Ex-deputy charged in Sonya Massey killing drew ire from previous boss, audio files show
(SPRINGFIELD, Ill.) — An Illinois chief deputy’s concerns regarding Sean Grayson, the former sheriff’s deputy charged with murder in the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, an unarmed mother of two, are documented in an audio file released Monday.
The recorded 2022 conversation is with Grayson’s then-boss, Logan County Chief Deputy Nathan Miller, who addresses Grayson’s mishandling of a traffic case.
“Seven months on, how are you still employed by us?” Miller said. Grayson responds, “I don’t know.”
The exchange centers around Grayson, who would eventually leave Logan County and join the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office in 2023, being accused of violating department policy and submitting inaccurate reports.
Miller said he and Grayson have “had this conversation before” and called Grayson’s behavior “extremely concerning.”
“Just me asking you those questions, you got a report writing violation for policy. You got an accuracy violation for policy. You got a standard of conduct violation for policy and we’re 48 seconds into this,” Miller said.
Grayson did not receive any policy violations, as Miller put a hold on the report to discuss the inaccuracies with him before officially submitting the document.
Grayson’s integrity was also questioned.
“I’m calling you on your integrity. How does that make you feel?” Miller asked. Grayson replied that he was learning from it.
“If we can’t trust what you say and what you see, we can’t have you in our uniform,” Miller said.
Miller goes on to remind Grayson that “a lot of officers have been charged and end up in jail,” and reminding him that “official misconduct will land you in jail.”
Grayson’s application to Logan County, where he worked from May 2022 to April 2023, included a letter he wrote explaining and apologizing for his two DUIs, as they were flagged in the hiring process.
Grayson, 30, was charged with two DUI offenses in Macoupin County, Illinois, in August 2015 and July 2016, according to court documents. He pleaded guilty to both charges and paid over $1,320 in fines and had his vehicle impounded as a result of the 2015 incident. In 2016, Grayson paid over $2,400 in fines, according to court records.
Documents obtained by ABC News from Logan state that Grayson resigned in April 2023. He began his full-time job as a sheriff’s deputy at Sangamon County three days after leaving Logan.
Grayson is now behind bars, denied bond, charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct in Massey’s death. He has pleaded not guilty.
“I’m going to say something right now I’ve never said in my career before: we failed,” Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell said at a community event in Illinois Monday evening, “We did not do our jobs. We failed Sonya. We failed Sonya’s family and friends. We failed the community. I stand here today before you with arms wide open to ask for forgiveness.”
Grayson’s attorney has declined to comment.
The Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Labor on Tuesday said it was dropping its initial grievance seeking to have Grayson reinstated and would not be proceeding any further.
The audio file was released as Grayson’s employment history shows he held six different police jobs in the state of Illinois since 2020, according to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board.
According to employment records, Grayson was hired for his first known police job at the Pawnee Police Department in August 2020 and was fired from his most recent job as a sheriff’s deputy at the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Department after the July 6 deadly shooting of Massey.
Prior to his time in law enforcement, Grayson was discharged from the U.S. Army for “misconduct (serious offense),” according to documents obtained by ABC News.
Grayson was discharged on February 24, 2016, after beginning service in the U.S. Army on May 5, 2014. He served for a total of one year, nine months and 19 days, Grayson’s certificate of discharge from active duty shows.
The U.S. Army, citing the Privacy Act and Department of Defense policy, said it is prevented from releasing information relating to the misconduct of low-level employees or characterization of service at discharge.
Grayson was a 91B (Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic) in the Regular Army from May 2014 to February 2016. He had no deployments and left the Army in the rank of private first class, according to an Army spokesman.
Massey’s heartbroken family continues to mourn her death as they seek justice.
“Our whole family is in a disarray. The main focus of everybody is that this animal gets justice and gets exactly what he deserves,” James Wilburn, Massey’s father, told ABC News affiliate KATV.
ABC News’ Tesfaye Negussie contributed to this report.
(BERKELEY, Calif.) — Two weeks ago, as college students returned to campus at the University of California, Berkeley, some of the most senior officials in the FBI were huddling inside a nondescript conference room beneath the stands of the school’s football stadium.
“Here’s where the rubber meets the road,” one of the FBI officials told the group of law enforcement officials, academics, tech developers, venture capitalists, and crime victims.
The problem they’re trying to solve, according to officials, is that the FBI is losing its ability to fight some of the greatest threats facing Americans, because phones and other electronic devices are increasingly being designed with no way for authorities to access their contents when the law authorizes them to collect evidence regarding suspected crimes — including those committed by radical terrorists, fentanyl dealers and online child predators.
It’s hardly a new problem.
“[It’s] the same conversation we had yesterday, five years ago, and 10 years ago, and 15 years ago, and now 20 years ago,” a professor told the group. “There’s something depressing about that. … We keep making the same goddamn mistakes over and over again.”
That’s why the FBI has taken the unusual step of turning to an academic institution for help. And not just any academic institution, but Berkeley — considered to be the birthplace of the Free Speech and student protest movements of the 1960s.
“To their credit, they were willing to think outside the box,” former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who now runs a center at Berkeley focused on security, said of the FBI.
‘A historic milestone’
A generation ago, such a partnership would have seemed unthinkable. In the 1950s and ’60s, in the midst of the Cold War, the FBI reportedly targeted a wide swath of Berkeley professors and students with surveillance and other secret tactics, convinced that radical Communists were among them.
Now, however, the FBI is battling a very different set of threats — and a new generation of advanced technologies.
Last year, the FBI signed an agreement with Napolitano’s center, the Center for Security in Politics, vowing to exchange resources and technology related expertise in a shared effort to support the FBI’s mission.
In a press release at the time, Napolitano touted the arrangement as “the first collaboration of its kind” and “a historic milestone for both institutions.”
The meeting two weeks ago was one of the first in-person gatherings to come out of the agreement.
The gathering involved three sessions spread over two days, and ABC News was allowed to observe the closing session on the condition that it not name any of the speakers.
One FBI official framed the final session by noting that while the FBI brings “enormous resources to bear” in significant or high-profile cases, “we don’t have the people, we don’t have the financial resources to do that” in the many thousands of other cases the FBI pursues each day.
“[That] is why we need to work with our private sector partners to have a lawful-access solution for our garden-variety cases,” the FBI official said during the session.
Instead of trying to address the many types of threats investigated by the FBI, the summit focused on just one: finding ways to stop child exploitation and the spread of sexual abuse material online.
“I think there’s a universal recognition that that stuff is bad, and we need to figure out a way to better deal with it,” Napolitano told ABC News.
‘A really egregious trend’
More children than ever are being exploited online, as predators use newer technologies like live-streaming apps, online video games and advanced messaging platforms to solicit sexual material from them, according to Abbigail Beccaccio, who heads the FBI’s section focused on violent crimes against children.
Beccaccio told ABC News there’s been a significant shift in these cases as they’ve exploded in number.
While the FBI had long seen cases of “traditional sextortion,” when predators with a sexual interest in young girls trick them into sharing explicit images of themselves, the FBI has in recent years seen a “huge uptick” in so-called “financially motivated sextortion” targeting boys, Beccaccio said.
In such cases, the victims are tricked into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves — but “that’s where the scheme turns,” said Beccaccio. Armed with the compromising material, the perpetrator then threatens the victim with claims of, “If you don’t send me money, I will ruin your life, I will send this to all your friends and family,” Beccaccio said.
In less than 18 months, from October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI counted more than 12,600 victims of such schemes — a “huge” and “shocking number,” as Beccaccio put it.
She said she knows of cases where children even dipped into their college savings accounts to pay the criminals who targeted them. But worst of all, she said, “We began to see a really egregious trend in suicides.”
Beccaccio said that helps illustrate why she and her FBI colleagues are so adamant that law enforcement needs some way to access criminals’ devices when a judge authorizes it.
“Without lawful access, we lose the ability to obtain the information we need to prosecute the offenders and rescue these child victims,” she warned.
The public, she said, should find that “troubling.”
‘A very dark place’
A decade ago, as highly-encrypted phone apps became commonplace, the FBI tried to engage the public in a national conversation about the future of lawful access. Then-FBI director James Comey warned that “going dark” by losing lawful access to personal data would lead to law enforcement agencies “missing out” on chances to stop “some very dangerous people.”
“Criminals and terrorists would like nothing more than for us to miss out,” he warned during an October 2014 speech in Washington, D.C. “Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.”
The issue came to a head a year later, when for several months the FBI was unable to unlock an Apple iPhone left behind by one of ISIS-inspired terrorists who killed 14 people and injured nearly two dozen others during an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.
There were congressional hearings held on the issue, and the FBI even took the matter to federal court, seeking to force Apple to find a way for authorities to access the phone’s content. The case became moot after an Israeli security company found a way to unlock the perpetrator’s phone.
“It’s so seductive to talk about privacy as the ultimate value,” Comey told a House panel in March 2016. “[But] in a society where we aspire to be safe and have our families safe and our children safe, that can’t be. We have to find a way to accommodate both.”
But the FBI’s public campaign over lawful access appeared to lose steam after FBI leadership become engulfed in a controversy surrounding the 2016 presidential election and Comey was fired as the agency’s director in May 2017.
Now — more than seven years later — the FBI is trying to spark the conversation again.
Katie Noyes, the head of the FBI’s next-generation technology section, said that in a survey of the FBI’s field offices last year, the bureau identified nearly 17,000 active cases that were either stalled or missing key evidence due to “warrant-proof encryption.”
Just two months ago, as the FBI struggled to determine why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Abbate, the deputy director, told lawmakers that the shooter had used encrypted applications and that, more than two weeks after the shooting, the FBI was still unable “to get information back because of their encrypted nature.”
“We need a solution that provides lawful access to law enforcement,” Abbate implored lawmakers during a Senate hearing on the assassination attempt.
So the FBI is turning to Napolitano and her team at Berkeley for help.
‘Waiting for the market’
The summit at Berkeley was led by Napolitano’s team and an array of FBI officials, including deputy director Abbate; Jeff Fields, the head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s San Francisco field office; and members of the agency’s technology units.
Victims of online sexual exploitation, including a woman whose likeness appeared in a “deepfake” video that went viral, also shared their stories and perspectives.
“What was really wonderful about this convening was having really disparate points of view around the same table,” Noyes told ABC News, adding that some of the tech companies and venture capitalists there said they had never heard directly from victims before.
The group got into an impassioned debate over whether tech companies, especially global giants such as Apple and Meta — neither of whom participated in the summit — would ever voluntarily redesign their devices and platforms to ensure that law enforcement could access them with a court order.
One law enforcement official noted that the FBI spoke with the companies a decade ago, but they had little interest in having a conversation about changing their ways.
“Waiting for the market here is not going to get it done,” said another law enforcement official, insisting that the only thing that will bring change is Congress passing a new law.
Others rejected that view, saying that the point of holding the summit is to potentially find other ways to address the problem.
“There hasn’t been much movement at all, but on the other hand the technology has changed,” Napolitano told ABC News after the summit. “And so there may be better and more available ways for government — meaning law enforcement — to get around some of the traditional barriers to lawful access, and those were part of the discussions today.”
‘What’s next?’
Noyes emphasized that she and her colleagues at the FBI are “big fans of encryptions” for personal security and privacy — and that the FBI is not trying to expand or change what it’s legally allowed to do.
As she described it, the FBI just wants ensure that law enforcement maintains the type of access that it has long used to bring criminals to justice.
“There’s no discussion around a request for any additional authority,” she said. “In many cases we have had this access, and it has been removed or taken away over time” due to newer technology.
According to Noyes, the summit produced a number of ideas and proposed approaches.
Some participants suggested that an independent third party could hold a technology company’s access keys in “escrow,” so those keys would not be in the hands of law enforcement but could be used under court order.
There was also discussion about “homomorphic encryption,” a type of encryption that can keep data encrypted even as that data is processed or even shared.
Napolitano said the summit two weeks ago was just the beginning.
“The challenge for us is, ‘OK, now we’ve had these discussions, what’s next?'” she said.
NOTE: If your child is the victim of a predator or you know someone who is a victim, you can always call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit information online at tips.fbi.gov.
(NEW YORK) — A 70-year-old man is in “good spirits” after being found nearly a week after going missing while on an off-road trail in California, authorities said Wednesday.
Warren Elliott got lost after walking away from his group while on the Rubicon Trail in Placer County Friday afternoon, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office.
Following a dayslong search in tough terrain, Elliott was found “safe and uninjured” Wednesday morning at Hell Hole Reservoir, the sheriff’s office said. A person texted 911 at approximately 8 a.m. PT that they were with a missing person who was determined to be Elliott, the sheriff’s office said.
Elliott was camping in Rubicon Springs with a group doing trail rehab ahead of an upcoming event dubbed the Jeepers Jamboree when he got lost after going out for a walk, the sheriff’s office said. He was familiar with the area but upon returning from his walk he went in the wrong direction, according to the sheriff’s office.
Elliott managed to drink water from a river and ate a “handful of berries” while lost, the sheriff’s office said.
He was found roughly nine miles from the point where he was last seen though had walked much farther than that over the past five days, the sheriff’s office said.
Elise Soviar, a spokesperson for the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, said Elliott was airlifted out of the area by helicopter. The remote region, located west of Lake Tahoe, is accessible by road, though a helicopter was the quickest way to evacuate him, she said.
A California Highway Patrol helicopter transported him to the command post at Homewood Mountain Resort, where he was “greeted by cheers and clapping” and reunited with his family, the sheriff’s office said.
The sheriff’s office released a video of Elliott’s emotional return, in which he could be seen in the now-tattered shirt he was wearing when he went missing.
“This is a tremendous relief for Mr. Elliott’s family and friends,” the sheriff’s office said in a social media post. “A heartfelt thank you to all the search and rescue teams who tirelessly assisted from across the state.”
The sheriff’s office said they were also “immensely grateful to Jeepers Jamboree,” which provided food, drinks and a place to camp overnight amid the search.
Dozens of searchers from 10 agencies across the state were involved in the search, which also used drones and dog teams, according to the sheriff’s office.
The Rubicon Trail is an approximately 22-mile-long route near Lake Tahoe that features a popular off-highway vehicle trail.
“Tears of joy are flowing this morning,” the Jeepers Jamboree said on social media after Elliott was found. “All of us at Jeepers Jamboree are so incredibly relieved to have Warren found! We can’t express the appreciation we have for everyone who has been a part of finding Warren!”
(TALLAHASSEE, FL) — The New College of Florida is under fire after what appears to be hundreds of books that have been wiped from its collection and discarded on the street.
Social Equity Through Education Alliance (SEE), a local activist group, was alerted on Thursday by a New College student who reported seeing what they believed was up to “thousands” of books being “shoved into a dumpster” behind the college’s library.
“We basically tried to communicate to officials that there were educational nonprofits and shelters that were immediately willing to bring trucks and save all of the books … and officials refused,” said Zander Moricz, executive director at SEE.
Moricz continued, “There were Bibles, there were stories of Black authors, of Latin authors, female stories, there were LGBTQ+ and queer stories, or trans stories, all thrown into a dumpster. It sends the message that New College of Florida wants to send stories of gender and diversity to the dump, and it was so heartbreaking and also very frustrating.”
In a statement to ABC News, a New College spokesperson said it’s following “longstanding annual procedures for weeding its collection, which involves the removal of materials that are old, damaged, or otherwise no longer serving the needs of the College.”
“The images seen online of a dumpster of library materials is related to the standard weeding process,” the statement read. “Chapter 273 of Florida statutes precludes New College from selling, donating or transferring these materials, which were purchased with state funds. Deselected materials are discarded through a recycling process when possible.”
Some of the books found on the street were associated with the school’s discontinued Gender Studies program that were primarily donated and were not part of any official college collection or inventory, according to New College’s statement. When the books were not claimed for pickup from the program’s former room, the college also left them on the street, the college told ABC News.
The New College, a public liberal arts school in Sarasota, has been a target of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-“woke” policy efforts, who has said he hopes to shed the institution’s liberal reputation.
DeSantis overhauled the Board of Trustees and touted the “replacement of far-left faculty with new professors aligned with the university’s mission” with a slate of terminations in recent years as well as the elimination of positions aligned with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) standards.
“The New College Board of Trustees is succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission,” said DeSantis in an August 2023 statement.
Some of the books that have been discarded, according to a spokesperson for New College, were from the school’s gender studies programs — which were terminated under DeSantis’ appointed Board of Trustees.
Florida officials have long been under scrutiny for restrictions and bans on books in the state amid legislation that is aimed at restricting certain topics regarding race, gender, sex and more in higher education and K-12.
The Parental Rights in Education Bill and the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act restrict content on LGBTQ identities and race in schools, respectively.
Florida law also allows parents and residents to object to books and have them reviewed and potentially removed from schools.
Since the implementation of these laws, Florida has seen a rise in book-banning attempts across the state, according to the American Library Association (ALA) and free speech advocacy group PEN America.
In the first half of the 2023-2024 school year alone, PEN America found that Florida experienced the highest number of cases focused on banning materials, with 3,135 attempts across 11 school districts.
Critics — including parents, studentsand local activists — have instead led banned book campaigns to encourage the reading and distribution of booksthat have been targeted.
DeSantis later signed a bill in April he hoped would limit the amount of book objections that can be made by people who don’t have a child with access to school materials.
Parents of children in the school districts or using district materials will still be able to object to an unlimited amount of material.
DeSantis’ office said the change to these policies “protects schools from activists trying to politicize and disrupt a district’s book review process.”
Moricz and other activists were able in the end to take several books: “These were readable books. These were books that did not have tears in the pages. Have clean covers. These are books that could have been used, and it’s truly unforgivable.”