What I See in the Video of Sonya Massey’s Killing
7 min read
Let me tell you what I see and hear in the video of Sonya Massey’s killing: A nervous woman, head tilted down toward her phone, as if hoping someone—maybe a family member—has replied to her messages. A shaky voice wanting to hear words of reassurance.
“You didn’t see anybody?” she asks the two law-enforcement officers who were sent to her house after she had called 911 to report what she thought was an intruder.
“We checked the whole area,” one of the officers tells her.
“Okay,” she says in a whisper.
When one of the officers, Deputy Sean Grayson, speaks again, he sounds suspicious: “What took you so long to answer the door?” He doesn’t assume that she must be afraid, which is why she dialed 911 in the first place. Instead, he sounds like he’s interrogating her. In another story, she might be the damsel in distress, but Black women are hardly ever seen that way.
Still, she addresses him respectfully, to indicate that she understands his position of authority: “Oh, I was trying to put on some clothes, sir, I’m sorry,” she says. She is wearing a silky-looking cream-colored robe, so long that it brushes the ground; a T-shirt over pajama pants with a flamingo-pink string; and a headscarf like so many Black women wear while sleeping to protect our hair.
Grayson’s partner asks if there’s anything else they can do for her. When she doesn’t reply, Grayson repeats the question, enunciating it as if speaking to a toddler: “Is. There. Anything. Else. I. Can. Do. For. You?”
“No, sir,” she says, surely aware of the officer’s annoyance.
Her steady politeness reminded me of the way that many Black children are taught early on to interact with police officers: Always answer “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” Assume that they’ll have negative assumptions about you, assumptions that you may need to defuse to protect yourself from getting hurt.
Then Grayson asks about her mental state. Massey’s family has said that she had mental-health issues, and it’s clear the officer has concluded that something is wrong with her. She replies that she has taken her medicine. She is still polite, but now she just wants to go back inside her home. Maybe something has become clear to her, as well: that these officers are not going to help her. “I love y’all. Thank y’all,” she says as she tries to close her front door.
Since the killings in 2020 of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the racial-justice protests that followed, I’ve become somewhat desensitized to police violence. I got tired of reading beautiful prose capturing the last moments of someone who should never have died. These things happen, I have occasionally told myself. But watching this video, I felt outraged all over again by the barbarous misuse of police power and by the senseless loss of innocent lives.
Was it the intimacy of the video? Was it the image of Massey standing on her porch, as the light emanating from her living room highlighted her slender frame? I saw a small woman in her nightclothes having a tense exchange with an officer who was bigger. And stronger. And armed.
Was it the fact that, at night, I often FaceTime my aunt, who is also named Sonia, though she spells it with an i instead of a y? If it is after 9 p.m., I can almost guarantee that her pixie cut will be hidden under a silk scarf just like Massey’s, wrapped around her head like a bandage.
Then the video skips ahead: The officers have entered her home. They’re telling Massey to show them her ID. Why?
I see the folded clothes on the top of her sofa, the scattered pillows, the reusable shopping bag with items spilling out. In the kitchen there’s a blender, a plant, two plastic bottles. The door has come off one of the kitchen cabinets, and you can see everything stacked inside.
Me seeing this feels a violation. But the scene also feels familiar. I know firsthand that dirty dishes in a sink, clothes tossed throughout an apartment, or piles of junk can be the outward signs of deep personal struggles.
In Massey’s kitchen, a pot of water boils on the stove. Grayson orders her to take it off the flame. As the body camera follows her, I notice a black rolling chair that would make more sense in an office. On another chair, pumpkin-orange fabric pours out of a cardboard box. Massey puts on her oven mitts before lifting the pot. It seems to occur to the officers only now that the water—meant for cooking pasta, maybe, or rice—must be hot.
One of the officers backs away. Massey seems confused; she asks where he’s going. He tells her he doesn’t want to get hit by boiling water.
Then she says: “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
“Huh?”
“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
To the officers, this seems bizarre—understandably. But I’ve heard the phrase before, mainly because I have family members and friends who call on Jesus for all sorts of different reasons. I asked my brother-in-law, who’s a pastor, what it technically means. In the church, he said, to rebuke is to cast out a demon, or keep a demon from using a person to do something bad. The phrase can be said casually, though, in response to someone’s misbehavior. When Massey says it, her voice is louder and clearer than it has been before, but she doesn’t sound angry. It’s the tone of voice that you might use while saying: For goodness’ sake, this is really getting ridiculous.
“You better fucking not,” Grayson responds, the rage rolling off his tongue. “I’ll shoot you in your fucking face.”
Massey crouches down behind the kitchen counter, terrified, apologizing. I can’t tell what happens to the pot. She puts it down, maybe. Later, the water will spill across the floor. Does it scald her? We don’t know, because the officer does exactly what he said he was going to do. He shoots her in the face.
Grayson didn’t see Massey as the mother of two teenagers, or a “daddy’s girl”—as her father described her—or a woman who simply needed help. Her humanity was invisible to him. It didn’t matter that a few minutes earlier she’d called him “sir,” even though he was six years younger than she was. She said she loved the police. It didn’t save her.
After her body drops to the ground, the other officer says he’ll go get a medical kit to see if he can help her. “Nah,” Grayson says, “she’s done. You can go get it, but that’s a headshot.” I hear him try to justify the shooting: He says he wasn’t about to take a pot of boiling water to his face, even though Massey was already at ground level when he pulled the trigger.
Grayson goes to retrieve the medical kit after all, though he says, “I mean there’s not much we can do.” We realize then that she’s still breathing: “She’s still gasping a bit,” the partner says, and he presses something against her head to try to stop the bleeding. I imagine the strength it must have taken for her body to hang onto life in those moments. Was she able to hear Grayson, a public servant whom she had put her faith in, dismiss her so quickly? By the time he comes back, it’s too late.
“This is the worst police-shooting video ever,” Ben Crump, the lawyer representing Massey’s family, said at a news conference. He knows what he’s talking about: He has represented the families of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others, over more than 20 years. We have the record of what happened only because it was captured by Grayson’s partner: Grayson himself never turned on his body camera. Sonya Massey’s tax dollars had contributed to the salary of the officer who killed her. That’s the insanity of being Black in this country.
Unlike the victims of other police killings, Massey doesn’t have a movement behind her. The public response to the video has been relatively muted. Maybe that’s in part because, this time, the sheriff’s department was quick to fire the officer. Grayson now faces charges including first-degree murder, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Surely it’s also because others have become desensitized like I had, feeling that we had witnessed so much violence that the only way to keep going was to distance ourselves from it. And maybe it’s because she died during a time of bigger news.
The same week the footage of Massey’s killing was released, we saw Kamala Harris take the mantle of the Democratic Party. I know I can’t be the only one struggling with this cognitive dissonance. This, too, is what it means to be Black in America: One Black woman has the chance to win the most powerful position in the world, while at the same time, another Black woman, even at her most vulnerable, wearing her nightclothes and headscarf, is perceived as a threat—and shot to death in her kitchen.
