In 911 call day before shooting, Sonya Massey’s mom pleaded: Don’t hurt her

The day before Sonya Massey was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois, her mother called 911 seeking help. She said Massey was having a mental breakdown - and she implored law enforcement officers not to harm her daughter, newly released 911 recordings show.

“I don’t want you guys to hurt her, please,” Donna Massey said around 9 a.m. on July 5.

When the dispatcher told her help was on the way to her daughter’s Springfield, Ill., home, she replied: “Thank you, and please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced - please.”

“They just do their job, okay?” the dispatcher responded.

“They’re scary. I’m scared of the police,” Donna Massey said.

He replied, “There’s nothing to be fearful of, ma’am.”

About 16 hours later, Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black mother of two, called 911 to report an alleged prowler at her house. She was fatally shot by a responding sheriff’s deputy, body-camera footage showed.

The 911 calls and law enforcement reports - released Wednesday by Sangamon County’s dispatch agency in response to public records requests - outline a series of interactions between Massey and law enforcement in the 24 hours before her death.

The records indicate that local law enforcement knew who Massey was before July 6 and had been advised that she was having mental health issues, though whether the responding deputies had that information was not clear. The Springfield Police Department also reported that Massey had interacted with a local mental health crisis service at least three times in the two weeks before the shooting, a sheriff’s deputy noted in one of the newly released documents.

James Wilburn, Massey’s father, said in an interview Wednesday that he believes the records from July 5 demonstrate that law enforcement knew or should have known that his daughter had mental health problems. (Donna Massey could not be reached for comment.)

“I can’t for the life of me understand why they didn’t realize that beforehand and why they could not do anything to help her,” Wilburn told The Washington Post.

The case has caused a national uproar and revived questions about how law enforcement polices Black communities and responds to people going through mental health crises. Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson, 30, was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting.

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“She needed a helping hand,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Massey’s family, told The Post Wednesday. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.”

Grayson has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Daniel Fultz, declined to comment.

The sheriff’s office did not respond to questions from The Post about whether Grayson and the other responding deputy on July 6 were aware of the previous calls from Massey’s residence.

County Sheriff Jack Campbell said at a community meeting Monday night that his office had failed Massey and her family.

“She called for help, and we failed her. That’s all she did: call for help,” he said. “We failed. We did not do our jobs.”

In the weeks leading up to the shooting, Massey had been struggling with her mental health, according to her family and law enforcement records.

Her children had been staying with other family members while she sought treatment; her 17-year-old son, Malachi Massey, said she had checked into a facility but had returned after two days. He said he had been trying to help her get back into treatment.

In her 911 call the morning of July 5, Donna Massey told the dispatcher that her daughter was acting “sporadic,” according to the recording. She described her daughter as becoming paranoid when upset but assured the dispatcher that Massey wasn’t a danger to herself or others, according to the recording.

She said the “mental people” had advised her to call 911 because she was worried her daughter might try to drive and could have an accident. (It was not immediately clear to whom she was referring, but the records indicated Massey had previously used the local mental health crisis service.)

After Massey’s mother said she didn’t want the police to hurt her daughter, she told the dispatcher she thought police sometimes made things worse.

An ambulance was dispatched immediately after Massey’s mother’s call. In a report, a Springfield police officer logged at 10:12 a.m. that he had spoken with Massey and said she had been “cleared” by emergency responders.

An unidentified person at the house told the officer that Massey wasn’t a danger to herself or others, according to the report, as Donna Massey had told the dispatcher that morning.

Less than three hours later, a woman law enforcement suspected was Massey called 911, according to a second report. The woman didn’t identify herself but was shouting about her neighbor, which prompted a 911 dispatcher to call her back. A sheriff’s deputy then went to Massey’s house, the report shows.

He found her car window broken, which Massey had accused her neighbor of doing. She left and went to the hospital, where the deputy met her. She allegedly told him that she had broken her own car window trying “to get into the car to get away” and was going to get treated for cuts from the broken glass.

The deputy noted that she “appeared to be having some (mental) issues,” using a law enforcement abbreviation for someone in mental distress.

That was just before 2:30 p.m. It was 12:49 a.m. when Massey next contacted 911.

Though it was not clear how much of the information about Massey’s mental health had been conveyed to the two deputies who showed up at her house around 1 a.m., Grayson asked Massey at one point after arriving at her house whether she was “doing all right mentally.”

About three minutes later, he pulled his gun.