How race, police and mental health collided in America’s heartland

On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes discusses what’s next for the country after this summer’s deputy fatal shooting of Sonya Massey. The Trump campaign says ‘hostile’ foreign sources hacked and leaked internal documents. USA TODAY Trump Campaign Reporter Zac Anderson takes a look at former President Donald Trump’s shift in approach. That’s a wrap on the Paris Summer Olympics! Plus, Jordan Chiles must return her Olympic bronze medal.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson, and today is Monday, August 12th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.
Today, what’s next for America after Sonya Massey’s death. Plus, Donald Trump’s campaign blames hostile foreign players for a campaign hack. And we take a closer look at Trump’s tonal shift in recent weeks.
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It’s been just over a month since a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois shot and killed Sonya Massey in her own home. I spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent Trevor Hughes about how the community is coping and what’s next when it comes to questions about police, race, and justice in America.
Trevor, thanks for joining me today as always.
Trevor Hughes:
Absolutely.
Taylor Wilson:
So I want to just kind of walk through this tragedy chronologically, Trevor. What do we know about the weeks leading up to the shooting? And then what actually happened on the night of Massey’s death according to released body camera footage?
Trevor Hughes:
What we know is that Sonya Massey was a longtime resident of Springfield. She had 600 members of her family. This is a family with deep ties in the area. She had some level of mental illness, her family tells us. We’re not sure what it was, no one really wants to talk about the specifics, but everyone sort of acknowledged that she did have some issues. And in the days leading up to this terrible incident, she had actually called 911. Her mother had called 911. She had actually spent some time in a hospital for some level of treatment of this mental illness, but she left relatively quickly after being taken there.
Taylor Wilson:
And so the night of what happened here, Trevor, I know the body camera footage is absolutely brutal. It was released last month.
Trevor Hughes:
It is really awful to watch. Sonya Massey actually called 911 herself to report that there was a prowler in her backyard, and she had texted her eldest child to say the same thing. The deputies came and checked all around the neighborhood, flashlights, looked over, didn’t see any signs. When you look at the body cam footage, you can see that Ms. Massey was not focusing well. The deputies were asking her questions. She wasn’t really responding to them directly. She was looking at her cell phone instead. She seemed distracted. Something else was going on.
Ultimately, the deputies made their way into the house, and this is the part that’s heartbreaking, is that they went from sort of chuckling and laughing to her death literally within seconds. Ms. Massey was asked to remove a pot of water from the stove, so she went into her kitchen and picked up the pot. And as she was doing that, she said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” And the deputy responded forcefully, said very directly, he would shoot her in the face if she threatened him. And then shots came out just moments later, a really awful situation to see.
Taylor Wilson:
So we’re learning more, Trevor, about the former deputy here, Sean Grayson, who fired his weapon inside her home. What do we know about him and his background ahead of the shooting?
Trevor Hughes:
Deputy Grayson was relatively new to this department. He had worked jobs in other area police departments over the past couple of years, part-time jobs. This was, best as we can tell, a young man working his way up. But at the same time, there were a lot of red flags. Records show that he had at least two DUIs. And then he was discharged from the Army without an honorable discharge. He had a different kind of discharge. And then in interviews with his supervisors at those other departments, there were sort of these revelations that he moved to quickly, that he wasn’t being trusted because sometimes his reports didn’t really match what was on the body camera footage from other incidents. And so the question that’s really being raised around Springfield is how did this deputy, with a bunch of red flags in his history, how did he end up on the streets working in the middle of the night?
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, these are important questions. So Grayson was quickly fired and then put in jail after this fatal shooting. And as you write in the piece, Trevor, there was a little opposition from police unions or law and order advocates. At the same time, as you mentioned in the piece, law enforcement officers have killed more than 700 people this year, putting the year on track to be the deadliest since the nonprofit mapping police violence began cataloging officer killings in 2013. Where do we stand now on issues of police violence and systemic racism four years after the killing of George Floyd?
Trevor Hughes:
We’re in this very delicate position right now. I mean, there are a lot of police officers. I have a lot of police officer friends myself who would also point out that a lot of police officers have been shot this year. And so , there is a lot of violent confrontation going on in this country.
The issue with police involved shootings is that a Black community in particular says that police officers, law enforcement, are way too quick to resort to violence when dealing with the Black community in a way that they would never respond to a white person having the exact same issues. That’s something that comes up over and over. And in this particular instance, one of the things we’re seeing is that the Black community is very glad to see that this deputy was fired, brought up on charges very, very quickly. But they are also saying, “What’s next? How do we address a system that allowed a deputy with so many obvious red flags to be on the street?” And so they’re really pushing to look at the systems that exist around policing in America.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thank you, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
You bet.
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Taylor Wilson:
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said over the weekend that some internal documents and communications had been hacked and leaked to a news organization. And the campaign blamed it on foreign sources hostile to the United States, intent on interfering with the presidential election. The acknowledgement by the campaign came after the POLITICO news organization reported that it had received emails from an anonymous account with documents supposedly from inside the Trump campaign operation. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to USA TODAY, “These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and so chaos throughout our democratic process.”
Cheung did not say why the campaign believed the hack came from hostile foreign operatives or whether it had been briefed on any intrusions by US intelligence or law enforcement agencies or private cybersecurity firms. But he cited a new report issued by Microsoft on Friday that said Iran is ramping up its digital election meddling activity to try and influence the upcoming US election.
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Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s approach has taken on a notable shift as Vice President Kamala Harris gains momentum. I spoke with USA TODAY Trump campaign reporter Zac Anderson to learn more.
Zac, how are you, sir?
Zac Anderson:
Doing good. Good to be back.
Taylor Wilson:
Good to have you back on the program. So Trump appears to be ramping up more personal attacks really in recent weeks, Zac. What are you seeing and hearing?
Zac Anderson:
So there’s been really a change of tone, we saw during the Republican National Convention and after Trump survived an assassination attempt where he was really talking about unity and trying to bring the country together. That didn’t last very long. In fact, it really didn’t last through the end of the convention. His convention speech ended up being a recap of his rallies and some of his greatest hits from this election season. But we’ve really seen that since Biden dropped out of the race and Harris has really gained a lot of momentum, he has tried to blunt her energy and tried to define her and focused at first more on policy and trying to call her liberal and attacking some of her policies, but really now a lot more on personal attacks, questioning her racial identity, saying she always identified as Indian and now identifies as Black, which is false. She went to a historically Black college, a historically Black sorority. And also calling her low IQ, purposely misspelling her name. So a lot of really personal attacks that are reminiscent of how he campaigned in previous campaigns.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, so you mentioned the previous campaigns. Trump back in 2016 was very aggressive against his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and it worked out for him. He won that election. Is he taking lessons from that campaign in particular this time around?
Zac Anderson:
He probably does think that, “Hey, it worked for me then. Why not try it now?” But a lot of people have pointed out to me that this is a different world and these are different candidates. Hillary Clinton was one of the most historically unpopular candidates in modern times. She had been saddled with years of baggage from being the first lady and her political involvement. The Clintons obviously became a somewhat controversial brand, especially on the right. And so she had been in politics for decades, whereas Harris is much less defined. But Trump did win the 2016 campaign. He really belittled his way to victory by talking about low-energy Jeb Bush and little Marco Rubio and lying Ted Cruz, and crooked Hillary, and really does seem like a retread of what he did in 2016.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah. You touched on this a bit, Zac, but is this approach getting worn out or stale at this 0.8 years later?
Zac Anderson:
I think there’s some people who really do think that it’s sort of a tired schtick, know that voters might be over it to some degree. But obviously, it doesn’t seem like Trump feels that way or he wouldn’t be doing it. Some of these more personal attacks do really fire up his base. I do think that they make the Republican establishment nervous, but making the Republican establishment nervous is something that Trump excels at.
Taylor Wilson:
And Zac, despite some of these issues we’ve been outlining for Trump, this race does still appear to be neck and neck, depending on kind of which polls you look at, how you view it. Where does this race actually stand in terms of the polling and some of what experts are saying?
Zac Anderson:
The momentum is clearly with Kamala Harris. Polls have all moved in her favor, especially in the swing states. Now there’s more swing states that are toss-ups here. We’re seeing nonpartisan political handicappers move more states into the toss up category like Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, states that Biden won in 2020, but that seemed like they were trending pretty heavily towards Trump. It does seem like the momentum is in Harris’s favor, but she’s not opening up big leads at this point. The races are all sort of within the margin of error in these swing states. There’s more swing states that seem to be in play now, so there’s more pathways to victory for Democrats, but it still seems like pretty much a toss up at this point, and that the race is really kind of reverting to where most people always thought it would be, which is a nail biter, which is what the last few elections have been.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. I’m sure we’ll be checking in again over the next few weeks. Zac Anderson covers Donald Trump and the Republicans for USA TODAY. Thank you, Zac.
Zac Anderson:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
That’s a wrap on the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. On the final weekend of the games, the men’s and women’s US basketball teams picked up gold medals in their respective finals, while the US women’s volleyball team fell to Italy and had to settle for silver.
And there was big news from gymnastics as the International Olympic Committee announced yesterday that US gymnast Jordan Chiles will be required to return her individual bronze medal. The news comes less than 24 hours after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the judging panel for the women’s floor exercise final made a mistake in granting an inquiry filed by Charles coaches, which moved the American gymnast into medal position. The Romanian Gymnastics Federation had challenged the validity of that inquiry saying it was filed four seconds beyond the deadline by which any scoring appeals had to be submitted. The IOC said in a statement that it will reallocate the bronze medal to Romania’s Ana Barbosu, who had previously been fourth. USA Gymnastics, though, said yesterday that it had obtained new evidence showing that Charles’s coach submitted the inquiry into her score before the time deadline. You can read more about that with the link in today’s show notes.
The game’s wrapped up last night with a closing ceremony in Paris as things now shift to Los Angeles for 2028. But first, the Winter Games set for Italy in 2026.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. And if you’re on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I’m Taylor Wilson, and I’ll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.