A tragedy revisited, trees come down, and shootings go up
A tragedy revisited, trees come down, and shootings go up
Been spending a lot of time on social media lately (pray for me) so I’m sorry there hasn’t been a newsletter in a while. News happens fast these days! Anyway, here’s a round-up of what’s been catching my attention, most of it pretty grim.
ABC News Studios just released the documentary "Death in the Dorms" and episode 3 features the 2010 murder of UVA women's lacrosse player Yardley Love by men's UVA men's lacrosse player George Huguely. A music track with heavy drum beats, dim lighting, and camera point of view walks in the night in the trailer (below) churning up the suspense for a tragedy I remember well. It’s also a good example of the importance of The Hook’s archives, which were recently in the news. We produced 4 cover story packages with over 33 in-depth news stories on the crime and the trial from many angles.
The Murder
https://readthehook.net/issues/0918
https://readthehook.net/issues/0919
The Trial
https://readthehook.net/issues/1107
https://readthehook.net/issues/1109
I think the Downtown Mall is going to be okay
There was kind of an alarming headline in the Daily Progress recently, “City begins cutting down trees on the Downtown Mall,” which prompted some people to think that many of the big willow oaks, so critical to the mall’s design, were coming down. “Those trees made aimlessly strolling such a lovely thing to do for most of the year,” wrote one observer on social media, assuming all the trees were coming down. “ I honestly doubt I will be taking out-of-town visitors there just to walk around anymore. Why show them something that looks just like other towns?”
Anyway, the long-planned city project, which included a public walking tour and explanation about why each tree was coming down - 9 in all - revealed that a few long struggling and/or dead red maples in front of the rat hotel and several already severely pruned and struggling willow oaks would be coming down. Molly Conger (@socialistdogmom) provided a good thread about the walking tour here if you’re interested.
Incidents of gun violence continue to haunt us
Sadly, the many incidents of gun violence that have been occurring regularly since last September continued at an iconic setting in Charlottesville, the Fitzgeral Tire Company Co. building in Downtown Belmont, known for the "I love Charlottesville A Lot" mural on the side of the building made with old tires. In what appears to have been a shootout between two groups of young men, Jose Omar Rivas Sorto, a Maryland resident, was arrested on the scene for shooting and killing Osvaldo Lopez-Hernandez, a Texas resident, and wounding an unnamed associate of Lopez-Hernandez, who himself was charged with kidnapping and brandishing a firearm.
There have been 15 shootings, eight of them fatal, since last September, according to the Daily Progress, and that's including the high-profile shooting death of three UVA football players. While there's been some effort to tie many of these shootings to a local gang problem, each one has its own characteristics. It still remains a mystery why UVA student Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. shot and killed Lavel Davis Jr., D'Sean Perry, and Devan Chandler on a bus after coming back from a field trip to D.C. to attend a play (you can read a timeline of what we know so far here), and there's no further information yet about why men from Texas and Maryland got into a shootout in Downtown Belmont.
The shooting death of arts provocateur and author Matthew Farrell, which his live-in girlfriend, Shawna Marie Natalie Murphy, confessed to appears to involve mental health problems Murphy struggled with, and the shooting death of Davonn Jamar Wilson by Marcel D. Washington stemmed from a fight that took place at a bar on the Downtown Mall. As The DTM reported, one shooting incident not reported on by local media involved a man shooting his friend while he was cleaning his gun.
A mother of four who worked in Charlottesville, 37-year-old Sabrina Elizabeth Jenkins, was shot in her car on Stony Point Road in December. Dominic Adonis Gaskins, 31, who allegedly lived with Jenkins in Orange, was arrested and charged with the killing.
Meanwhile, there have still been no arrests in the shooting death of Daquain Maurice Anderson, 29, just off the downtown mall last September, or in the afternoon drive-by shooting that month on Anderson Street that left two men wounded and neighbors traumatized. As this short video shows, neighbors rushed to treat the wounded before an ambulance arrived.
As Hawes Spencer pointed out recently in the Daily Progress, the news about a 6-year-old in Newport News shooting his teacher has shocked everyone, especially Orange resident Kyrin Falcetti, the daughter of a police officer and a veteran of the Army National Guard, whose 4-year-old shot himself in 2017 after finding a loaded gun in a bedside table at the home-based daycare center he was attending. Today, thanks to testimony from Falcetti, there's a Virginia ban on having unlocked weapons at home daycares. Still, passing meaningful laws to regulate the ownership of guns in America is close to impossible (the daycare ban law, which you'd think would be a no-brainer, was rejected in the General Assembly for two years before it passed), despite the more high-profile mass shootings that occur regularly across the country and the local shootings that are occurring frequently in towns like Charlottesville.
Newly hired Police Chief Michael Kochis has a lot on his plate when he starts work on Monday.