PEORIA, ILLINOIS — An Illinois jury is scheduled to continue its deliberations Wednesday in the first-degree murder trial of the sheriff’s deputy who shot… Sonia Masseya black woman who called 911 for help and was later killed in her home because of the way she was handling a pot of hot water.
The jury consisted of nine women and three men The case was received on Tuesday It was traded for 6 and a half hours. Jurors must decide whether Sean Grayson31, pleaded guilty to murder for shooting Massey in Springfield.
Grayson and another deputy responded to Massey’s emergency call reporting a troll outside the home 36 year old woman home early on the morning of July 6, 2024. They entered the home and noticed a pot of hot water on the stove, which he ordered Grayson to remove, according to the other deputy’s body camera video, which was key evidence.
Grayson and Macy joked about how Grayson moved away while Macy moved the hot pan. Then Massey said: I rebuke you in the name of Jesus“, Grayson yelled at her to drop the pot and threatened to shoot her. Macy apologized and leaned behind the counter.
“I made it very clear: I don’t want any part of this. So be it,” Mary Beth Rodgers, first assistant district attorney for Sangamon County, said in her closing argument.
Defense attorney Daniel Fultz asked the jury to decide how Grayson felt in that moment, “not to sit down 15 months later and say, ‘This is what I would have done.'”
“It’s true that she put the bowl down,” Fultz said. “If it had ended there, we wouldn’t be here today, but for reasons we will never know, she took the bowl back, stood up, and threw it in his direction.” “It was only then that he fired his weapon.”
Massey’s killing has raised new questions about U.S. law enforcement shootings Black people in their homes. The publicity, protests and legal action accompanying the incident prompted the judge to move the trial from Springfield, 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Chicago, to Peoria, an hour’s drive north of the capital.
If Grayson is convicted of first-degree murder, he faces 45 years or life in prison. The jury was also given the option of considering second-degree murder, which applies when there was “serious provocation” to the defendant or when the defendants believed their actions were justified even though that belief was unreasonable.
Second-degree murder is punishable by four to twenty years in prison or probation.