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Sonya Massey death brings fresh heartache to Breonna Taylor, George Floyd activists
Many Black women were elated over Kamala Harris’ rise only to experience new horror over the video of Massey’s killing. One activist likened the whiplash to a ‘domestic violence relationship.’
Hannah Drake felt something akin to emotional whiplash when she saw the video of an Illinois police officer killing Sonya Massey earlier this week.
Drake, 48, described the moment as the “dichotomy of being a Black woman in America.”
The bodycam footage showing the 36-year-old Black mother of two being shot in her own kitchen by Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson was published Monday.
Massey had called 911 to report a possible intruder in her Springfield home on July 6. Thirty minutes later she was shot dead.
The shooting occurred as another deputy was clearing the house. Grayson began “aggressively yelling” at Massey to put down a pot of boiling water she had removed from her stove, although he had given her permission to do so. Grayson can be heard in the body cam footage saying “I swear to God. I’ll f— shoot you right in your f— face,” before firing a bullet at Massey’s head.
The footage was released just as the Democratic Party began to rally around Vice President Kamala Harris, making her the presumptive nominee to replace President Joe Biden – much to the elation of many Black women, some of whom have felt taken for granted by the Democratic Party.
Bodycam footage shows fatal shooting of Sonya Massey
Police body camera footage captured the moments in the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey in the Springfield, Illinois area.
“It’s like we’re in a domestic violence relationship with America,” Drake said. “It’s like a honeymoon phase, and then it’s right back to violence.”
It’s an eerily familiar feeling for the activist and poet, who was integral in passing police reform in Louisville, Kentucky, after the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor.
Four years ago, people across the U.S. called for a racial reckoning in the wake of the killings of Taylor and George Floyd. Major companies made financial pledges to reduce racial disparities and lawmakers promised to meet the demands for policy change.
But progress toward those goals has been slow – particularly at the federal level, where few substantive policies have been passed to curb police-incited violence. Last year, the police killed more Americans than any other year on record.
Harris called the Massey family to offer condolences, and issued a statement Tuesday saying “we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name.”
“Sonya Massey deserved to be safe,” Harris said, adding that she and second gentlemen Doug Emhoff were “grieving her senseless death.”
For activists like Drake, Massey’s killing marks yet another flashpoint in the struggle to end the scourge. Her death, they say, brings even more urgency to their cause.
‘Russian roulette’
Timothy Findley Jr. a Louisville, K.y. pastor, organized countless protests demanding justice after Breonna Taylor’s death in 2020. Today, Findley finds himself questioning whether the work he did and the attention he helped draw to police brutality made a difference.
In light of Massey’s case, Findley said he believes there are few ways Black and brown people can interact safely with law enforcement. The officer who shot Massey was responding to a call for help she had initiated about a possible intruder. When he shot her in the head, she was holding a pot of water.
“For me, like with so many others, it continues to reinforce the belief that law enforcement is not always the helpful, friendly entity that we need,” Findley said. “You call 911, and it’s almost like Russian roulette. Depending on who you get, it could be the end of your life.”
DeRay McKesson views the path of progress slightly differently. As leader of the organization Campaign Zero, McKesson works day in and day out to pass local and state policies to reduce police violence. McKesson became a civil rights activist after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, nearly ten years ago.
“This last decade is the first sustained period of activism ever around the police,” McKesson said of the improvements he’s seen since.
Seven states now have adopted Campaign Zero’s recommended restrictions on the use of no-knock raids, the practice that allowed police to enter Breonna Taylor’s home.
Renewed calls for action
McKesson, however, doesn’t deny that more change is needed. When he heard of Massey’s death earlier this month, the first thing he researched was the police department’s local use of force policy because often “they’re awful.”
“They allow the police to kill people,” McKesson said. “Imagine if you had a job where no matter what you did, it was impossible to be held accountable.”
The officer who shot Massey was fired after the incident. But an Illinois labor council representing the officer has since filed a complaint, arguing that he was terminated “without just cause.” Prior to Massey’s killing, the officer had a disciplinary record that included claims of bullying and abuse of power, according to reporting by CBS News.
Those circumstances are part of the reason Lonita Baker, an attorney who represented Breonna Taylor’s family, believes a cultural change in the way law enforcement organizations operate is equally as important as policy reform efforts.
“We can have all the legislation in the world, but if we still have the bad people they’re still going to do bad things,” Baker said.
Efforts to decrease police brutality, she said, should be focused at the local level – where most departments are run. She has advocated for more thoughtful hiring practices, and enacting better systems of addressing misconduct within police departments.
At the federal level, Baker puts the blame for policy action squarely in the hands of Congress, who has yet to pass the comprehensive George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
“As someone that works, and pushes for continued change, I’m going to continue like every little bit that we get is a step in the right direction,” Baker affirmed. “Is it fast enough? Absolutely not.”
Trahern Crews, an activist who founded Black Lives Matter Minnesota, urged Democrats to make racial justice a policy priority ahead of the 2024 general election. While he said he won’t vote for Trump, Crews believes Democrats need to earn the votes of Black Americans by more ardently pushing for policy change in the next few months.
“It’s just a wake up call for all of us across the country that we still have a lot of work, work to do, and that we have to get to it,” Crews said of Massey’s death.
“The only way we won’t go backwards is if we continue to stay in the streets and continue to organize and continue to put, not just pressure on police departments, but also on elected officials to do the right thing and enact policies into a law.”
Contributing: Steven Spearie, The Springfield State Journal- Register
Across Camp Mystic on the night of July 3, 195 campers settled into their bunks. Taps played over a loudspeaker shortly after 10 p.m. Dick Eastland, the 70-year-old patriarch of the family-run all girls camp, was at home in his creek-side house on the camp property, not far from the cabins.
So too was Edward Eastland, one of his sons. Edward grew up at Camp Mystic and now directs the camp along with his wife Mary Liz, living in a house even closer to the cabins and the Guadalupe River than his father.
Heavy rain was in the forecast, and camp staffers had already pulled from the water the largest boats — 20-foot-long “war canoes” — as they always did before a big rain in the flood-prone area.
What follows is the most detailed description to date of the events that took the lives of more than two dozen campers and counselors, and the elder Mr. Eastland, at the 99-year-old summer retreat.
The descriptions and rendering of those events were taken from the first interviews that Camp Mystic’s owners have granted, along with never-before-seen videos and photos taken during flooding at the camp, data from devices such as Apple watches, cell phones and vehicle crash data, and court documents from a lawsuit filed by some of the parents of children who died.
The Times visualized the water levels at the camp over the course of the night using videos and photos from the camp and estimates from a flood simulation by First Street, a nonprofit that assesses flood risk in the United States. The moving dots on the diagrams in this story show the simulated flow and depth of water at different times, and the extent of flooding.
1:14 a.m.
At 1:14 a.m. on July 4, the National Weather Service warned of potentially life-threatening flooding in the area. By that point, according to data from his phone, Dick Eastland was already up and monitoring the weather.
Around 1:45 a.m., he radioed his son, Edward. “His words were that we’ve gotten about two inches of rain in the last hour and that we need to move the waterfront equipment,” Edward Eastland told The New York Times, his first time recounting his story publicly. Members of the grounds crew went to the waterfront and pulled the remaining smaller canoes to higher ground on the hill nearer to the cabins. No one expected the water to rise that high, Edward Eastland said.
He drove to the camp office where his father and the night watchman, Glenn Juenke, were monitoring the weather. The elder Mr. Eastland checked the rain gauge that he kept at his house. A group of workers had just returned to the camp from a day off, describing a harrowing drive in the pouring rain.
2:14 a.m.
“Bubble Gum Creek is bad,” Edward Eastland texted his wife, at 2:21 a.m. “Look at the radar.” A severe thunderstorm hovered over the camp, he recalled in the interview. “Looks short tho,” she texted back, believing the heaviest rain would soon pass. “It kept saying that it would end in 30 minutes,” he recalled.
Around that time, two counselors from Bug House — a cabin of 12-year-olds closest to the river — came to the office to report water running down a steep hill into their cabin door. Edward and his father drove them back, and tried to reassure them. “At that point,” he recalled, “it was a normal flood.”
That changed quickly.
A little before 3 a.m., Edward said, a call came over the radio from a staff member in the gatehouse at the camp entrance, right along the river. “She said there’s water coming in her cabin,” he said. “She couldn’t get the door open.” Then her radio made some “very strange noises.” He could not reach her again. (The gatehouse cabin was eventually swept away in the flood; the woman survived by clinging to a tree.)
At about that time, Mr. Eastland said his father radioed from Bug House where the river was rising. “My dad said, we need to get Bug House out,” he recalled.
3:00 a.m.
The evacuation began, he said. Mr. Eastland, his father and Mr. Juenke loaded campers into each of their vehicles — two pickups and an S.U.V. — in two trips, bringing campers to the main office and directing them to walk the short distance to the recreation hall.
Counselors in a cabin further up the road, Nut Hut, watched as the evacuation took place.
The camp’s one-page safety plan, reviewed by The Times, called for them to shelter in place in a flood.
During the evacuation on July 4, the counselors were told “by the camp” not to leave their cabins, according to a lawsuit filed against Mystic. But as the water rose, the Nut Hut counselors evacuated themselves and their campers, climbing a steep hill behind their cabin.
Edward Eastland denied directing anyone to stay put during the evacuation. “When Jumble House asked me if they should walk, I said, ‘yes, go,’” he recalled, referring to another cabin.
In all, counselors in two cabins eventually evacuated on their own, climbing up the hill with their campers. Mr. Juenke helped those in a third cabin reach the hill, and then sent them up.
3:26 a.m.
“On the second trip, the water was running over the road. It was probably ankle deep,” Edward Eastland said. By then, water covered the sloping grass between the cabins and the river. Lightning crashed, revealing canoes floating over the soccer field.
Soon it was up to the top of his truck tires, he said.
At that point, Mr. Eastland and his father turned to the cabins of the youngest campers, Bubble Inn and Twins. A video, taken at 3:26 a.m. by one of the workers from a second-floor sleeping area above the commissary, captured deepening water swiftly moving past Twins, while, in the distance, campers were still able to wade through ankle and knee-deep water into the rec hall.
Mr. Juenke ended up in a cabin called Wiggle Inn, where he would ride out the rising water, with the campers and two counselors floating on inflatable mattresses. “We’re going to be OK,” Mr. Juenke recalled telling them.
3:50 a.m.
Dick Eastland parked his S.U.V. by the entrance to Bubble Inn. “He was standing outside of his Tahoe, and the water was rushing all around these cabins at this point, it was probably two or three feet,” his son said. “That’s the last place I saw him.”
Edward Eastland walked around Giggle Box and through waist-high water to the pair of connected cabins known as Twins.
“It feels like rapids at that point,” he said. He saw two counselors calling out for help from the porch. As he got to the cabin, he said he thought to himself, “we cannot get these eight-year-olds out of this cabin in this water.”
Water, he said, had never reached the cabin, not in 100 years. “It was unbelievable,” Edward Eastland recalled.
Inside the first Twins cabin, a dozen 8-year-old girls huddled in the corner together on top of two bunk beds.
“I tell them, I’m here and I’m not leaving you guys, and everything’s gonna be OK,” he said. The 11 girls in the second Twins cabin were also on the top bunks. The water at that point was rushing by the doorways and filling both cabins.
“Water started coming in through the window,” he said. “I yelled to the counselors, does anybody have a screwdriver?” Edward Eastland was thinking of trying to remove a metal vent in the low ceiling to climb through. As he moved between cabins, the counselors were yelling that the water was chest high.
“I remember seeing the waterline and just praying that it would stop going up,” he said. “And it just kept going up.”
Mr. Eastland said he was able to talk to his father on the radio, and he heard him struggling in the water.
“He said, ‘I need help. I can’t move,’” Mr. Eastland recalled. “I said, I can’t.”
Dick Eastland appeared to have been trying to get the eight-year-old girls out of Bubble Inn and into his Tahoe. It was not clear if he loaded all 13 campers and two counselors inside.
“He was right there,” Mr. Eastland recalled, standing outside the Twins cabins on a recent sunny morning, with Bubble Inn just a few steps away. But from inside the cabin that night, Mr. Eastland said he could not see him.
Then his father’s radio seemed to malfunction, Mr. Eastland said.
The water picked up Dick Eastland’s S.U.V., carrying it forcefully over the soccer field, down past the archery range and into a grove by the river, smashing the vehicle against a tall Cypress.
A data report from his vehicle, reviewed by The Times, indicated a crash at 3:51 a.m. His Apple watch showed he went underwater at the same time. He was found dead in the S.U.V., along with three campers from Bubble Inn.
Around that time, Mr. Eastland said he was in the second Twins cabin, the water at his shoulders, when a counselor yelled from the other Twins cabin that the water was carrying girls out the door.
“I’m right here in the doorway, and three girls come out of that door,” Mr. Eastland recalled, his voice shaking. “I catch two of them, and one girl gets away into the darkness.”
As he held the two girls, and gripped the doorway, the water began to rise over his head. Another camper swept from the cabin behind him grabbed onto him.
“I have no idea who it was,” he said. “She put her arms around my neck” and tried to hold on.
Then, he said, the water pushed him and the girls holding onto him from the cabin into the surging river.
Data from his Apple watch, reviewed by The Times, indicated that Mr. Eastland went underwater at 4:09 a.m.
He struggled against the current. “I could feel the pressure, like I was almost to the top,” he said, but the surface, “it just, it wasn’t there.”
The flow of the water carried Mr. Eastland alone past a row of trees along the road where an hour before he had been evacuating campers. Now the water reached the branches, which he tried to seize. But, he said, they kept breaking.
Eventually the water pushed him into the canopy of a pair of large trees, just below the Bug House cabin. He grabbed on.
Several campers and counselors from the Twins cabins were already there, clinging for their lives, Mr. Eastland said. Eight campers and three counselors survived by holding on to the same trees, he said. Another counselor survived in a tree along the road, and another camper also was found alive nearby, he said. Three more campers were later found alive down river.
The scale of the loss became clear only after the water receded, Mr. Eastland said.
Eleven campers from the two Twins cabins died in the flood. All 13 campers and both counselors who were in Bubble Inn died. Another girl was swept away after trying to return to her cabin, Jumble House, for a blanket after evacuating.
The body of one girl from Twins, Cile Steward, 8, has still not been found.
The waterlines in the cabins, measured by The Times, rose well above the heads of the campers.
In one of the Twins cabins, the lines appeared to reach the low, flat ceiling. In the other, the water stopped a few inches from the ceiling.
None of the buildings at the camp, except for the gatehouse and a wing of the commissary used for storage, were destroyed, though many were damaged. In Bubble Inn, the waterline was 6 feet 3 inches from the floor.
The riverwaters eventually surrounded and filled the first floor of the open, two-story recreation hall, where 95 campers and 15 counselors had gathered for safety, according to figures provided by Camp Mystic. They huddled on the narrow second-floor balcony that wrapped around the log-frame structure, watching beneath them the water flow through the building.
The relatives of some of the 25 campers and two counselors who died have filed lawsuits against the camp and the Eastland family, arguing that the camp had been negligent in advance of the flood and that the last-minute rescue efforts were undertaken too late.
“The Camp chose not to evacuate its campers and counselors, even as floodwater reached the cabins, until counselors demanded it,” according to one of the suits. “When it was too late, the Camp made a hopeless ‘rescue’ effort from its self-created disaster.”
In interviews with The Times, Mr. Eastland and his brother Richard, who also works and lives at the camp, said that based on decades of experience living at the camp and running it through previous floods, they believed the cabins were the safest place for the campers.
“In our minds, the cabins were built on high ground,” Richard Eastland said.
The family felt that way even after a 2011 FEMA map placed most of the cabins, including Bubble Inn and Twins, within a 100-year flood zone. The camp hired surveyors who argued there were errors in the topography used for that map; the federal agency in 2013 removed the cabins from the floodplain maps.
But the July 4 flood had changed what high ground was for the camp, Richard Eastland said.
There had been no plan for how to evacuate campers, the Eastlands said. The evacuation was improvised, as the water level rose more rapidly than they had ever seen. The camp is planning to create an evacuation plan for the future, Richard Eastland said.
And, the Eastlands said, the camp will never again use the cabins that flooded to house campers or counselors.
“No, never,” Edward Eastland said.
But next summer they plan to reopen their separate, adjacent camp – Camp Mystic Cypress Lake – that sits higher up a hill and did not flood that holiday weekend.
Some families have welcomed the news, while others, including those whose children died in the flood and the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, have criticized the camp for its decision. The Texas Legislature is planning to hold hearings on what took place at the camp though a date has not yet been announced.
Edward Eastland said he has been going to counseling. He has returned many times to the spot where his father died along with several girls from Bubble Inn, at the base of a Cypress tree, by the now-gently flowing river.
“Every morning is horrible,” he said, his voice quavering. “I want to help the families. I don’t know what to do though.”
“We are so sorry,” said his wife, Mary Liz. “I feel like no one thinks that we’re sorry.”
Methodology
Times’ journalists generated the 3-D model of Camp Mystic from high-resolution LiDAR data captured by The Times using a drone flown over the camp on Nov. 12. The flood simulation provided by First Street models water levels at the camp over the course of the night, based on rain on the night of the flood and topography in the area. Photos and videos from the camp point to water levels even higher than the simulation’s estimate.
Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s facing threats following a barrage of personal criticism from US President Donald Trump on social media.
The former MAGA ally posted on X, saying she had been contacted by private security firms “with warnings for my safety as a hotbed of threats against me are being fueled and egged on by the most powerful man in the world”.
She went on: “As a woman, I take threats from men seriously.
“I now have a small understanding of the fear and pressure the women, who are victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal, must feel.
“As a Republican, who overwhelmingly votes for President Trump’s bills and agenda, his aggression against me, which also fuels the venomous nature of his radical internet trolls (many of whom are paid), this is completely shocking to everyone.”
Calling her “wacky,” a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) and swapping her surname from Greene to “Brown” (“Green grass turns Brown when it begins to ROT!”), Donald Trump rescinded his support for the Georgia representative and suggested he could back a primary challenger against her.
Ms Greene claims the president’s “aggressive rhetoric” is in retaliation for her support for releasing files about disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
After the US government shutdown ended, a petition to vote on the full release of the files about Epstein received enough signatures – including that of Ms Greene – to bring it to a vote in the House of Representatives.
Ms Greene claimed text messages she sent to Mr Trump over the Epstein files “sent him over the edge,” writing on social media: “Of course he’s coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next week’s vote to release the Epstein files.”
She went on: “It’s astonishing really, how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level.”
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Trump rebukes MAGA ally over foreign policy
High-profile figures, including Mr Trump, have been referenced in some of the documents.
The White House has said the “selectively leaked emails” were an attempt to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump”, who has consistently denied any involvement or knowledge about Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.
Mr Trump has called the Epstein files a “hoax” created by the Democrats to “deflect” from the shutdown.
Watch Sky’s Martha Kelner clash with Taylor Greene earlier this year…
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Marjorie Taylor Greene clashes with Sky correspondent
In another post on X, Ms Greene wrote: “I never thought that fighting to release the Epstein files, defending women who were victims of rape, and fighting to expose the web of rich powerful elites would have caused this, but here we are.
“And it truly speaks for itself. There needs to be a new way forward.”
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The new Epstein files: The key takeaways
Read more on Jeffrey Epstein:
Ghislaine Maxwell ‘wants Trump to commute sentence’
What Epstein’s right-hand woman said about Trump and Andrew
Epstein took his own life in prison in 2019 while awaiting a trial for sex trafficking charges and was accused of running a “vast network” of underage girls for sex. He pleaded not guilty.
Following a conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, he was registered as a sex offender.
Mr Trump has consistently denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
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