
