Copyright St. Paul Pioneer Press
To place an obituary, please include the information from the obituary checklist below in an email to obits@pioneerpress.com. There is no option to place them through our website. Feel free to contact our obituary desk at 651-228-5263 with any questions. General Information: Your full name, Address (City, State, Zip Code), Phone number, And an alternate phone number (if any) Obituary Specification: Name of Deceased, Obituary Text, A photo in a JPEG or PDF file is preferable, TIF and other files are accepted, we will contact you if there are any issues with the photo. Ad Run dates There is a discount for running more than one day, but this must be scheduled on the first run date to apply. If a photo is used, it must be used for both days for the discount to apply, contact us for more information. Policies: Verification of Death: In order to publish obituaries a name and phone number of funeral home/cremation society is required. We must contact the funeral home/cremation society handling the arrangements during their business hours to verify the death. If the body of the deceased has been donated to the University of Minnesota Anatomy Bequest Program, or a similar program, their phone number is required for verification. Please allow enough time to contact them especially during their limited weekend hours. A death certificate is also acceptable for this purpose but only one of these two options are necessary. Guestbook and Outside Websites: We are not allowed to reference other media sources with a guestbook or an obituary placed elsewhere when placing an obituary in print and online. We may place a website for a funeral home or a family email for contact instead; contact us with any questions regarding this matter. Obituary Process: Once your submission is completed, we will fax or email a proof for review prior to publication in the newspaper. This proof includes price and days the notice is scheduled to appear. Please review the proof carefully. We must be notified of errors or changes before the notice appears in the Pioneer Press based on each day’s deadlines. After publication, we will not be responsible for errors that may occur after final proofing. Online: Changes to an online obituary can be handled through the obituary desk. Call us with further questions. Payment Procedure: Pre-payment is required for all obituary notices prior to publication by the deadline specified below in our deadline schedule. Please call 651-228-5263 with your payment information after you have received the proof and approved its contents. Credit Card: Payment accepted by phone only due to PCI (Payment Card Industry) regulations EFT: Check by phone. Please provide your routing number and account number. Cash: Accepted at our FRONT COUNTER Monday – Friday from 8:00AM – 3:30PM Rates: The minimum charge is $162 for the first 10 lines. Every line after the first 10 is $12.20. If the ad is under 10 lines it will be charged the minimum rate of $162. On a second run date, the lines are $8.20 per line, starting w/ the first line. For example: if first run date was 20 lines the cost would be $164. Each photo published is $125 per day. For example: 2 photos in the paper on 2 days would be 4 photo charges at $500. Deadlines: Please follow deadline times to ensure your obituary is published on the day requested. Hours Deadline (no exceptions) Ad Photos MEMORIAM (NON-OBITUARY) REQUEST Unlike an obituary, Memoriam submissions are remembrances of a loved one who has passed. The rates for a memoriam differ from obituaries. Please call or email us for more memoriam information Please call 651-228-5280 for more information. HOURS: Monday – Friday 8:00AM – 5:00PM (CLOSED WEEKENDS and HOLIDAYS) Please submit your memoriam ad to memoriams@pioneerpress.com or call 651-228-5280. By JOHN O’CONNOR, Associated Press PEORIA, Ill. (AP) — An Illinois jury has begun deliberations in the first-degree murder trial of a sheriff’s deputy who shot Sonya Massey, a Black woman in her home who had called 911 for help and was later killed because of the way she was handling a pan of hot water. The nine-woman, three-man jury received the case just after 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. Jurors must decide whether Sean Grayson, 31, is guilty of murder for fatally shooting Massey in her Springfield home. Grayson and another deputy answered Massey’s emergency call reporting a prowler outside the 36-year-old woman’s home early on the morning of July 6, 2024. They entered the house and, spotting a pan of hot water on the stove, Grayson ordered it removed, according to the other deputy’s body camera video, which was key evidence. Grayson and Massey joked about how Grayson moved away as Massey moved the hot pan. Then, Massey said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Grayson yelled at her to drop the pot and threatened to shoot her. Massey apologized and ducked behind a counter. “She makes it abundantly clear, ‘I want no part of this. Let this be done,’” Mary Beth Rodgers, Sangamon County First Assistant State’s attorney, said in her closing argument. “She doesn’t say, ‘Let’s go, Sean.’ She says, ‘I’m sorry.’ He has no right to go into her kitchen, where she’s hiding from an angry man with a gun, he has no right to follow her and shoot her.” Defense attorney Daniel Fultz beseeched the jury to decide how Grayson felt in the moment, “not to sit back 15 months later and say, ‘This is what I would have done.’” “He drew his weapon to gain compliance, to make her realize that whatever she was considering doing, she shouldn’t do,” Fultz said. “It is true that she put the pot down. If it ended there, we wouldn’t be here today, but for reasons we’ll never know, she reacquired the pot, stood up and threw it in his direction. Only at that time did he fire his weapon.” Massey’s killing raised new questions about U.S. law enforcement shootings of Black people in their homes. The accompanying publicity, protests and legal action over the incident prompted Judge Ryan Cadagin to move the trial from Springfield, 200 miles southwest of Chicago, to Peoria, an hour’s drive north of the capital city, because of pre-trial publicity. If convicted of first-degree murder, Grayson faces a sentence of 45 years to life in prison. The jury also has been given the option of considering second-degree murder, which applies when there is a “serious provocation” of the defendant or when defendants believe their actions are justified even though that belief is unreasonable. Second-degree murder is punishable by a term of four to 20 years or probation. In an unusual step for a defendant in a murder case, Grayson testified in his own defense, saying he considered using a Taser to subdue Massey but was afraid it wouldn’t work given the distance and the counter separating them. He said he determined that Massey was a threat and drew his 9 mm pistol only after she uttered her “rebuke” twice — although prosecutors pointed out that was because he didn’t hear her and asked her to repeat it. Dawson Farley, the other deputy on the scene that morning, testified that while he followed Grayson in drawing his gun, he did not see or hear anything that caused him to consider Massey a threat. But Farley, who did not fire his weapon, acknowledged that he initially told investigators he was threatened by the hot water. Fultz suggested in his closing that the reason the then-probationary employee changed his story after Grayson was indicted was so he wouldn’t be criminally charged too.
