This story was originally published by Invisible Institute, IPM Newsroom and Illinois Times
The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office hired now former deputy Sean Grayson despite his history of policing at five other police departments in 3 years, serious misconduct in the military and integrity issues at former jobs.
Experts say this combination of issues should have been a glaring warning about Grayson as a candidate.
“In this particular circumstance, there were enough red flags or things that you go, wow, there’s a problem here,” said Chris Burbank, a former longtime chief of the Salt Lake City Police Department.
In an interview conducted August 1, Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell defended his agency’s vetting of Grayson. Campbell, 60, has said he won’t resign amid public criticism in the wake of the shooting death of Sonya Massey, a Black woman, at the hand of Grayson, who is white.
Grayson has been charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct after shooting and killing Massey in her home in the early morning hours of July 6 after she called for help thinking there was a prowler outside her home in the Cabbage Patch neighborhood of unincorporated Sangamon County, just outside Springfield.
Invisible Institute, IPM News, and Illinois Times obtained Grayson’s personnel file and application materials through a public records request to the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. After reviewing these records, Burbank said he believes the Sheriff’s Office was negligent in hiring Grayson.
“My bottom line — they were insufficient in evaluating this individual’s background before hiring, and to that extent, I believe they negligently hired this person, and bear some responsibility for his poor actions,” said Burbank, who is now a law enforcement strategy consultant with the Center for Policing Equity.
In the interview with Illinois Times, Campbell disagreed, calling Burbank’s comments “opinion and speculation.”
“There was no indication that anything in his background would lead to a violent event like that,” Campbell said in his first round of news media interviews after the nationally publicized incident between a 30-year-old white police officer and a 36-year-old, unarmed Black woman inside her home.
“There was nothing in his background that would disqualify him from being a police officer in Illinois,” the sheriff said.
Campbell, a Republican who is halfway through his second four-year term as sheriff, said Grayson was never fired from any of the five part-time and full-time police agencies he worked for in the three years before he joined the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office in May 2023.
He said he would be willing to work with state officials to improve communication among police agencies about personnel issues. He said he has told people who handle hiring in his office “to be as thorough as possible” since Massey’s death sparked protests locally, statewide and nationally.
“My standard is now that ‘I want you to figure out a way not to hire this person,’” Campbell said. “That is my new standard … I want you to do your best to keep this person from being hired.
“That’s not really an angle we ever took,” he said. “If you thought about it, it’s a negative angle, but I think that it’s a good idea for us to take that angle and then again work with these other entities about trying to find a way to ensure we get all the information.”
The hiring process for Grayson has spurred several Democrats on the Sangamon County Board, including Marc Ayers, to call for Sheriff Jack Cambpell to resign. Ayers, who represents District 12 and sits on the board’s Jail Committee, which oversees the sheriff’s office, said the Sangamon County Sheriff’s hiring process needs to be overhauled to include more input from county employees.
“Before all this happened, we knew absolutely nothing. And not just about the former deputy, literally any deputy that comes on,” Ayers said. “We literally know nothing about them.”
The county board is really just “holding the purse strings,” Ayers said. Once they approve the budget to hire a new officer, the only information the county board members see about a new hire is their name. That leaves almost the sole power of hiring to Sheriff Campbell and the sheriff’s office’s Deputy Merit Commission, whose members he appoints.
Reforming this system is the top priority for many board members after the death of Sonya Massey, Ayers said.
“That process has got to get looked at first and foremost, because I think having sole hiring authority being done behind closed doors, is not building public trust,” he said.
At a community meeting on July 29, Campbell said his department “failed the community” and failed Sonya Massey and her family. But he told Illinois Times that his statement didn’t mean his office made mistakes in hiring Grayson.
Grayson’s application included questionable references
At the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked immediately before being hired at Sangamon County, Grayson was investigated for initiating a traffic pursuit that reached 110 miles per hour. The incident ended with him hitting a deer after he had turned his lights and sirens off, but was still traveling at a high speed.
During the investigation, Logan County Chief Deputy Nathan Miller made clear he believed that Grayson had lied in his official report documenting his reasoning for initiating the stop in the first place.
Grayson stated that he’d seen a woman suspiciously slide down in her seat in a parked pickup truck after making eye contact with him, but Miller demonstrated through Google Maps and video footage that Grayson could not have physically seen what he claimed to have seen based on his location.
Just based on what Grayson had written in his report, Miller said, “You got a report writing violation for policy. You got an accuracy violation for policy. You got a standard of conduct violation for policy.”
Craig Futterman, who directs the University of Chicago Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic, described the traffic stop to Invisible Institute and IPM News as a “classic pretext stop” — based solely on Grayson’s suspicion that some potential crime had occurred, without any evidence — and said his decision to escalate the stop to a high-speed pursuit was an extreme example “of poor judgment.”
Despite these issues with the case, all that existed in the official written report for the investigation was that Grayson admitted his memory failed him, and that he needed more training on “high-stress decision making.” Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell has blamed Logan County for failing to provide additional material.
Campbell told Illinois Times that he spoke with Logan County Sheriff Mark Landers after Massey’s death. Cambell didn’t say specifically whether Sangamon County asked Landers for a broad range of information from Grayson’s personnel file.
“All I know is that he verified that we didn’t get the information that we had sought,” Campbell said. He told WCIA that he relied on “professional courtesy” when contacting previous departments.
A spokesperson for Landers said he will not speak to the media about Grayson.
In his two-page background investigation, Sangamon County Sheriff’s Lt. Wes Wooden summarized Grayson’s time at the Logan County agency in a paragraph that quoted Jerry Mayes, a former co-worker of Grayson’s who also was a personal reference.
Wooden wrote that Mayes said Grayson is a “good deputy” who “needs more extensive training.”
However, the Sangamon County Sheriff’s background investigator should have also been able to uncover what reporters were eventually able to, regardless of what the official record provided by Logan County was, said Burbank. He pointed to the fact that the only interview that the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office did with the Logan County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t with a supervisor of Grayson’s, but rather with Mayes, a coworker — who was also listed as a personal reference.
“The two most important things you can do as a police chief is hire people and fire people,” Burbank said. “Those are the only two things you have control over.”
In the background investigation, the other personal reference listed was Scott Butterfield, who’s identified as the father of Grayson’s girlfriend. Butterfield was also a longtime official with the sheriff’s office who retired from the office in 2020 after 24 years, WCIA reported.
In a podcast interview released on May 7, 2024, Sheriff Campbell discussed how family ties play into his hiring decisions.
Sharing that he’s a “legacy” with the sheriff’s office due to his father having worked there, Campbell said “I look for things like that” when evaluating applicants.
“If we have a connection when we’re looking for young applicants, do you have a connection with law enforcement — especially the sheriff’s office? Even if it’s two or three degrees separated, there’s still some connection there,” said Campbell on The Table podcast, released by Springfield cleaning company Peerless Cleaning & Restoration Services.
“If you have that type of connection to an agency, then you really, I think, put in the effort and you wanna do right by your family,” Campbell continued. “Your family knows that other people were there, could be an uncle or something, so I think that also ties us down” when parsing through applications.
In his interview with Illinois Times, Campbell said that Grayson’s connection to Butterfield had “very little” influence on the decision to hire Grayson. “I’ve lived here my entire life. I’ve been in law enforcement for 30 years plus, and I know a lot of people. So I end up inevitably knowing some of the people that are listed as references or neighbors or something.
“I considered it, but it didn’t change my feeling about Grayson. It was simply, OK, he will get an interview like everybody else, and we’ll see how it plays out.”
He told the podcast hosts that he thinks the sheriff’s office has the “best” application process when compared with other local law enforcement. After applicants pass the physical and written tests, he said, they’re entered into “this giant pool” of potential deputies.
“We can pluck anybody from that pool,” Campbell said. “We don’t have any sort of order you have to go in by how you scored or anything, so I think we have the best process to hand-select the best people.”
“Nepotism runs thick in Sangamon County,” Sangamon County Board member Ayers said of Grayson’s hiring. “That makes me question — are we hiring the most qualified individuals? Or are we just hiring folks that know someone that knows someone else? Because that’s inappropriate.”
In his online statement, Campbell also shifted blame for the hiring process to the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Merit Commission, writing, “Through our current hiring process, Grayson’s application was reviewed and sent to a Merit Commission for review and certification. The Merit Commission certified Grayson for hire.”
However, Springfield lawyer Patrick “Tim” Timoney, a former Sangamon County Democratic Party chairperson and chairperson of the Merit Commission, said the Merit Commission doesn’t review and certify applications. It also doesn’t do background checks, he said.
The commission mainly exists to administer written tests to entry-level applications for deputy and correctional officer applicants, Timony said. The commission has no say over police who apply from other agencies to become deputies. Campbell and other top officials from the sheriff’s office evaluate those applications, Timoney said.
He added that he talked with Campbell recently about expanding the commission’s role in the hiring process for deputies. Such an expansion would require a change in rules governing the commission, Timoney said.
No investigation into Army discharge for serious misconduct
The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office did have Grayson’s records from the U.S. Army showing he was discharged because of serious misconduct. However, no records were included about what this serious misconduct was.
According to Sheriff Campbell, he believed Grayson’s DUI in 2015 was the reason for his discharge from the military because of a letter Grayson’s former commanding officer wrote in his application to the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.
“Aside from Mr. Grayson’s DUI there were no other issues that he had during his tenure in the Army,” Master Sergeant Ray Benekin wrote in a letter of reference.
“Past DUI convictions are not disqualifying criteria for a deputy,” Campbell wrote in an online statement on July 31. “We recognize that individuals can change and improve over time.”
“I have no idea if it’s correct or not,” Campbell told Illinois Times of Benekin’s letter. “If he misled us, I would think that would endanger his career. … I don’t know how you get information out of the military.”
However, experts said that the letter in and of itself should have been a red flag to Campbell.
It wasn’t relevant to his application to become a sheriff’s deputy, said former Air Force judge Joshua Kastenberg, because Benekin wrote it as a letter of reference to help Grayson someday get back into a branch of the military. “If he can join the Navy I have no doubt he will be a great asset and work very hard to be the best,” Benekin wrote in his unsigned, undated letter.
The letters from Benekin and another sergeant who provided a reference letter that also discussed Grayson returning to the military “don’t apply to a police department application,” said Kastenberg, who’s now a University of New Mexico law professor. “Whoever’s responsible, should have just looked at those and said, ‘This is a big red flag.’”
“At best, what they did was negligent,” he said.
“If these letters came from an actual officer, especially a commanding officer, they would be on letterhead and have much more of an official appearance,” said Anthony Ghiotto, a University of Illinois law professor and former Air Force prosecutor.
“These were obviously not written by his commanding officer,” agreed Geoffrey Corn, a former Army lieutenant colonel who directs Texas Tech University’s Center for Military Law & Policy. He said the letters could have been written as rebuttals during Grayson’s discharge. “They seem to be exactly what a soldier would get when his detailed military defense lawyer tells him to go find some people who will say some good things about him.”
Experts consulted by Invisible Institute and IPM News have said that, while it’s possible that the DUI was, by itself, the sole reason for the discharge, it’s also likely that other misconduct occurred to warrant such a discharge. Public records requests are pending with various Army offices for records about Grayson’s service and discharge.
As a police chief who used to hire officers, Burbank said military records are often difficult to get. However, he said discharge records because of serious misconduct should have prompted the sheriff’s office to find out more.
Experts say “red flags” were missed
Hiring processes that don’t investigate red flags allow officers like Grayson to move from department to department without accountability, Burbank said.
“Across the country, you have officers that move from agency to agency, and they have substandard performance that is either not documented whatsoever, or is documented and then not passed on,” Burbank said. “So people end up being hired that really shouldn’t be police officers anymore, but continue to perpetuate this problem.”
Other figures in policing have also spoken out about what they see as clear issues with the hiring process. “If a police chief/sheriff believes this was a thorough hiring process, you’re wrong,” wrote Thomas Weitzel, former chief of the Riverside Police Department in Chicago’s west suburbs, on social media.
“Sonya Massey was killed by an officer who drifted from one law enforcement job to another after leaving the Army after a serious offense,” wrote Cedric Alexander, a former police and public safety official in Minneapolis, suburban Atlanta and Rochester, NY, in an MSNBC op-ed. “It doesn’t appear that any of the departments that hired him thoroughly vetted him. How could they have hired him if they had?” Both cited Invisible Institute and IPM News’ coverage of Grayson’s Army discharge.
Sheriff Jack Campbell defended his decision to hire Grayson despite his moves from department to department in an online statement after his office released the former deputy’s personnel file.
“Grayson’s employment history shows that he was employed by five different law enforcement agencies prior to applying to the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. This is a standard career path in this field,” Campbell wrote online. “What I prefer to see is movement to progressively larger and more structured agencies with higher levels of public interaction, which indicates professional growth and ambition.”
Ayers believes building a new way to screen and hire deputies is essential to rebuild the public’s trust after Massey’s death and the nationwide scrutiny on policing in Sangamon County, Ayers said.
“The public trust has been decimated at this point from what happened with Sonya Massey,” Ayers said. “There has got to be another body that reviews applications and background checks [to] screen candidates before they even get to Sheriff Campbell for hire.”
This story was produced in collaboration between Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago; IPM Newsroom, a public media station based in Champaign, Illinois; and Illinois Times, a weekly newspaper based in Springfield. Farrah Anderson is an Investigative Reporting Fellow with Invisible Institute. Sam Stecklow is a journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Dean Olsen is a Senior Staff Writer for Illinois Times.