Bad news for my fellow UVa employees: an employee’s laptop was stolen, and it contained names and Social Security numbers for 7,000 students and staff. Brian McNeill explains in the Progress that the university has contacted everybody whose data has gone missing, saying that they suspect the intended theft was of of the computer, not its data. The university uses SSNs as a primary identification number for many UVa employees, so it’s used whenever there’s cause to provide a unique identifier for a given employee, but they’re thankfully phasing that out.
Archive for the 'Crime' Category
From the Progress and the Waynesboro News Virginian, some addition developments in the case of yesterday’s shootings on Route 64:
- Charges have now been filed against Slade Woodson and an unnamed 16-year-old in the case, “Dumb” in the “Dumb and Dumber” duo. Felony malicious wounding, using a firearm in the commission of a felony and maliciously shooting at an occupied vehicle are just the beginning of what will surely be a heaping serving of legal trouble for the pair. They’re facing twenty charges between the two of them.
- The house the duo shot up was the home of Woodson’s apparent nemesis, a fellow student whose questioning by police last year led to Woodson’s prior conviction. This is not the first time Woodson has made a scene at the household — he’s a regular there
- Not content to merely abandon his own laughably recognizable vehicle — a bright orange 1974 Gremlin — that he’d used for the crime spree, Woodson left the .22 shell casings in the vehicle, which were recovered by police. No doubt his fingerprints are all over them.
- The guy shot by police at the time of the arrest this morning is in stable condition, but his identity and specific condition hasn’t been revealed.
- The injuries sustained by the two occupants of vehicles were slight enough that police suspect they might have been caused by shards of glass from the shot-out windows rather than the bullet themselves.
For those of y’all who aren’t familiar with firearms, a .22 is the smallest caliber bullet you’re likely to come across. Both handguns and rifles commonly fire .22s. They have so little powder in them that there’s very little recoil, making it simple to aim a weapon that takes this cartridge. If you had to pick a caliber to be shot in the shoulder with, this would be the way to go. But though it might be small, it’ll punch right through the side of a car and, once it starts to tumble, tear up anybody in its way. Jackson Landers (disclosure: my brother) coincidentally explained this on his blog just two days ago.
Though it remains to be seen which law enforcement agency is responsible for this — Albemarle or state — somebody deserves a lot of credit for making an arrest within 30 hours of the first shot being fired. This could have been a source of a lot of fear and anger, but instead it was wrapped up immediately.
The two budding young rocket scientists that went on a shooting spree on Route 64 are in custody. Police went to Crozet’s Yonder Hill Farm to make the arrest around 5am this morning, only to have a guy with a handgun come at them. (That was presumably the second suspect.) They shot him, natch; he’s in the hospital now. Then they arrested 19-year-old WAHS alumnus Slade Woodson. These two dopes used Woodson’s own orange 1974 Gremlin on their little adventure, which was caught on camera at the bank that they shot up yesterday morning and eventually abandoned up 29N near Greene. Woodson’s already got a record (read as: fingerprints on file), convicted of auto theft and arson a year ago. He was stealing trucks, driving the hell out of them, ditching them and burning them. Presumably charges against the second guy will be coming soon, at least for threatening a cop with a gun, and I’d bet the shootings, too.
Either these guys were drunk out of their minds or they are two of the dumbest bastards ever to the walk of the face of the earth. I vote for “both.”
2:30pm Update: The Hook reports that the gunshot victim is not a suspect, and that there were five people in the house when the police showed up at 4:48am. It looks like it’ll be a few days until enough of this story comes out that we’ll began to piece together a proper narrative.
A 20-mile stretch of Route 64 was closed for hours early this morning after four apparently random shootings. Two people were injured (not severely) and four vehicles were shot, all close to the overpass on the C’ville side of the mountain. Traffic was diverted along 250 until just a few hours ago, and schools opened two hours late are closed. Local and state law enforcement responded with helicopters and K9 units. State police are leading up the investigation. If there are any suspects, or if anybody’s been caught, there’s no word.
Given that the overpass exists solely to get to the Scott family farm, which has no other exit other than Route 250, I’d have to think it’d be pretty easy to corral the shooter, at least if he drove up there.
12:30pm Update: There’s a bunch more information out now. Shootings took place at three different locations, off the mountain, all around Yancey Mills/Ivy; the Royal Orchard overpass was not one of them. It turns out that a fifth vehicle was hit, an unoccupied VDOT truck at the Yancey Mills facility. The caliber of the bullets in all incidents appear to be the same (though they’re not saying what caliber that is). The suspicion is that this is the work of more than one gunman, though presumably they’re working together. Police figure the shooters are still in the area, and the whole region is under surveillance. They say it’s safe to drive on 64 now, but looking at the traffic cameras, it doesn’t look like many people are buying that.
The national media haven’t picked up on the story yet, but Virginia media are all talking about it. If it stops with this morning’s string, then people may well remain calm. But if there are any more similar shootings, we can expect to be whipped up into a frenzy by a nationwide media brouhaha.
Mike Brown has been arrested for theft and selling stolen goods, Barney Breen-Portnoy and Jay Jenkins write in the Progress. The 21-year-old broke into a student’s car in the Newcomb parking garage stole $3,400 worth of A/V equipment, and then tried to sell it on eBay. The kid from whom the stuff was stolen bought the stuff on eBay, knowing it was his, but apparently Brown was running a scam, because he never sent anything. Police found the stuff in his apartment, along with marijuana. What a maroon.
Mark Tenia at WCAV called up a Craigslist hooker, who offered him a “Greek” or a “French” for $150/hour. He called back and said he was a reporter, and she did a phone interview, saying the usual things prostitutes say when they’re interviewed. Tenia even called up the Albemarle Police, who said they they’d never even heard of Craigslist.
French? Greek? Am I so unhip I don’t even know the slang anymore?
The Sexshuns clothing store on the Downtown Mall was raided by federal agents this afternoon, Rob Seal writes in the Progress. Proprietor Reynold George Samuels Jr. is accused of running a crime ring, distributing marijuana, crack, cocaine, and pirated DVDs. Samuels is already a convicted felon, so his ownership of firearms isn’t going to help him, either.
You can get away with selling crack these days, but get caught pirating DVDs and you’re screwed.
Assembling data for the Uniform Crime Reports, the city has found that there was a 12% drop in crime rates between 2006 and 2007, Rob Seal writes in the Daily Progress. There was an 18% drop in violent crime, an 11% drop in property crimes, a 30% drop in aggravated assaults, and a 15% drop in burglaries. It remains to be seen whether this correlates with a nationwide drop or whether this is the result of the city’s own efforts. For comparison, Albemarle had a 2.3% crime decrease, and crimes against individuals actually increased.
Courtesy of The Hook, here is the video of Gerry Mitchell being hit by an Albemarle County Police cruiser:
Presumably the delay in releasing this video was to work out royalty payments to the Black Eyed Peas.
An Amtrak train hit a car at the 2nd Street crossing this afternoon, Henry Graff reports for NBC 29. The car was dragged about 100 feet and, luckily, nobody was hurt. The driver says that the crossing arm hadn’t come down, while the train’s engineer says that it did. The driver has been charged with failure to obey a railroad crossing signal. Amtrak trains are generally going pretty slowly at that spot, because they’re so close to the station. (I used to live on South and 1st, with an apartment directly over the tracks.) There are several thousand such accidents each year.
I can’t help but feel a bit skeptical of Amtrak’s claim that the gate was down. Like many people, I read Walt Bogdanich’s 2004 “Death on the Tracks” series in the New York Times, for which he won a Pulitzer. Bogdanich revealed that rail crossing guards are routinely broken, engineers routinely lie and claim that they were working fine, and the railroads send out repairman to fix the problem faster than federal inspectors can arrive. There are hundreds of such fatal accidents every year, dozens of which aren’t ever reported to the National Response Center.
Photo kindly provided by “gman.”
Four juveniles have been arrested for a Tuesday night beating of a man on West Main, the Progress reports. Along with three others, they mobbed a couple walking down the street, clotheslined the guy, and beat him. An officer tracked down the kids down on Wertland, and the victim was able to ID them. There was no robbery — just a random attack. This sounds a lot like the series of random assaults there this summer, which stopped after a pair of teenagers were arrested in July.
Well-known local artist and AIDS survivor Gerry Mitchell was knocked out of his wheelchair by a police cruiser earlier this month, and then received a ticket for jaywalking (rolling?).
Courteney Stuart explains in this week’s Hook that Mitchell was returning home from a shopping trip to Reid’s when he stopped to wait to cross West Main at 4th. When the light turned green, he progressed across the street. Halfway across, a police car hit him from behind, hurling him from his motorized wheelchair and into the street. The apologetic Albemarle County police officer Gregory Davis leapt from his car to help, as did a pedestrian. Bleeding from his limbs, Mitchell consented to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. A city officer came to visit him a few hours later, a ticket in hand.
The press only learned about this because a bystander contacted The Hook. Mitchell just wants an apology and, presumably, the ticket to be dropped. Obviously, Officer Davis didn’t deliberately run into a man in a wheelchair, but the decision to ticket his victim quite literally added insult to injury. (Attorney Debbie Wyatt speculates that this was deliberate — as with the recent case of the officer nearly running down pedestrians on Water Street, in which he charged two of them with crimes, both of which they were acquitted of.)
Given the press attention to that other recent cruiser/pedestrian incident, the timing for this couldn’t be worse. The victim likewise couldn’t have been worse: it’s not just that he’s a man in a wheelchair, but an enormously well-known, well-respected, well-spoken man with an unimpeachable reputation. The smartest thing for the county police to do in this case would be to get the city police tear up the ticket, apologize, and move on. Let’s see how circuitous their path to that obvious solution proves to be.
City council voted against Chief Timothy Longo’s request for $300k for downtown security cameras, but is willing to support a scaled-back version, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. Mayor David Brown and councilors Kevin Lynch and Dave Norris all voted against Longo’s proposal to blanket downtown with security cameras. To their great credit, both Brown and Norris specifically cited the utter lack of evidence that security cameras lead to a reduction in crime. All members of council but Brown said they’re willing to explore a scaled back version, with mobile security cameras that store the video (rather than transmit it to the police station), to be extracted only in the case of an incident report. They’ve asked for a modified proposal from Chief Longo, but they’re making no promises that they’ll support it.
The Charlottesville PD’s request for security cameras fizzled out after a majority of council was opposed to them. Now Chief Longo is taking another bite at the apple, having appealed to downtown business owners to turn out at Monday’s city council meeting and support his request for the $300k camera setup. Council started to move on this in July, but it didn’t go anywhere.
As Kate Harmon explains in her Progress article, there are now specifics: the plan is five cameras on the east end of the Downtown Mall; ten on Water 3rd and 4th; and fifteen along the rest of the mall and its side streets. Longo says that even if this request doesn’t pan out, he’s not done trying.
Michael Stuart Pritchett has confessed his role in the murder of Jayne Warren McGowan, Kate Harmon and Rob Seal report in today’s Daily Progress. The eighteen year old says that he and his cousin, William Douglas Gentry, intended to rob somebody. They selected her house (for reasons not yet disclosed), knocked on her door, and entered when she opened the door. Based on the Progress’ depiction, it sounds like they immediately killed her, with each of the two men using a handgun of their own. They then robbed the home and stole her car. The two were arrested just a week ago, and McGowan was killed just ten days ago, so there’s a great deal more information yet to come out.
WINA is reporting this morning that a pair of arrests have been made in last week’s murder of 26-year-old Jayne McGowan. Two men — 22-year-old William Douglas Gentry, Jr. and 18-year-old Michael Stuart Pritchett, both of Caroline Street — have been charged with capital murder and are being held at the jail. Caroline St. is quite near to where the victim’s car was found, and also near to the victim’s home. A pair of handguns were found, which they believe were used in the crime, and police say that more evidence is being sought.
Try as they might, Charlottesville can’t seem to attract any police officers, Kate Harmon reports in today’s Daily Progress. The starting salary of $33,904, along with a $5,000 signing bonus, has snared a grand total of one police officer in two years. The city has seven vacancies now, so now they’re trying to entice cops to commute from Waynesboro.
The reason for the problem is pretty clear: housing costs. The median cost of a home in the city is $280k and $311k in the county. That’s a monthly mortgage, insurance and property tax bill of just a hair under $2,000/month, or about 80% of the officer’s post-tax income. Hell no.
From a city press release:
On 11-09-07 at approximately 14:46 hrs the Charlottesville Police Department responded to 807 St. Clair Avenue for a report of a suspicious death. Upon arrival police found the victim Jayne Warren McGowan, a 26 year old University of Virginia graduate dead in her living room. The victim was apparently shot and died as a result of the gunshot wound. Police are currently looking for the victim’s vehicle which apparently was taken from the residence. The vehicle is a Nissan Sentra, with Virginia license AED-2522 and is gold in color. If you see this vehicle, do not approach the occupants who should be considered armed and dangerous and call 911 immediately. Anyone with information about this case should call Detective Mooney or crime stoppers at 977-4000.
When murders happen in the area, it’s almost always a dispute between friends, family members, or drug-related; they’re not random, and they’re tough for police to prevent. But when somebody is found dead under these circumstances, that’s a different sort of a crime entirely.
Note that the photo is of a Nissan Sentra, not the Sentra in question.
Courteney Stuart reports in the current Hook about a pretty stunning arrest that took place on Water Street a few weeks ago. A 27-year-old Iraq/Afghanistan veteran was crossing Water Street with his fiancee when a Charlottesville police vehicle came barreling through the crosswalk. The angry man shouted at the officer to slow down, and the officer promptly got out of the SUV and handcuffed him. His fiancee asked the cop why he was being arrested, and the officer knocked her to the ground in response. A dozen angry onlookers demanded that the officer let the pair go while one called 911 to report an incident of police brutality. Another officer arrived and arrested the female, and the two were taken into custody on charges of public swearing, intoxication and obstruction of justice. The woman went to the emergency room for her injuries. The two went before a judge on the charges back on the 11th. There’s no word on the outcome.
The couple who run Double H Farm, in Nelson, have been arrested for using non-approved labels as price tags, Dave McNair writes for The Hook. The couple, in their 60s, had their farm swarmed by ten Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services agents, a state trooper, and the Nelson County Sheriff before they were handcuffed and hauled away in separate cruisers. Their Double H pork products were seized from restaurants across the area, destroyed by soaking them with bleach. Double H’s owners are well-known advocates for the rights of family farmers, which has surely earned them no love from state regulators.
I know a fair number of people in the farming and livestock business. They are all terrified of harassment by the state, which appears to both loathe family farms, actively seeking out piddily reasons to bust them. Locally-produced food is a strong interest of mine, and I’ve encouraged some of these food producers to speak out, but they’re all terrified that if they do, VDA&CS will invent a reason to shut them down. Now I see why.
This is going to get ugly — the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association will make sure of that. I wonder if any members of the General Assembly will have the good sense to introduce legislation to support family farms and stop this harassment on the part of state regulators.
While everybody was wondering whether crime has actually risen downtown recently, The Hook found out. Simple assaults are occurring at twice the 2004 rate, which is a pretty startling increase. In fact, it’s the single most common crime downtown, occurring 134% more often than shoplifting. To re-mount my two-year-old hobby horse, if the police would simply make raw crime report data available online (incident, date, time, and block address), news outlets and citizens activists could mine this data for trends on our own.
There’s been the first real break in the serial rapist case. The Hook broke the story that jibes with the information I’ve been getting over the past couple of hours. A suspect was arrested this morning. He’s married, lives in Woodbrook, and works at Harris Teeter. With a decade of consistent, solid DNA evidence in the case, it should be a snap to determine whether he’s the guy. There will be a joint city/county press conference at 4pm to provide details.
12:55pm Update: CBS 19 reports that the suspect is 40-year-old Nathan Antonio Washington of Old Brook Road. He’s been charged only in the August 2004 attack.
1:20pm Update: Regular commenter “Stormy” writes to point out that while CBS 19 names Washington in their story, they stop short of actually saying that he’s the suspect in the serial rapes. That was my inference as a reader, because it would be pretty random to name some unrelated guy in such an article. Anyhow, we’ll all have to hold onto our collective hat until 4pm to find out whether Washington’s arrest on the August 2004 rape charges is one and the same as the arrest of the serial rapist.
5:15pm Update: Well, the press conference was every bit as frustrating as police warned it would be. There’s basically no new information. They arrested Tony Washington shortly after midnight, and they’ve charged him with two of the rapes. Previously about all that police could say was that there was a DNA match on all of the rapes, but at the press conference they refused to even confirm that, saying only that Washington is a suspect in the other cases. This is going to leave media outlets torn: do they report that the serial rapist has been caught, or do they toe the cautious line drawn by law enforcement? NBC 29’s 2001 legendary gaffe — accusing some poor guy of possessing cocaine and then refusing to run a correction — surely stands out as a stark warning of what not to do.
Henry Graff reports for NBC 29 about a disturbing new trend: groups of Charlottesville teenagers filming street fights to share the video on Youtube. Four separate Youtube users have all uploaded footage of fights between groups of black kids at Prospect Avenue and Forest Hills Park. Though several of the videos are now gone, along with Youtube user “DatNiggaJeeze”’s account, several other videos that certainly appear to be filmed locally [1, 2, 3] still remain. In them, 1-2 dozen people mill around, alternately egging people into fights and fleeing when things get too dangerous. Sometimes several fights break out between different people, in rapid sequence.
Most were filmed in the past two months, the same period in which groups of black teenagers have been randomly assaulting people walking downtown. Police Chief Longo speculates that there’s a connection; it’s not surprising that the aggression shown in these videos would spill over to attacks on strangers. Long says that they’ve been keeping an eye on these videos as they’ve appeared for the last couple of months. Perhaps this will provide some leads in bringing an end to these random attacks. Police say they’re making progress, but can’t disclose specifics.
WINA reports this morning that two more assaults have taken place in the downtown area, this time on the 400 and 800 blocks of West Main Street. Both took place around 3 AM, and both attacks involved a group of 4-6 young, black white t-shirt-wearing males attacking a couple, not inflicting serious injury and not for the purpose of robbery. Joy assaults, basically. These sound precisely like the random assaults that have been taking place for the past few weeks, though took place many blocks away from the downtown area where business owners want cameras, ostensibly to stop the crimes.
City Council wants bids to have security cameras all around the Downtown Mall, after a spate of assaults have have occurred just about everywhere downtown but the Downtown Mall, the Progress reports. Police Chief Longo has proposed 30 cameras for $300k, though it remains to be seen what the bids determine is feasible. I’m fond of Tim McCormack’s proposal that, fine, we put up the cameras, but that all the video be streamed real-time to the internet.
I’m assigning reading to City Council: Jeremy Bentham’s “The Panopticon Writings” or Michel Foucault’s “Discipline & Punish,” which explores modern applications of Bentham’s theories on surveillance. We really can’t have a proper discussion of the merits of becoming a surveillance society without getting the decision makers up to speed.
10:30pm Update: Jennifer McKeever attended last night’s Council meeting, and provides each councilor’s stated position. Apparently Dave Norris cited Tim’s suggestion of putting the video online, and Chief Longo supports it. Wonderful.
Police are trying to figure out what the deal is with random attacks on people in the greater downtown area, the Progress reports. One attack was on Friday night, when a guy was sucker punched by one kid in a group of a dozen, as he wrote about on cvillenews.com. Another was on JPA a few hours later, when a guy had a rock hurled through his car window while he was driving. And a couple of hours after that, a woman was knocked to the ground by a group of kids on the street outside of the Elks Lodge on 2nd St.
In every case so far, the attacks have come from groups of teenaged African American kids wearing white t-shirts, as is the fashion. This is where community policing efforts are particularly important — a pointed conversation between a friendly police officer and their mothers may be all it takes to nip this in the bud.
The Charlottesville Police want to install 30 cameras to monitor your every movement while downtown, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. The two city councilors contacted for the story both expressed unease at the proposal, with Kendra Hamilton citing George Orwell’s “1984.” The cost of the cameras alone is estimated at $300,000. It’s my understanding that the crime downtown is quite low, in proportion to the population, a result of there being so many eyes on would-be criminals most of the time. Wouldn’t it make more sense to propose an CCTV installation in the areas with the most crime?
There was a gunfight on The Corner this week, Lisa Ferrari reported for CBS-19 on Friday, but somehow nobody was injured. It was apparently spurred by an argument between people attending the Slick Rick concert at the Satellite Ballroom. Shortly after midnight, two men exchanged an estimated ten shots in the corner parking lot, damaging five cars. Police are trying to track down the shooters.
Former Western Albemarle High School social studies teacher Neal Willetts has been indicted on federal charges of sexually exploiting children, Lisa Ferrari reports for CBS-19. The 26-year-old is accused of engaging in sexual acts with a total of eight students, including two at WAHS and one at Fluvanna. The most recent regional instance of similar charges came in the case of CHS’ Jonathan Spivey. Before that was Fork Union Military Academy’s Gregory Allen Moyer and, also in 2001, CHS teacher Jeffery Hutchinson.
For six months now, the Hessian Hills and Canterbury Hills have been plagued with burglaries — dozens of them, often on weekdays, in the afternoon or early evening, with electronics and similar high-dollar items stolen. Some houses were hit twice. Now the police think they’ve got someone. In a join press release (below), the county and city police have announced the arrest of 41-year-old William Frances Breckenridge on Monday, charging him with stealing from a vehicle and homes. If this really is the guy that’s committed all of the crimes, that list of charges will have to get a whole lot longer. Thanks to Al for the news.
Continue reading ‘Suspect Arrested in Hessian Hills Burglaries’
Janitors discovered an envelope and a “cylinder” at Henley and Brownsville this morning, the middle school and elementary school separated by a parking lot in Crozet, across from the street from WAHS. (Which is confusing. Were they in the parking lot between the two? Was the envelope at one school and the cylinder at another?) They contacted police, who got the bomb squad and the FBI involved. Parents were asked to keep students at home, and those kids who had already showed up were ushered over to WAHS. Late this morning the bomb squad did what comes naturally to them: they blew up said envelope and cylinder.
No doubt Jim Camblos is preparing to press charges against some poor kid for the crime of leaving a thank you note and a tin of cookies at her principal’s door.
The Daily Progress Rob Seal reported yesterday on some of the items reported stolen to Charlottesville police in 2006, revealing that some mighty unusual things are stolen each year.
The Charlottesville Police Department was kind enough to provide me with a copy of this list, and I reproduce it here for your listening and dancing pleasure. It makes for some bizarrely fascinating reading. I don’t know what’s weirder: that some of these things are stolen, or that anybody bothers to call the police to report them. If I had some more time on my hands, I’d keyword these and turn them into a tag cloud.
Continue reading ‘The 4,612 Things Stolen in C’ville Last Year’
The founder of the Charlottesville-based National Vanguard white supremacy group was arraigned on charges of possession of child pornography and witness tampering after being arrested at his home last night by FBI agents. Kevin Strom, an occasional cvillenews.com troll, is accused of possessing “multiple images of child pornography” on his computer and physically assaulting a witness to his crime. This yahoo is considered one of the top intellectuals in the Neo-Nazi movement, a group of people with an average IQ around room temperature.
The Hook has more on their blog.
CHS choral director Jonathan Spivey was indicted today on seven felony charges of child sexual abuse, the Daily Progress reports this evening. That’s three counts of making indecent sexual propositions and four of sexual abuse, all involving minors. He was accused of “improper sexual contact” by a student in September, prompting his immediate suspension. Chief Longo says that there are multiple alleged victims, not just the one who came forward. Spivey is also the Minister of Music for the Mt. Zion Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir. He will appear in court for the first time on Tuesday.
Police took Jeffery Wayne Shifflett into custody after a high-speed chase down Rt. 20 South yesterday afternoon, the Daily Progress reports. Albemarle police spotted him on Monticello Road and radioed ahead to Charlottesville police to coordinate the chase. Shifflett refused to pull over, and fled south on 20. He called 911 to report that he would drive to his sister’s house and surrender there. Twenty minutes after the chase began he was arrested on President’s Road, presumably his sister’s house.
Jeffery Shifflett is the older brother of Elvis Shifflett, who was recently arrested after a chase that also ended on 20 South. Shifflett the younger is now in the hospital after being shot repeatedly by police after he refused to surrender, a mistake that his brother did not repeat, or at least stopped repeating after twenty minutes of doing so. Shifflett was wanted in Albemarle, Charlottesville, Madison and Greene for theft, burglary, and probation violation, but it was his alleged threat against police after the shooting of his brother that made him particularly popular with area police in the past week. NBC 29’s Paul Merrill has an interview with one family allegedly a victim of Shifflett’s crimes, who say that they feel the world is a safer place today, but they’re still thinking of moving to a new house just to leave behind the memories of the burglary and ransacking of their home.
Family members of Elvis Gene Shifflett were permitted to visit him in the hospital yesterday, CBS-19 reports, three days after Shifflett was captured in a massive manhunt resulting from his attempt to kill his ex-girlfriend two weeks ago. Shifflett is in serious condition, but is expected to survive, after being shot repeatedly by a pair of police officers.
New details are now coming out about the events of Friday afternoon. Police found a loaded semiautomatic SKS and forty rounds in ammunition in his vehicle shortly after he abandoned the car while fleeing police. Crystal Morris, who was in the car with him at the time of the chase, says that Shifflett claimed that he hadn’t turned himself in because he believed they would kill him. She told police that Shifflett was unarmed. Shifflett was spotted by police while he was attempting to steal a flatbed truck on Brookhill. Chief Tim Longo says that he was repeatedly ordered to show his hands and, when he didn’t comply, officers opened fire, hitting him in the neck, back, chest, and arm. The Hook broke the news yesterday that Shifflett was shot in the face and at least one injury was inflicted by an M16.
The state police are investigating the shooting now, as is required, leaving Charlottesville police unable to say much about the matter.
In the Progress, Rob Seal reports that Shifflett has a heck of a rap sheet, going back two decades, including felony convictions. And the Hook reports that it runs in the family: Shifflett’s brother, Jeffrey Wayne Shifflett, is wanted by police for a string of burglaries and for threatening the lives of police officers in his brother’s case. Police are sufficiently concerned about the threat that they’re not releasing the names of the officers involved in the shooting. He is considered armed and dangerous.
Budding rocket surgeon Elvis Gene Shifflett has been captured by police after a massive manhunt yesterday afternoon. Shifflett, wanted for attempting to kill his ex-girlfriend in Court Square last week, was pulled over by police yesterday for driving with two different license plates on either end of his car. He sped off, ditched his car on route 20 just south of Piedmont Virginia Community College, and took off on foot, prompting the police to order a lock down at nearby PVCC and MHS and shut down 20 and 53. Somebody told police that they’d seen a “muddy man” walking down a creek bed, which set them on his path. Police finally found him on Brookhill Ave at 6pm and shot him repeatedly; he’s now at the UVa hospital.
The Progress has a multimedia presentation that combines Matthew Rosenberg’s photos with narration by Lt. John Teixeira.
Crimes like robbery and even carjackings occur with regularity in the area, but it’s not often that they take place in broad daylight while witnessed by a blogger. WT reports on the attempted carjacking that he witnessed in Court Square this morning. I love seeing citizen journalism like this, though obviously I could do without the carjacking.
10/14 Update: CBS 19 has the story. Check out the picture of the suspect, one Elvis Gene Shifflett. If ever there was a guy who was going to attempt to kill somebody, it’d be him.
Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross dismissed criminal trespassing charges against Rich Collins, WINA reports, and I couldn’t be more surprised about it.
Collins was arrested while campaigning for House of Delegates in May of last year after he refused to leave Shoppers World. He maintained that it was public property, while the complex’ manager begged to differ. Criminal charges were filed against him, and he filed a civil suit against the shopping center. Collins was convicted a year ago this month, much to his pleasure, since he hoped to appeal the case clear up to the Virginia Supreme Court and get the law changed. (The judge said that he’d have ruled in favor of Collins were he on the state’s highest court, but felt that his hands were tied at the level of his court.) He and his lawyers — from the ACLU and the Rutherford Institute — believe that private property that is provided for substantially public purposes, such as shopping centers, have an obligation to let people express themselves freely, given appropriate time, place, and manner requirements.
I’m certainly no attorney, but I believe that the ruling would need to be appealed by the Commonwealth’s Attorney (Jim Camblos, assuming that Shopper’s World is in the county) in order to proceed up the appeals chain. This, of course, is just the criminal case — I believe that the civil case is ongoing.
10:15pm Update: The Hook has more useful, complete information on their blog.
UVa graduate student Elizabeth Hafter has been missing since Friday, and a body fitting her description has turned up at Humpback Rocks. And a 37-year-old Georgia man has been shot dead by Florida police shortly after driving Hafter’s car off the road, concluding a multi-state killing spree as he fled from Georgia to Virginia and then south to Florida. Media General News Service presents the story as it’s known now, though presumably there’s much still to emerge.
Well-known and well-liked CHS choral director Jonathan Spivey has been accused of improper sexual contact with a student, Lisa Ferrari reports for CBS 19. The accusation was reported to the school by the student, and then reported to police. The police searched the school for evidence a week ago, and he has not reported to work all week, presumably indicating a suspension during the investigation. Spivey also serves as minister of music at Mount Zion Baptist Church. No further details have been made public.
Some assclown stuck these things along the road all over Albemarle County. I see a dozen when driving from Stony Point to Free Union. It’s illegal (ยง18-4.15.7), as it should be, and it’s promoting a scam, which is very illegal in itself. (See the National Consumer Law Center’s report, “Dreams Forclosed: The Rampant Theft of Americans’ Homes Through Equity-Stripping Foreclosure ‘Rescue’ Scams.”) Do these “We Buy Houses” and “Lose Weight Fast” jerks get prosecuted by our esteemed commonwealth’s attorney Jim Camblos, or this one of those optional laws? Should we all call 989-2622 to wish these spammers well?
In a ginormous bust, state and local officials seized 4,400 marijuana plants from a garden behind a guy’s house just outside of Scottsville, Rob Seal reports in today’s Progress. Gary Peck, 51, had a patch of bamboo with a 10′ by 10′ area carved out in the middle to grow the plants. I figure that’s 3.2 square inches per plant, or 1.8″ by 1.8″ — I wish I could grow things in my garden at that density. Peck has been charged with manufacturing with intent to distribute. Police are carefully drying it to…uh…preserve it.
The good news is that violent crime has dropped in Albemarle and Charlottesville this year: homicides are down 100% in Albemarle and 50% in Charlottesville; rapes are down 19% in the county and 22% in the city; and aggravated assaults are down 12% in the county and 13% in the city. The bad news is that theft is on the increase — it’s up by 50% in Albemarle and 31% in Charlottesville. This after years of declines in burglaries in the county, dropping annually from 2000 to 2004. Given the small number of actual crimes (88 burglaries in Charlottesville from January 1 - May 31), police figure that this is a result of a small burglary ring at work. These break-ins are happening not at night, as was going on last year, but in the daytime, when people are less likely to be home. Note that the Albemarle statistics are just for the first quarter, while Charlottesville’s are for the first five months of the year. Rob Seal has the story in today’s Daily Progress.
Albemarle county provides some aggregate crime statistics on their website, while Charlottesville provides only this puzzling chart. I wish the area police departments would provide raw incident data on their site — date, time, crime classification and block address — to permit citizens to find out exactly what’s going on in their neighborhood or, better yet, compile their own crime statistics. I’d love to put together a Google map plotting crime locations over time, create a scatterplot of crime trends, or create an RSS feed to track auto thefts.
Cecil writes: “According to today’s DP, cops broke up a party of underage drinkers early Sunday a.m. (probably a post-WAHS prom party). Teixeira said the parents were ‘on location’ (and I don’t think that means they were filming a movie). Sixteen teenagers were ticketed for underage possession of alcohol. As we all (probably) know, a local teen died about a week ago in an alcohol-related accident (Nolan Jenkins, AHS). And these circumstances sound remarkably similar to the circumstances several years ago when the cops broke up a party in Earlysville, at the home of Lisa Robinson, where underage kids were drinking–that party also took place within weeks of the deaths of two (?) girls in an alcohol-related accident. And we all recall the 8-year sentence that the Robinsons received (see the Hook story.)
Deja vu?”
Courteney Stuart has a fairly horrifying article in the current Hook about the shooting death of a cat in a suburban neighborhood north of town. I read the first half of the article when the issue came out last week and figured hey, bummer, some mystery person killed their cat. But then I finished the article tonight, horrified to discover that it’s known who the shooter is: Charlottesville businessman George Seymour, owner of The Import Car Store, on the corner of Hydraulic and 29. He confessed to murdering the cat “because he’d once seen her on his car.”
What a horrible human being. I’d love to see people stop buying cars from him after this. Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos has, mysteriously, only charged the guy with a misdemeanor, rather than a felony; he won’t explain why. Chalk this one up as another gaffe by Camblos? The case goes to trial on June 20.
Gangland: not actually an amusement park. (I’m not making that mistake again; sorry, kids.) Also not a word used in Charlottesville newspapers until a few weeks ago, when there was a “gangland-style beating of two teenage boys,” to quote from the Daily Progress. Now the police’s Capt. Chip Harding says that two of the six kids arrested in the attack were not just wannabes, but actual members of the Bloods, John Yellig and Bryan McKenzie write in today’s Progress. As gang activity has spread south from D.C., police around the state have become increasingly vigilant about viole