Charles Blow: Sonya Massey’s killing is Black America’s sorrow
In the days before she was killed, Sonya Massey was having death premonitions. She kept telling her family that she was going to die, that someone was going to kill her. On July 6, a local sheriff’s deputy became the incarnation of her fears: He shot her in the face in her own kitchen.
Massey, a 36-year-old Illinois woman, had called 911 because she thought there was an intruder in her house. Two Sangamon County deputies arrived and entered her home, and one of them, Sean Grayson, began cursing at her and threatening her over a pot of boiling water that she was holding. Grayson shot her at close range as she ducked behind a counter saying she was sorry.
The Associated Press reported that according to her family, Massey had been struggling with mental illness and “had admitted herself to a 30-day inpatient program in St. Louis sometime during the week before her death, but returned two days later without explanation.”
At a news conference Tuesday at New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago’s West Side, Ben Crump, an attorney for Massey’s family, said “many people said she had a premonition” because when the officers arrived she repeatedly said, “Please, God”; she asked one of the officers to grab her Bible; and one of the last things she said before she was shot was, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
Among the first things Massey said when she opened the door for the officers was: “Please don’t hurt me.”
It seems clear that Massey was in distress, that what she needed was help. What she got was a bullet that hit her face just below her left eye and exited her head behind her ear.
In the wake of so many of these incidents, we see the wreckage of family members struggling to make sense of the senseless, facing the gantlet of news coverage while their emotional wounds are fresh and tender, expected to convert the screams stuck in their throats into coherent calls for justice.
On Tuesday, I spoke with Donna Massey, Sonya’s mother, in a meeting room in the back of the church. Donna is a slight woman whose face was gloomy and drawn, like a cloud, still gray, but emptied of rain.
She told me that she has been hearing voices since her daughter was killed and that she now has a nightmare of being killed the same way. When I asked her about the terrible pain of having to bury her child, she burst into tears: “Oh, God. Nobody should have to do it, nobody.”
Sonya Massey’s 17-year-old son, Malachi, described to me the devastation of returning to the house where his mother was killed, how empty it felt and how empty he felt: “I still feel lost without my mom right now.”
He is just a boy, a motherless child, whose world is now forever shattered.
This kind of devastation has happened so often, to so many families, that it has become a motif of Black existence in this country, an enduring injury, a simmering sadness, an ambient terror.
And America has refused to enact meaningful federal legislation to address the problem.
Had it become law, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was shelved in the Senate in 2021, may well have saved Sonya Massey’s life. One of its provisions, as described on the website of the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrats, was the creation of “a nationwide police misconduct registry to prevent problematic officers who are fired or leave one agency from moving to another jurisdiction without any accountability.”
Grayson had worked at six law enforcement agencies in the past four years and was charged with two DUI misdemeanors: one in 2015 and the other in 2016.
He has been fired from the Sangamon County sheriff’s office and charged with three counts of aggravated murder, one count of aggravated battery with a firearm and one count of official misconduct.
This is an encouraging first step, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. After more than a decade of interviewing the families of Black people slain by police, I have come to the conclusion that what we see in far too many of these situations is the manifestation of a societal sickness that fundamentally devalues Black life.
The Washington Post has been tracking fatal police shootings since 2015. In reports, these shootings have risen in recent years, and in 2023 “police killed the highest number of people on record.” A disproportionate number of those killings were of Black people. According to the Post, Black Americans “are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.”
As long as this trend continues, telling us that as a society we still acquiesce to the assignment of value – and threat – on the basis of race, it will continue to short-circuit people’s natural empathetic impulses and pose an outsize danger to Black lives from the police.