It was James Wilburn’s turn to speak at his daughter’s funeral. Flanked by his wife, Donna Massey, Wilburn started off by repeating his daughter Sonya Massey’s last words.
“‘I rebuke you, in the name of Jesus,’” Wilburn said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that my baby is resting in the arms of Jesus.”
Massey, 36, was shot and killed by a Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy in her home near Springfield last month. The shooter, Sean Grayson, has since been fired from his post and now sits in jail on murder charges.
But at the funeral last month, Wilburn said Grayson’s dismissal and arrest are not nearly enough. Instead, he said his daughter’s killing demanded a change in law to make it harder for law enforcement officers to bounce from one department to another, a reform Massey’s family believes could have prevented Sonya’s death. Speaking from the lectern in the Ruby Funeral Home chapel, Wilburn turned his attention to one person: the state senator from Springfield, Doris Turner.
“Illinois can be No. 1, state senator,” Wilburn said. “Introduce the bill tomorrow, that when you [resign] in lieu of being fired from a police department, you don’t go on to the next one. You can call it the Sonya Massey bill.”
Massey had called 911 to report a potential home intruder, when Grayson and another deputy came to her home. Grayson fired at Massey three times, striking her in the face. Body camera footage shows Grayson did not render aid to Massey before medical personnel arrived.
Sangamon County was Grayson’s sixth law enforcement post in four years. And reporting from Illinois Public Media, in partnership with the Invisible Institute, found complaints filed against Grayson for inappropriate conduct with jail detainees while he was at the Logan County Sheriff’s Department. He also had issues with arrests he made while at previous departments. And according to his personnel file, Grayson received a complaint from a citizen while at Sangamon County alleging that he “verbally attacked” a 17-year-old while responding to a call.
‘Devastated’ by the killing, but unsure about a new law
Turner, the state senator, said the Masseys have been like her family since she moved to Springfield in 1981. A week before the shooting, Sonya and her mother, Donna, were talking on Turner’s porch.
“Sonya was a very petite woman, quiet, soft-spoken, you know, just very, very friendly. Not combative at all,” Turner said. “When her cousin called me early that morning to tell me what happened. I … just couldn’t believe it.”
Turner said she was “devastated” by the news. But despite her sadness and frustration about the killing, Turner isn’t sure a new state law, like the one Massey’s family is calling for, is necessary.
“Before we file any new legislation, we always look at what’s currently on the books,” Turner said. “We’ve been looking closely at the SAFE-T Act.”
Before Turner joined the General Assembly in February 2021, Democratic state lawmakers passed the SAFE-T Act, a sweeping criminal justice reform package that, among many other things, expanded the avenues for decertifying law enforcement officers, making it so they can’t work as officers in Illinois.
Before the change in law, officers could only be decertified if they were convicted of a felony and certain higher-level misdemeanors, such as aggravated assault or domestic battery. Now, many more forms of misconduct can be grounds for decertification, like tampering with video evidence or failing to intervene.
The SAFE-T Act also created a new process called discretionary decertification, where the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board investigates a complaint of misconduct made by a citizen or law enforcement agency.
Before the Massey shooting, Grayson did not have anything on his record that would have led to an automatic decertification. And the Chicago nonprofit Impact for Equity found that as of April, not a single officer had been discretionally decertified since that provision of the SAFE-T Act went into effect two years ago.
Closing ‘loopholes’
Sharon Fairley, a law professor at the University of Chicago specializing in criminal justice reform, said lawmakers could update the decertification process to make it more effective.
For one thing, she said the current law still relies too much on individual agencies to investigate misconduct claims.
“Let’s say you have a situation where an officer commits misconduct, and the law enforcement agency that he works for investigates the misconduct, and says, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that the officer did what the complainant said that they did,” Fairley said. “That does not get reported to [the standards board].”
Fairley said another part of the law, which requires an investigation after a notice of violation is made, is vague, allowing some agencies to only report complaints to the standards board after an internal investigation finding that an officer’s actions were inappropriate. In a statement to Illinois Public Media, the Logan County Sheriff’s Department said Grayson was not under investigation at the time he resigned.
“There’s a little bit of wiggle room,” Fairley said. “I think it’d be great to kind of close that loophole to be more specific about what the law enforcement agencies are required to report.”
And finally, though the law allows citizens to report officer misconduct to the standards board, it also states that the board must hand over the investigation of the complaint to the employing agency.
“There’s so much we know about the challenges to law enforcement officers policing themselves that if we’re going to have a robust decertification process, I think the state needs to go ahead and commit the resources to conducting these investigations themselves,” Fairley said.
Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell has defended his decision to hire Grayson and in a statement said he did not receive any information about Grayson’s conduct at his previous workplaces. Members of the community, as well as Massey’s family, are calling for Campbell to step down. During a public meeting last week, Campbell rejected those calls.
“I will not abandon the sheriff’s office at the most critical moment,” Campbell said. “That would solve nothing. That incident would remain.”
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said that based on Grayson’s record, it’s questionable whether Grayson should have ever been hired as a law enforcement officer. But like Turner, he said he’s not certain a new law is needed. It’s going to take some time for the current laws to “get going,” Raoul said.
The problem is not the laws on the books right now, but in how they’re being implemented, Raoul said.
“There are hundreds of law enforcement departments within the state of Illinois, and they’re not all the same,” Raoul said. “They’re not of the same quality in terms of their capacity to make sure that they have good policy, implementation and adequate training.”
In a meeting with Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton last month, the Massey family said Pritzker promised to sign a police reform bill named after Sonya Massey.
Pritzker and Stratton’s offices said they would not comment on what they called private conversations.
Mawa Iqbal covers state government and politics for WBEZ. (Follow her @mawa_iqbal)