Sean Grayson, the former Sangamon County sheriff's deputy now facing murder charges in the death of Sonya Massey, left a previous agency following allegations of inappropriate conduct with a female detainee.
Grayson, 30, was also accused of retaliating against the detainee's boyfriend after she filed a complaint.
Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media and the Investigative Reporting Workshop obtained new records from the Logan County Sheriff's Office, where Grayson worked for 11 months prior to Sangamon County, that show department officials concluded Grayson ignored internal policies during a high-speed chase, fielded at least two formal complaints about his behavior, detected serious inaccuracies in some of his police reports and told him directly that they had considered firing him.
These records also include audio recordings from a November 2022 interview between Grayson and Logan County's chief deputy which suggest the department – as well as other police departments that had employed him – were previously aware of issues with his performance and integrity as an officer.
Grayson's relatively short law enforcement career, during which he worked at six central Illinois police departments in four years, has come under scrutiny in the weeks since he shot and killed Sonya Massey on July 6, 2024.
Body-camera footage of the incident shows that Grayson shot at Massey, 36, three times after entering her home and telling her to drop a pot of boiling water. He has since pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct.
Daniel Fultz, Grayson's defense attorney, declined to comment about the allegations contained within Grayson's file from his time at Logan County, a mostly rural county of about 28,000 people between Springfield and Peoria.
Logan County Sheriff Mark Landers said Grayson was not under investigation when he left the department but declined to comment further. Grayson resigned from the Logan County Sheriff's Office to take a position with the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office. He remained there until he was fired after Massey's killing.
An undated report announcing Grayson's resignation from Logan County reads that he left the sheriff's office "in good standing."
The Sangamon County Sheriff's Department issued a written response July 26 that said the department "was not provided with the information" obtained by Invisible Institute and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
The Sangamon County department added, "We cannot comment on whether the information is accurate, nor why it was not shared by another agency."By the time Grayson applied to be a deputy at the Logan County Sheriff's Office in March 2022, he had four different policing jobs across central Illinois – three part-time gigs and one full-time post.
But when Logan County officials called his current employer, the Auburn Police Department, they received mixed reviews. Auburn Police Chief Dave Campbell said that, while Grayson was an eager officer who showed up for his shifts early and had never been disciplined, he struggled with report writing and had raised concerns that he was "too aggressive."
"Very aggressive with getting drugs," the Logan County interviewer wrote in his or her notes. "He's a bragger."
The Auburn Police Department declined to answer any questions about Grayson's previous employment or evaluations.
Despite his background, Grayson was hired full-time at the Logan County Sheriff's Office – the largest department he had worked for thus far.
But it quickly became apparent that he may not have been the best fit for the agency.
The first sign of trouble in Logan County came just months after his hiring. According to department records, while on patrol around 1:41 a.m. on Sept. 22, 2022, Grayson spotted a woman in a parked truck, who seemingly crouched down in the driver's seat in an attempt to avoid being seen by him.
When the woman drove away, Grayson followed her and eventually attempted to pull her over for allegedly rolling through a stop sign – prompting Grayson to initiate a high-speed chase during which he struck a deer.
In reviewing the incident, department officials found that, in a number of instances, the details of Grayson's written report did not match the dash camera footage from his vehicle and that he had violated a number of policies during the chase.
In the interview, Grayson appears to admit to initiating the traffic pursuit, which reached speeds of 110 miles per hour, for potentially illegal reasons, claiming that the woman who he attempted to pull over looked suspicious. His supervisors ultimately recommended he receive training for "high-stress decision making."
In a recorded interview about the chase in November 2022, Logan County Chief Deputy Nathan Miller and another department supervisor made clear that Grayson had not been operating up to their expectations and that they were aware of issues with arrests Grayson had made while at previous departments.
Miller went on to say that he was considering terminating Grayson.
Even with an extended line of questioning, Miller's final report never accuses Grayson of dishonesty, or recommends anything beyond training. Miller only recommended additional training, including training on understanding the department's own policies.
Traffic stops and report writing – and his related credibility questions – weren't the only issues Logan County Sheriff's Office supervisors fielded about Grayson's conduct as an officer.
In December 2022, just a few weeks after the chase, a woman whom Grayson had arrested on drug possession charges filed a complaint with the Logan County Sheriff's Office.
The woman alleged that, as she was being processed at the jail that October, she told deputies that she had inserted drugs inside herself. In response, she claimed, Grayson instructed her to remove them in front of him and another male deputy.
A female deputy intervened and informed Grayson that was not allowed.
The woman was then brought to Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Lincoln to have the drugs removed. While she was lying on a hospital bed in a gown, she alleges that Grayson swept open the curtains around the bed, leaving her "completely exposed" to him and two other male officers.
"I felt very violated on both occasions and was unsure how to handle this matter until now," she wrote in her complaint to the department.
A couple of weeks later, just after the New Year, a man identifying himself as the woman's fiancé, also a detainee at the Logan County Jail, filed a complaint accusing Grayson of "abusing his power and harassing me" in retaliation for his fiancée's complaint.
During the conversation, the man alleged that Grayson asked him if he was aware that his fiancée had been bailed out of jail by another man and was now living with him.
"Well, I thought you guys were getting married," Grayson allegedly told the man. Grayson allegedly went on to say, "That's pretty fucked up, don't ya think?"
Chief Deputy Miller ruled the woman's complaint "unfounded," writing that Grayson was "trained on best practice" in a note dated Jan. 24, 2023.
Previous reporting from Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media and the Investigative Reporting Workshop revealed Grayson was also hired at six central Illinois police departments, including the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office, despite a discharge for serious misconduct while stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas as a soldier in the U.S. Army.
Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell has said the sheriff's office had a copy of Grayson's certificate of release from the military, and Campbell said the form stated Grayson was given a "general honorable discharge from the military."However, Anthony Ghiotto, a former Air Force prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the form to which Campbell referred listed the "character" of Grayson's service as "under honorable conditions (general)," which can be confusing to a lay person.
Regardless, Ghiotto said, the form says the nature of Grayson's separation from the military was an involuntary discharge.
Campbell said the sheriff's department thought the reference on the form to serious misconduct was a reference to one of Grayson's previous Macoupin County arrests in 2016 and 2015 for driving while intoxicated, which records show the officer also disclosed to Logan County at the time of his hire.
However, Ghiotto said it was unlikely that a misdemeanor-level DUI would result in such a discharge.
Grayson's employment by six police departments in four years has connected the killing of Massey to the national issue of "wandering officers" — those who commit misconduct at one department and are fired or forced out, only to find employment at another.
Grayson's official record at the state and department level shows that he wasn't terminated from any department, and was let go by only one, Kincaid, for refusing to move within a 10-mile radius of the Christian County village. However, experts say that the official record could obscure past misconduct, as in Logan County.
Until 2021, Illinois had no comprehensive system to prevent these officers from simply being rehired unless they were criminally convicted of a felony or a small handful of misdemeanors. That year, reforms were put into place to expand the state's power to strip officers of their certifications, and better track officers who left departments after being terminated or while under investigation.
However, according to a May 2024 report by the Chicago law and policy nonprofit Impact for Equity, progress on the new decertification system has "stalled." The state Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board has yet to use its new powers, which went into effect in January 2022, despite receiving hundreds of complaints from departments and residents.
To civil rights attorney Amanda Yarusso, the Logan County Sheriff's Office's decision to only recommend training for Grayson after supervisors clearly indicated Logan County officials thought Grayson had lied on an official report, and had a history of doing so, serves to protect not only Grayson but the reputation of the Logan County Sheriff's Office.
If the Logan County Sheriff's Office failed to report the serious questions about Grayson's credibility to the state and his next hiring agency, that would be a violation of the reforms passed in 2021, said Amy Thompson, a staff counsel at Impact for Equity.
Even though the reforms that were put into place should have made an impact on Grayson's career, the accountability systems "can always be strengthened," Thompson said.
The decertification system has yet to result in any officers who were not convicted of a crime being stripped of their police powers.
Editor's note: This story is a condensed version of two stories by Invisible Institute and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Full versions of both stories are available at illinoistimes.com.