Years before a deputy killed Sonya Massey, sheriff’s office failed to police misconduct within its ranks

After midnight on July 6, Sonya Massey called 911 to report a prowler. When sheriff’s deputies responded, she answered the door in her nightgown, thanking and welcoming them into her home in Springfield, Illinois. But two minutes later, Sangamon County Deputy Sean Grayson took aim at Massey’s face and fired a fatal gunshot, killing her in her kitchen. The morning prior, her mother Donna had warned police that her daughter was in the middle of a mental health crisis.

“Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced,” Donna Massey pleaded to a 911 operator. “I’m scared of the police.”

Grayson was fired less than two weeks later and charged with Sonya Massey’s murder. He pleaded not guilty. It’s the only criminal case in recent history against a Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputy for actions on duty, according to a review of court records dating back to 2007, and local officials characterized Massey’s fatal shooting as an aberration. 

But CBS News subsequently obtained thousands of pages of law enforcement files, medical and court records as well as photo and video evidence which indicate that the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office has a history of misconduct allegations and accountability failures that long predate Deputy Grayson. These records challenge the claim that Massey’s death was an isolated incident by one “rogue individual,” as the then-sheriff said at the time. 

Local families assert that Massey’s death is the latest in a pattern of brazen abuse that has gone unchecked for years.

“This is not a one-off. This is one of apparently many examples of wrongdoing,” said county board member Marc Ayers, who is among several local officials calling for independent inquiries and widespread reforms of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.

At least eight other deaths in the custody of Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputies and corrections officers have occurred under circumstances where officials’ conduct was called into question. In at least five of those cases, officers acted in ways that appeared to have violated local law enforcement policies as well as state and federal standards, according to a CBS News review of two decades’ worth of documents obtained through court records and Freedom of Information Act requests. Police in other communities who used similar tactics have sometimes been charged criminally.

In each of the eight cases that CBS News identified in Sangamon County, officers had been informed that victims were experiencing some kind of mental health or other medical issue at the time of their death. Their families alleged either excessive force or deliberate indifference to life-threatening medical conditions for people in pretrial detention.

Since 2004, the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office has been the target of more than 50 civil rights complaints, including 20 related to policing and another 34 related to misconduct in the jail, which the sheriff also oversees, records show. The allegations include violations of due process, excessive tasing, the rape of a woman who called 911 for help, and arrests made with no legal grounds as tools of harassment or intimidation. The sheriff’s office disputed each one of these accusations. 

In two of the civil rights cases, federal judges ruled against the sheriff’s office. And in 10 of them, the county agreed to pay settlements out of court for more than $3.6 million, without admitting fault. They paid another $9.6 million in legal fees, according to records obtained through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. All of that money came directly from taxpayers, according to county board member Craig Hall, who has chaired Sangamon County’s civil liabilities committee for more than two decades.

“If we’ve done something wrong … make what is wrong right, if that’s even possible,” Hall told CBS News. “How many people have to die before enough is enough?”

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office declined multiple requests to respond to questions for this story.

The sheriff leading the department when Grayson shot Massey, Jack Campbell, was elected in 2018 and had been second in command from 2008 to 2016. Campbell is identified in county documents as an official who, for years, ordered and oversaw misconduct investigations within the department. On Aug. 9, he resigned following pressure from the public and the state’s governor. Campbell did not respond to a request for comment on this report.  

“If it has become a systemic problem, it’s not going to be enough to change one person,” said Chiraag Bains, a former civil rights prosecutor who served as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council until 2023.

History of misconduct

In 2010, sheriff’s deputies responded to a 911 call from an anxious resident about a man trying to break into their home. When deputies arrived on scene, they encountered Patrick Burns, 50, alone in a nearby ditch after he had broken the window of his neighbor’s house, and he told them that he’d smoked marijuana and crack cocaine. Burns became combative and the officers hog-tied him and tased him 21 times, according to police records.   

“He kept screaming that they’re trying to kill me,” an eyewitness later recounted to investigators, having observed the altercation through her house window. Burns was unresponsive when deputies brought him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, but no charges were ever brought. The local State’s Attorney determined the use of force was justified.

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s taser policy in effect at the time stated that deputies “should generally not intentionally” tase a person excessively or at all, if the person is “handcuffed unless there is immediate threat to the Deputy/Officer, suspect or bystander.” The current policy goes further, instructing that “deputies should generally not intentionally apply more than one Taser at a time against a single subject.”

The outcome left relatives of Burns unsatisfied.

“Sangamon County does a pretty good job of hiding things or twisting things or making them seem like they’re squeaky clean. Behind the scenes, they’re anything but that,” said Richard Burns, Patrick’s younger brother. He said he felt that the sheriff’s office vilified Patrick after his death, and that the department’s treatment of the family was callous. “I want to get to the bottom of what happened to Patrick because we were being told a series of lies.”

A year earlier, a woman in Sangamon County alleged that after she dialed 911 for help before dawn on New Year’s Day 2009, she was raped by the deputy who responded. The county settled her lawsuit for $30,000 following a nearly three-year court battle, with no charges brought against the deputy. 

Sangamon County is not alone in facing allegations of misconduct. A CBS News investigation earlier this year found chronic misconduct and oversight failures that have enabled abuses to persist unchecked in sheriff’s offices around the country. 

Inside the county jail

In addition to patrolling the community, Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office also oversees the county’s jails. Several residents have alleged the agency deliberately ignored pretrial inmates in distress with serious medical concerns.  

In 2016, Tiffany Rusher, 27, who had a long, documented history of suicide attempts, was transferred from a mental health facility to the Sangamon County jail, where she was placed naked and alone in a cell with a covered window, according to her mother’s complaint. After three months of intermittent solitary confinement, Rusher died after strangling herself in her cell. With no admission of guilt, Sangamon County paid $700,000 to settle her mother’s wrongful death lawsuit in March 2022.

The very next month, Dylan Schlieper-Clark, 23, died from a treatable infection in that same pretrial jail. An internal affairs investigation determined officers ignored his complaint of pain and request to be taken to the hospital, offering no medical assistance for hours as they observed him collapsed face down on the floor, foaming at the mouth, surveillance video and law enforcement records show. 

The subsequent investigation determined one of the officers violated policy by failing to act on observable signs that medical intervention was “necessary.” She received a written reprimand. 

A lawsuit filed by Schlieper-Clark’s mother against the sheriff’s office is ongoing. The sheriff’s office denies the allegations that it violated his civil rights.

“Training and policies are crucial and essential for policing. But training and policies without accountability are useless,” said Ed Chung, vice president of initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice, who previously served as a state and federal prosecutor investigating police violence and misconduct.

Internal Affairs investigations

Over the years, the sheriff’s office’s Internal Affairs unit substantiated multiple misconduct allegations detailing a variety of ways officers had abused their positions of power. And yet their misconduct appeared to continue; in some cases, it escalated.

One deputy who has faced scrutiny for his conduct is Deputy Travis Koester. The complaints against him range from using excessive force to making bogus arrests and falsifying reports about the incidents in apparent attempts to cover them up. The 6-foot-1 officer also claimed an unarmed 83-year-old woman posed a threat to his physical safety for calling him a “tough guy” while he allegedly aggressively confronted and baselessly arrested her neighbor who was trying to deliver her some biscuits. Internal Affairs investigators substantiated the incident as an abuse of his position. Even some of his colleagues reported their inability to trust him and recommended his demotion.

In all, Koester has been the subject of 13 Internal Affairs investigations and at least five lawsuits in Sangamon County over 15 years. He was exonerated once; six complaints were substantiated, four allegations were deemed unfounded and another six were unsubstantiated. He denied every allegation but, in several cases, department investigators and a federal judge determined that he violated policies and civil rights laws. After a verbal apology from the deputy but no admission of liability by the county, it paid $45,000 to settle the most recent substantiated complaint in June 2024. 

In two cases, judges ruled that Koester made unjustified arrests. He received no disciplinary action and, records show, he was later given pay increases. Illinois Judge John Madonia of the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court found that the deputy’s actions lacked “one iota of credible evidence,” characterizing the deputy’s own reports as “convolutedly crappy” and “factually incorrect.” Records show he received no disciplinary action.

Koester is currently one of Sangamon’s highest paid deputies, according to a review of county financial reports and personnel files obtained through public records requests. Koester did not respond to a request for comment through the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.

Another veteran officer, Deputy John Gillette. was the subject of 27 complaints in eight years, most of which were never substantiated. In eight cases, he was found to have violated policy or used excessive force. Gillette resigned in 2009, less than two months after an Illinois court ordered the sheriff’s office to publicly release his misconduct records, in a landmark disclosure case. Gillette did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment.

Bains, the former civil rights prosecutor whose work for the Justice Department helped reveal unconstitutional policing and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri, told CBS News that a failure to respond to persistent misconduct is a sign that accountability is lacking.

“And a broken accountability system can be a driver of a pattern or practice of misconduct,” Bains said.

Chung, the former state and federal prosecutor who investigated police misconduct, said law enforcement agencies should resist attributing incidents to “bad apples.”

“When you have persistent and continuous patterns of misconduct that have not gone addressed, or [were] even swept under the rug, that’s not an issue about individuals, that’s an issue of systems,” he said.

At a community listening session organized by the Justice Department over the summer, some county residents said they were no longer willing to call 911 out of fear that they, too, would end up dead. 

“They would be the last people I would call if I needed any help,” Billie Greer told CBS News. 

Herself a retired Illinois corrections officer, Greer said she was arrested without basis by a Sangamon County deputy two years ago and said she’s had nightmares since Sonya Massey was shot dead. “This young lady could’ve been me,” she said.

The newly appointed sheriff, Paula Crouch, said last week that her administration is committed to making reforms. Many residents and local officials insist that a deeper, independent inquiry into the conduct of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office is overdue.

In August, the Sangamon County Board passed a resolution to form a commission to investigate issues of equality and community safety. They called it the Massey Commission, and modeled it after the one formed 10 years earlier following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The commission’s first hearing is set for Monday evening.