Five months after another judge rejected an identical plea agreement, Albemarle County Circuit Judge Cheryl Higgins indicated a sentencing range in a deal that may end up assigning four years for last fall’s shooting that seriously injured two men and a dog at the Fashion Square mall just north of Charlottesville.
The shooting followed a contentious interaction inside a cannabis store in the shopping center between the shopkeepers and a group of teenagers, including the shooter Jalontae Truriel Percer.
While the shooting and the events leading up to it were captured on video, Percer seems to have convinced at least one interrogating police officer that he was fearful when he unleashed a salvo of eight shots in the early evening Sept. 13, 2023. At his Aug. 22 sentencing hearing, his attorney played a video in which Percer was filmed in an interrogation room with two detectives.
“It’s a pretty remarkable interaction,” said Percer’s attorney, Thomas Wilson, “and basically something I’ve never seen.”
In the video, Percer sobs into his hands, and one of his interrogators speaks to him.
“I don’t think you meant to hurt someone,” the detective can be heard saying. “But you can’t go back, and that sucks right now.”
Inside the main courtroom of the Albemarle County Courthouse in downtown Charlottesville, Percer, looking older than his 20 years of age, watched dispassionately as the video continued.
“We get a lot of people in here who deserve to be in that chair,” said the detective on video. “But you’re not one of them.”
The recorded statements paint a vastly different picture from the one depicted in Percer’s December preliminary hearing in Albemarle County General District Court. There, the two victims testified about asking the teenagers to leave the Supreme Green store because none of them would provide identification proving they were over the age 21.
Before leaving the store shortly before its 7 p.m. closing time, one of the teeangers stepped behind the store’s counter, and Percer was “jumping” at the store owner’s dog, according to one of the shopkeepers’ testimony.
A witness reportedly saw Percer holding a handgun while walking away from the store, according to another document in the court file. A subsequent search of his residence in the Brookdale Apartments, a complex off Old Lynchburg Road, found a Taurus 9mm handgun along with a noise suppressor and two to three ounces of marijuana, according to a search warrant inventory.
The most contentious legal matter was whether Percer fired his weapon maliciously. In March, when Percer found his guilty plea blocked by Judge Claude Worrell, prosecutor Susan Baumgartner said the defense was prepared to claim that Percer feared for the safety of his brother, who was one of the teenagers with him.
Baumgartner said that testimony at the preliminary hearing indicated that the shopkeepers made a show of force by referring to a gun of their own hidden inside the shop. That statement, she said, might have led a jury to think that Percer worried that the shopkeepers would shoot at him or those with him.
The preliminary hearing testimony also included the fact that the shopkeepers were moving slowly through the mall parking lot in the owner’s sedan. Video shows that the vehicle paused as the group of teenagers exited the mall and stepped off a curb. With such facts bolstering a self-defense claim, Baumgartner told the court she agreed to downgrade the original charges from malicious wounding to unlawful wounding.
“He made a horrible mistake,” said Baumgartner at the most recent hearing.
While not testifying, Percer did stand to make a statement.
“I’d like to start by apologizing to each of my victims,” Percer said. “I am haunted each and every day by what I did.”
The judge went ahead and sentenced Percer to the mandatory state minimum of three years on the firearms charge, but she delayed the formal imposition of the sentences on the two unlawful wounding convictions to Oct. 6, 2025. At that time, Higgins said she could sentence him, after suspended time, to a maximum of three more years, but she said that she envisioned a sentence of six months on each of those two wounding charges, and she suspended all 12 months of the sentence for misdemeanor animal cruelty.
While one of Percer’s relatives rushed out of the courtroom in distress after learning Percer will be jailed for years, his term is well below the statutory maximum of 14 years.
“It is such a struggle,” said Higgins, “because the defendant is so young. He made a mistake, but on the other hand it is a very serious mistake.”
The deal dropped a second felony firearms count and mandated mental health counseling and supervised probation.
Store owner and manager Jerome Henry was hit by multiple bullets, including one that tore into his chest 10 centimeters from his heart, as he testified at the preliminary hearing. He told The Daily Progress that he has “physically” recovered from his wounds, but he declined to comment on Percer’s sentence.
His employee, Eliazar Prieto, also struck by multiple rounds of gunfire, previously told The Daily Progress that the two men are trying to move past the incident, which also injured Henry’s dog Coco.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com