Past Employers Questioned Integrity and Conduct of Deputy Who Killed Sonya Massey

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This story was originally published by Invisible Institute, IPM Newsroom, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop

Sean Grayson, the former Sangamon County, Illinois, sheriff’s deputy now facing murder charges in the death of Sonya Massey, left a previous agency following allegations of inappropriate conduct with a female detainee. Grayson was also accused of retaliating against the detainee’s boyfriend after she filed a complaint.

Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop obtained new records from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, where Grayson worked for 11 months prior to Sangamon County, that show department officials concluded Grayson ignored internal policies during a high-speed chase, fielded at least two formal complaints about his behavior, and told him directly that they had considered firing him.

These records also include audio recordings from a November 2022 interview between Grayson and Logan County’s chief deputy which suggest the department — as well as other police departments that had employed him — were previously aware of issues with his performance and integrity as an officer.

Grayson’s relatively short law enforcement career, during which he moved between six Central Illinois police departments in just four years, has come under scrutiny in the weeks since he shot and killed Sonya Massey on July 6, 2024. Body-camera footage of the incident shows that Grayson shot at Massey three times after entering her home and telling her to drop a pot of boiling water. He has since pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct.

Daniel Fultz, Grayson’s defense attorney, declined to comment about the allegations contained within Grayson’s file from his time at Logan County, the mostly rural county of about 28,000 people between Springfield and Peoria.

Logan County Sheriff Mark Landers said Grayson was not under investigation when he left the department but declined to comment further. Grayson resigned from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office to take a position with the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. He remained there until he was fired after the killing of Sonya Massey in July 2024.

An undated report announcing Grayson’s resignation from Logan County reads that he left the sheriff’s office “in good standing.”

Jeff Wilhite, the spokesperson for the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, wrote that the sheriff’s office was “not provided any such information from any of Grayson’s former employers, nor from any crediting agency.”

“We cannot comment on whether the information is accurate, nor why it was not shared by another agency,” Wilhite wrote in a statement.

Dropped Charges

By the time he applied to be a deputy at the Logan County Sheriff’s Office in March 2022, Grayson had four different policing jobs across Central Illinois: three part-time gigs and one full-time post. “My communication, people-centric nature, and compassion have afforded me excellent critical thinking skills,” Grayson wrote in his application.

“He’s a bragger.”

But when Logan County officials called his current employer, the Auburn Police Department, they received mixed reviews. Auburn Police Chief Dave Campbell said that, while Grayson was an eager officer who showed up for his shifts early and had never been disciplined, he struggled with report writing and had raised concerns that he was “too aggressive.”

“Very aggressive with getting drugs,” the interviewer wrote in their notes. “He’s a bragger.”

The Auburn Police Department declined to answer any questions about Grayson’s previous employment or evaluations.

Despite this official background, he was hired full-time at the agency — the largest department he had worked for thus far. In his own interview, Grayson said he hoped to have a long law enforcement career in Logan County. “Would like to retire here,” officials noted of his aspirations.

But it quickly became apparent that he may not have been the best fit for the agency.

The first sign of trouble in Logan County came just months after his hiring. According to department records, while on patrol around 1:41 a.m. on September 22, 2022, Grayson spotted a woman in a parked truck, who seemingly crouched down in the driver’s seat in an attempt to avoid being seen by him.

When the woman drove away, Grayson followed her and eventually attempted to pull her over for allegedly rolling through a stop sign — prompting Grayson to initiate a high-speed chase during which he struck a deer. In reviewing the incident, department officials found that, in a number of instances, the details of Grayson’s written report did not match the dash camera footage from his vehicle and that he had violated a number of policies during the chase.

In the interview, Grayson appears to admit to initiating the traffic pursuit, which reached speeds of 110 miles per hour, for potentially illegal reasons, claiming that the woman who he attempted to pull over looked suspicious. His supervisors ultimately recommended he receive training for “high-stress decision making.”

In a lengthy interview about the chase in November 2022, Logan County Chief Deputy Nathan Miller and another department supervisor made clear that Grayson had not been operating up to their expectations and that they were aware of issues with arrests he had made while at his previous departments — issues that pointed to questions about Grayson’s accuracy and honesty in writing reports.

“I know that you had a lot of cases presented in other jurisdictions, correct?” Miller asked Grayson in the interrogation.

“So, all my cases in Auburn were dropped after I left,” Grayson said.

“But even prior to that,” Miller pushed. “There was some agitation because cases were not prosecuted.”

“Yes, there was two —”

“Sean, I’m going to have a hard, straight-up conversation with you right now,” Miller said. “I have a strong feeling I know why they were dropped. … I don’t want you to take offense to this: They dropped your cases because of what I’m looking at right here.”

As the interview continued, Miller brought up concerns with Grayson’s professionalism and honesty, and revisited the September chase.

“What was the stop for?” Miller asked.

“Well, initially it was just for rolling the stop sign,” Grayson said. “It was a simple little traffic thing. My initial, what I was gonna stop ’em for, was the behavior in the vehicle, was what originally caught my attention. I just needed to wait for them to start the vehicle.”

“You were gonna stop them for just their behavior in the vehicle?” Miller asked.

“No, I mean, I was gonna wait for a traffic violation, but in my mind, that was the whole reason why I was gonna see what they were doing, was the reaction of the female in the truck,” Grayson said.

According to Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who directs the school’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, this was a “classic pretext stop” — one without any other reason to exist other than to pull the person over.

“Seeing someone look at you and then slouch doesn’t create reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person has committed a crime, so there’s not a legal or lawful basis to stop. He does admit his plan was, ‘I’m going to follow and then stop her as soon as I can find any reason to do so,’” Futterman said. “It’s the classic, there will be some traffic violation I can come up with that will provide a basis to stop after the fact.”

After asking Grayson whether he had checked his report about the chase for accuracy, Miller went over the locations in Google Maps, showing the officer that he had in fact been on a different street during the incident than he had written in his report — and that it would have been impossible for him to have seen the woman in the truck based on where he had written they were both sitting.

“If I allowed this report to go over, and you pushed wanting to get a warrant and you get the warrant,” Miller said, “just me asking you those questions, you got a report writing violation for policy. You got an accuracy violation for policy. You got a standard of conduct violation for policy, and we’re 48 seconds into this. If I allowed this report to go over, an attorney’s going to ask you exactly what I just asked you. Do you trust in the fact that you just Giglio’d yourself?”

Miller was referring to a U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over evidence that could show a pattern of dishonesty by law enforcement officers involved in a criminal case to defense attorneys.

“We have never had a deputy Giglio’d,” Miller said. “We have never had a problem with our state’s attorney on integrity.”

Miller referred to a previous conversation the two had, in which he ordered Grayson to review the video from the case and make sure his report was accurate, something Grayson said he didn’t know had been possible. During that conversation, Miller said, “I even made the comment that your memory is failing you. Others will say that you have no integrity and you’re lying to get to that traffic stop. I have told you that I have zero tolerance for stretching the law.

“When you have officers that stretch the law, they will get caught. They will get prosecuted, and they will handcuff the rest of law enforcement in this state, this nation, behind the back.”

Miller went on to tell Grayson that he was considering terminating him.

“This is an agency that represents the Constitution and policies. Forget the other policies, it’s the Constitution. Lawful stops. Integrity. I’m getting goosebumps. Everybody likes you. I gotta be able to trust you,” Miller said.

He then asks directly: “Was this a purposefully-done lie?”

“No,” Grayson responded.

Even with this extended line of questioning, Miller’s final report never accuses Grayson of dishonesty nor recommends anything beyond training. Instead, he writes, “Deputy Grayson appeared to be honest during his interview and definitely acknowledged his inability to recall from memory alone.”

Miller only recommended additional training, including classes for “high-stress decision making” and training on understanding the department’s own policies.

“Deputy Grayson acknowledged he lacks experience,” Miller wrote in his report.

Reached by phone, Logan County State’s Attorney Bradley Hauge said that his office had not received any notification of potential credibility issues with Grayson and refused to answer additional questions. A representative with the Logan County public defender’s office refused to comment. The Sangamon County state’s attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, and the public defender’s office hasn’t returned multiple requests for comment.

Allegations of Harassment

But traffic stops and report writing — and his related credibility questions — weren’t the only issues Logan County Sheriff’s Office supervisors fielded about Grayson’s conduct as an officer. In December 2022, just a few weeks after the chase, a woman whom Grayson had arrested on drug possession charges filed a complaint with the Logan County Sheriff’s Office.

The woman alleged that, as she was being processed at the jail that October, she told deputies that she had inserted drugs inside herself. In response, she claimed, Grayson instructed her to remove them in front of him and another male deputy. “I went to do as he instructed me to do feeling very afraid and forced to do such action,” she wrote. She alleged that a female deputy stopped her and “informed Officer Grayson that I was not to do that in front of them because they are male officers.”

The woman was then brought to Lincoln Memorial Hospital to have the drugs removed. While she was lying on a hospital bed in a gown, she alleges that Grayson swept open the curtains around the bed, leaving her “completely exposed” to him and two other male officers. She wrote that the doctor “immediately shut the curtain and told the officers not to come in again while I was exposed.”

“I felt very violated on both occasions and was unsure how to handle this matter until now,” she wrote in her complaint to the department, later adding: “Officer Grayson was out of line and used his title to act inappropriately with me.”

A Memorial Health System spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment.

A couple weeks later, just after the new year, a man identifying himself as the woman’s fiancé, also a detainee at the Logan County Jail, filed a complaint accusing Grayson of “abusing his power and harassing me” in retaliation for his fiancée’s complaint.

During the conversation, the man alleged that Grayson asked him if he was aware that his fiancée had been bailed out of jail by another man and was now living with him. “Well I thought you guys were getting married,” Grayson allegedly told the man, continuing: “That’s pretty fucked up don’t ya think?” In response reports, Grayson wrote a narrative confirming that he did ask the woman to remove the drugs herself, but denying by implication that he had done anything improper, and argued that, upon entering her hospital room, he observed her on the bed with the curtains already drawn. He entirely denied harassing the man, saying that he had only asked him some basic questions through the jail cell door in the presence of the Logan County jailor.

Chief Deputy Miller ruled the woman’s complaint “unfounded,” writing that Grayson was “trained on best practice” in a note dated January 24, 2023. The man’s grievance form simply reads that it was referred to Miller on January 10, but does not show a resolution. The sheriff’s office did not provide any report showing Miller’s investigative steps in either case.

Neither the man nor the woman who filed complaints against Grayson could be reached for comment. Despite the fact that the sheriff’s office released their names, they are not being published here as the identities of complainants of police misconduct are not public under Illinois public records law.

Army Discharge for Serious Misconduct

Previous reporting from Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop revealed Grayson was also hired at six Central Illinois police departments, including the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, despite a discharge for serious misconduct while stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas as a soldier in the U.S. Army.

Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell has said that the department understood this misconduct to be a reference to Grayson’s previous arrests in 2016 and 2015 for driving while intoxicated, which records show the officer also disclosed to Logan County at the time of his hire. Anthony Ghiotto, a former Air Force prosecutor, said it was unlikely that a misdemeanor-level DUI would result in such a discharge.

In an email to the Logan sheriff sent two weeks after he was hired, Grayson explained that his first DUI came in 2015 when he was 21 years old and on leave from the military following his grandfather’s death. The second one, he wrote, occurred the following year after he was pulled over while driving himself and a friend home from the bar.

“I was young and made very poor decisions,” Grayson wrote. “I have since matured and have changed my life around. I have been a police officer for almost 2 years now.”

Grayson’s employment by six police departments in just four years has connected the killing of Massey to the national issue of “wandering officers”: those who commit misconduct at one department and are fired or forced out, only to find employment at another.

Grayson’s official record at the state and department level shows that he wasn’t terminated from any department, and was let go by only one, Kincaid, for refusing to move within a 10-mile radius of the city. However, experts say that the official record could obscure past misconduct, as in Logan County.

Until 2021, Illinois had no comprehensive system to prevent these officers from simply being rehired unless they were criminally convicted of a felony or a small handful of misdemeanors. That year, reforms were put into place to expand the state’s power to strip officers of their certifications, and better track officers who left departments after being terminated or while under investigation.

However, according to a May 2024 report by the Chicago law and policy nonprofit Impact for Equity, progress on the new decertification system has “stalled.” The state Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board has yet to use its new powers, which went into effect in January 2022, despite receiving hundreds of complaints from departments and residents.

In addition, the tool for tracking officers who leave departments after being terminated or under investigation, called the Professional Conduct Database, was made secret under the reforms enacted in 2021. Before, the state training board would release copies of the list, which was inconsistently used, to the public in addition to other law enforcement agencies. Now, even though nearly all of the underlying misconduct records are public in Illinois, the public can’t access them from the central location where they’re held.

A request for submissions made to the Professional Conduct Database by the Logan County Sheriff’s Office is pending. But the decertification system and the Professional Conduct Database are both still heavily reliant on departments policing their own and accurately reporting information about misconduct up to the state.

To civil rights attorney Amanda Yarusso, the Logan County Sheriff’s Office’s decision to only recommend training for Grayson after supervisors clearly indicated they thought he had lied on an official report, and had a history of doing so, serves to protect not only Grayson but also the reputation of the Logan County Sheriff’s Office.

“If someone wants to dig deeper into the paper trail, they’re not going to realize the seriousness of the problem,” she said. “That’s how we get to this point of having officers carrying weapons who are a complete danger to people of color and the sort of people who officers are always targeting.”

If the Logan County Sheriff’s Office failed to report the serious questions about Grayson’s credibility to the state and his next hiring agency, that would be a violation of the reforms passed in 2021, said Amy Thompson, a staff counsel at Impact for Equity.

But even though the reforms that were put into place should have made an impact on Grayson’s career, she said, the accountability systems “can always be strengthened,” she said. The decertification system has yet to result in any officers who were not convicted of a crime being stripped of their police powers, and the restrictions about what types of cases should be reported to the Professional Conduct Database could mean that none of the allegations about Grayson were reported to the state — and that absence could be fully in accordance with the rules.

The state board exists to ensure the Illinoisans who live in jurisdictions without robust local law enforcement oversight still receive the same level of accountability. “People with smaller agencies deserve the same accountability as people who live in areas with large agencies,” she said. “If there’s an agency not responding to allegations of misconduct, that’s a problem.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an independent nonprofit newsroom affiliated with American University in Washington, D.C. Farrah Anderson is an Investigative Reporting Fellow with Invisible Institute and an intern with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Sam Stecklow is a journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Additional reporting by Illinois Times Senior Staff Writer Dean Olsen.