I tend not to write much about what happens in the US. 

Part of me isn’t interested and part of me is so angered by what I see, I figure I can’t adequately describe the destructive and racist ways of the police, or others in authority. 

Not that it’s so much better here in Canada.  For example, have a look at all the cases of cops harassing, taunting and inducing people of colour who have mental health infirmities or anxiety issues – to fall from their own apartment balconies and windows to their deaths. There is the 2022 death of Bobby Ramroop, a 32-year-old college graduate born in Guyana, who fell 16 storeys from a window in his mother’s apartment in Toronto.  At least four policemen, heavily armed and wearing tactical squad gear, entered the apartment.  Ramroop had done nothing but barricade himself in his bedroom; he asked to hear his mother’s voice “one last time”. But police did not allow her near her apartment suite to talk to him.  He fell out of the 55.1 centimetre wide window. Of course the police watchdog cleared the Toronto police of any wrongdoing. The horrific falling death of Regis-Korchinski-Paquet here and Mohammed Esaq’s jumping to his death here take my breath away.    More frightening still is the case of Ejaz Choudry, age 62,  who was shot and killed by police when he was alone, enduring a mental health crisis in his own apartment in Mississauga, Ont.  In all these cases, the police were found non-culpable. 

The police murder Sonya Massey

Still the cold-blooded murder of Sonya Massey in her home by white officer Deputy Sean Grayson in Springfield, Ill. was especially shocking.  No one has yet reported on the substance of the conversation between Massey and Grayson the night of 6 July, at nearly 1 am. 

What is truly revealing about the viciousness of Deputy Sean Grayson, is how strongly Grayson reacted to the smallest of slights, by a Black woman. The slight triggered (forgive the pun) him drawing his gun and killing Massey– after laughing with her seconds before.   

You can watch it here:

Sonya Massey, age 36, called the police to report an intruder.  Massey, who was Black, wore a diaphanous white housecoat as she stood on her front porch steps with Deputy Sean Grayson and his partner.  His partner’s webcam shows her and Grayson talking. Grayson reassures her that they’ve looked all around the house and there are no signs of an intruder.  The cop asks her if that’s her car in the driveway; she says no. The three go inside the house.  

Grayson asks for her ID.  She sits down on a chair about a metre from where the cops are standing and looks through her purse. She doesn’t find her ID.  Then Grayson notices a pot of water boiling on the stove –at least 5 metres from where he is standing in the entryway to the house.  In a joking tone of voice, he asks her to take the pot off the stove. He said, “We don’t need a fire while we are here!” 

Immediately she walks over to the stove and takes the pot off the burner.  Grayson laughs. 

Massey, pot in hand, asks, “Where you going?”

She is 4-5 metres from the policemen. There is a kitchen counter plus three metres between them.  

Grayson says, “Huh?”

Massey repeats, “Where you going?” 

Grayson says with a laugh, “Away from your hot steaming water!”

She stands still and repeats, “Away from my hot steaming water?”

Grayson replies “Yeah.” 

Up to this point, everything seems light-hearted. 

“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”

Sonya Massey’s last statement

Massey says, “Oh, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” 

Grayson asks, “Huh?”

Massey repeats, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” 

Immediately Grayson growls at her, hand on his holster, “You better fucking not! I swear to God. I’ll fucking shoot you at your fucking face.”

Hearing his tone change, Massey says quickly, “OK, I’m sorry.” 

He pulls the gun from the holster quickly and points it at her. He screams, “Drop the fucking pot! Drop the fucking pot!” 

She’s standing still, at least three or four metres from him, and a counter between them. 

He shoots, there’s no sound or visual because his partner covers the camera.

The second cop says, “I’m gonna go get my kit.”

Grayson says, “Nah it’s a headshot, dude. She’s done. You can go get it but that’s a headshot.  God dammit, God Fuck.” 

Grayson ends with, “I’m not taking fucking boiling water to the fucking head.”

Clearly, when she was shot she dropped the pot and the water spilled on the floor. 

He said, “Hey look it came right to our feet.”

From the time the cops walked into her living room and Grayson shot her it was one minute and fifty seconds. Massey was always three to four metres from him. 

What does this tell us? It tells us that it is anathema if a Black even invokes a word about Jesus or God.  In the cop’s view, Massey had no right to reprimand him – in the name of Jesus.  A reasonable interpretation is that it triggered the cop’s sense of white dominance, that he gets to call the shots (literally) not some Black woman. He is allowed to invoke God’s wrath (note his words), not she.  

The level of anger in him is both bizarre and terrifying.
Massey was terrified in her last seconds and said she was sorry – she realized she was “out of her place” to “rebuke” him.  

His anger was so extreme he failed to even render first aid to Massey or even whether the “head shot” had done its job, according to the news reports.  

So here we have it: the nexus between a good old white boy cop “joshing” with a Black woman over a pot of hot water – and his act of terrorism: killing her while she was three or four metres away still holding the pot.  Seconds before they had been chatting. He laughed. Then he killed her.  

He and his lawyer will doubtless claim that he had a “reasonable fear” for his safety and therefore that he be exonerated.

But to my eyes, it’s a lynching in real time.

Featured image at the top: Don’t Shoot by Mike Lroy (displayed by the National Coalition Against Censorship, read more here). The 2015 painting was mounted at the public library in Madison, Wisc. Apparently, “police groups aren’t keen on the piece. In a joint statement, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association and the Madison Professional Police Officers Association say that while they have ‘utmost respect for the value of artistic expression and free speech,’ they are ‘deeply troubled’ by a piece that “only serves to advance patently negative law enforcement stereotypes.” For more on the controversy, read this.