Love and drugs: Remembering the Elvis Gene Shifflett manhunt
A recent arrest triggers memories of a decades-old manhunt and police shooting...
Local news outlets dutifully reported that Jeffery Wayne Shifflett, 58, was arrested following a brief police chase on Saturday, according to a release from the Albemarle County police department. The pursuit ended somewhere in Earlysville shortly after Shifflett lept from his moving vehicle and tried to flee on foot. Shifflett was wanted for shoplifting and eluding police, which he had already done twice before on September 3 and October 13. He now faces multiple felony charges.
Why, I thought, did this sound familiar? And then it hit me. I’d written about Shifflett and his brother running from the police nearly two decades ago.
Nineteen years ago today, Shifflett’s younger brother, Elvis Gene Shifflett, then 38, was shot by police following an intense, military-style manhunt that included 60 police officers, search dogs and two helicopters.
Six days later, Jeffery Shifflett, then 39, who had outstanding warrants for probation violations and assorted crimes and had allegedly made threats against the police following his brother’s shooting that also made him the focus of a manhunt, led police on a 12-mile high-speed chance down Avon Street and Route 20 South and escaped to his sister’s house on President’s Road. He then called 911 and turned himself in.
According to press reports at he time, Shifflett’s mother came out of his sister house when the police finally arrived, and was allowed to give her son a cigarette and speak with him a few moments before they took him into custody.
The younger Shifflett, who ran a bricklaying business and had a son with a longtime girlfriend (he also had three grown children from another relationship), had recently started using crack cocaine, according to family members, and his life had begun to unravel. He was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend and instead of showing up for his court date he confronted her in her car outside the Court Square courthouse and drew a pistol he had in his waist band.
“I wasn’t trying to shoot her,” Elvis Shifflett said later in a jailhouse interview with the Daily Progress, then used this twisted logic: “…he said he only wanted to scare her, and that his plan was to take her away for the weekend so they could get back together.” Shifflett admitted he was high on crack and drunk on whiskey at the time.
Crack would bring him back to Charlottesville, where he bought more of it in a neighborhood south of town. A reported friend, 23-year-old Crystal Morris, was in the car with him. But an Albemarle County police officer spotted him driving down 5th Street Extended and he took off, pulling on to I-64 and exiting on to Route 20 South, where he parked (he said was out of gas) on the side of the road and fled on foot, leaving Morris in the car with a loaded semi-automatic rifle. When two City police officers finally found him in the cab of a wrecker truck he had discovered, with the keys in the ashtray, he made an attempt to flee but crashed into a tree. Shifflett said he put his hands up and tried to surrender, but officers said they believed he was reaching for a gun and opened fire, wounding him in the face and body.
“Next thing I know it felt like someone burned the whole side of my face off,” he told the Daily Progress.
An investigation revealed that Shifflett did not have a gun with him when he was shot, but it was determined that the two city police officer acted according to protocol. The Charlottesville police chief at the time, Tim Longo, said their actions were “justified, reasonable and within guidelines.” In January 2008, still using a cane due to his injuries, Shifflett was sentenced to 10 years in jail.
“We want people to know that love and drugs can push some people over the edge and therefore make a person do crazy things without thinking,” wrote Kathy Shifflett, a niece, discussing the Court Square incident on the now defunct Hook newspaper’s blog. “We feel that Elvis wasn’t only running from the law, but from himself as well.”
Many of Elvis Shifflett’s friends and family members made comments under the online versions of local news stories, or on the now defunct Hook newspaper’s newly launched blog, arguing that Elvis Shifflett, while flawed, was a good man while his brother was the real criminal.
Indeed, at the time, NBC29 did an interview with a family whose home was ransacked by Jeffery Shifflett. According to court records, the elder Shifflett was first found guilty of breaking and entering in 1995, with current city councilor Lloyd Snook listed as his defense attorney, and was charged with numerous probation violations and burglary crimes in the following years.
However, according to court records, Elvis Gene Shifflett continued to run from the law and himself. In July 2023, he was found guilty in Albemarle Circuit Court of drug distribution and sentenced to 8 years in prison with 3 years, 3 month suspended.