$10 Million Settlement for Family of Sonya Massey, Shot in Her Kitchen After Calling 911 for Help
Won by Ben Crump Law and Romanucci & Blandin.
Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, representing the family of Sonya Massey, secured a $10 million wrongful-death settlement with Sangamon County, Illinois, after sheriff's deputy Sean Grayson shot the 36-year-old mother in her own kitchen when she called 911 to report a possible prowler. Crump called it by far the largest settlement of any kind in the county's history.
What happened
In the early morning of July 6, 2024, Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black mother of two who had been struggling with her mental health, called 911 to report a possible prowler outside her home near Springfield, Illinois. Two Sangamon County sheriff's deputies responded. What began as a calm interaction inside her home turned deadly over a pot of hot water on her stove: after Massey said "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus," Deputy Sean Grayson threatened to shoot her in the face, drew his pistol, and fired three times, striking her below the eye. His own body camera, which he activated only after the shooting, though his partner's captured the encounter, became the case's central evidence.
The footage, released weeks later, produced national outrage and comment from the sitting president. It also exposed a hiring failure: Grayson had worked for six law-enforcement agencies in four years and had a record that included DUI convictions, yet the sheriff's office had hired him anyway. He was fired, indicted for first-degree murder, and the county's sheriff resigned under pressure.
Massey's family retained Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci of Romanucci & Blandin, the same pairing that had led the George Floyd civil case, to pursue the county. The legal team pressed both for compensation and for structural change in how the county screens and hires deputies, while the U.S. Department of Justice opened an inquiry that led to an agreement with the sheriff's office on hiring and training reforms.
The civil claims resolved without a lawsuit going to trial. On February 11, 2025, the Sangamon County Board voted to approve a $10 million settlement with Massey's estate, and a judge subsequently gave the deal final approval. Announcing the agreement, Crump called it historic, by far the largest settlement ever reached in Sangamon County of any kind, let alone in a civil rights case, while stressing that the money was only the first step in the family's pursuit of justice, with the criminal prosecution of Grayson still ahead.
The Massey settlement showed the Crump-Romanucci playbook operating at the county level: swift retention, relentless public pressure around the body-camera footage, and a resolution in seven months that spared the family years of litigation while forcing a mid-sized county to confront the hiring practices that had put a deputy with Grayson's record at Massey's door.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.NBC News: $10 million settlement in Sonya Massey shooting case gets final approval·Archived copy
- 2.Capitol News Illinois: Massey attorneys announce $10 million settlement in wrongful death case·Archived copy
- 3.FOX 32 Chicago: Family of Sonya Massey agrees to $10M settlement after fatal police shooting·Archived copy
- 4.Associated Press, 'Lawyers for Sonya Massey's family say $10M settlement first step; await trial, legislative changes', February 2025
- 5.NBC News, 'Former Illinois sheriff's deputy sentenced to 20 years for murder of Sonya Massey', January 29, 2026·Archived copy
- 6.WVIK, 'Sonya Massey attorneys announce $10 million settlement in wrongful death case', February 12, 2025
- 7.NPR Illinois, 'Sangamon County Board approves $10 million settlement with the family of Sonya Massey', February 12, 2025·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Ben Crump Law
All Ben Crump Law proven verdicts →Lewis Butler, a security guard, was shot eight times and killed in November 2023 during an armed robbery at an internet cafe in Havana, Florida. The cafe's operators had not reported a robbery three weeks earlier in which the gun used against him was stolen. In December 2025 a Gadsden County jury awarded his widow $779,389,024, including $550 million for pain and suffering and $225 million for loss of companionship.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.
Ben Crump, with co-counsel Antonio Romanucci and L. Chris Stewart, negotiated a $27 million settlement between the family of George Floyd and the City of Minneapolis, announced by the family's lawyers as the largest pretrial settlement of a civil rights wrongful-death claim in American history. The city council approved the payment unanimously in March 2021, while jury selection in Derek Chauvin's murder trial was underway blocks away.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.