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Sonya Massey Should Still Be Alive
What do we know about Sonya Massey? She was young. The 36-year-old was a mother to two teenagers — a son and a daughter. According to her son, she had a bold and outgoing personality. She could strike up a conversation with anyone. Massey was also a great cook who loved to help others. She had three siblings. Both her parents are alive. Her father says she was a daddy’s girl. She was a descendant of William Donnegan according to her family. Donnegan was a Black man who survived a lynching in 1908 during Springfield’s infamous 2-day race riots. This led to the creation of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Eerily, Donnegan later died in the same hospital where Massey was pronounced dead.
According to her daughter, Sonya Massey was paranoid-schizophrenic. She should still be alive today.
Sonya Massey is the latest unarmed Black woman killed by law enforcement in her own home while not committing a crime. You can add her to the list along with Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Niani Finlayson, and Kathryn Johnston. She also joins the list of mentally ill Black women killed during a police interaction. This list includes Eleanor Bumpurs, Deborah Danner, and Brianna Grier.
Massey had called the police in the early hours of August 6 because she thought she heard an intruder. The two sheriff’s deputies who responded to the call, Sean Grayson and an unnamed partner, didn’t see anyone after looking around outside her home in a predominantly lower-income neighborhood. After entering her home with flashlights and looking around, Grayson asked Massey for her driver’s license. He was distracted by a pot of water boiling on the stove, and told her to take it off the stove because they didn’t need to deal with a fire while they were there. Note that it was Grayson who directed Massey to the boiling water instead of ignoring it, or taking it off the stove himself. John Miller, CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst, when discussing all the ways Grayson and his partner handled the interaction incorrectly, told the network — “they allow her to walk over to a pot of boiling water…if they believed she constituted some kind of threat, they could have called her over to them, and one of the officers could’ve walked over, turned off the stove and poured the water out.”
