A single felony conviction typically precludes lawful gun ownership in Virginia, and Toreke Nauqan Barbour had 11 of them.
As he would later admit, he brandished a gun at a Charlottesville city employee last fall; so now, he has 12 felony convictions plus, after a Thursday morning sentencing hearing, five years of new and reimposed jail time.
"The prosecution of firearm-related offenses continues to be of the highest priority for the Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office," Joe Platania, the city’s top prosecutor, said in a statement.
Long before last fall’s incident outside City Hall, the now 32-year-old Barbour was known to law enforcement. In addition to multiple firearms charges, his felonies included cocaine distribution, assault on a law enforcement officer, assault on a family member (three times) and assault on a jailer.
On the day of last fall’s incident, Sept. 16, Barbour had been arguing with a homeless person on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall when city employee Fredrick Kimatu happened to be behind him.
"What the fuck are you saying?" Barbour allegedly asked Kimatu, while lifting his shirt and revealing a gun.
Detained inside the nearby Downtown Transit Station, Barbour was read his Miranda rights and then debriefed, according an account by Charlottesville police detective Arron Arreguin.
"Barbour said his shirt was covering the gun, and when he lifted his shirt it could have been shown," wrote Arreguin.
Barbour explained, according to Arreguin’s account, that he’d been shot before and carried the gun for protection.
When taking the plea in October to being a nonviolent felon in possession of a gun, Barbour also pleaded guilty to brandishing a weapon and carrying a concealed firearm, both misdemeanors. Sentencing would wait.
On May 19, his attorney, Nicholas Reppucci, the lead attorney with the Office of the Public Defender, urged the Charlottesville Circuit Court to accept a mitigation narrative to be filed under seal. Two days later, a letter from the HOPE treatment center in Richmond indicated that Barbour has mental health and substance abuse issues and those would help gain him admission into that program. The letter urged a "bed to bed" transfer into HOPE from the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, where Barbour has been held since his most recent arrest.
Reached Thursday, Reppucci, following the usual practice of his office, declined to discuss the case.
In 2020, the same court ordered Barbour to have no violent or abusive contact with a woman named Shontrice Jackson. He was arrested that April for violating the order, a charge concurrent with the violence that led to his conviction of domestic assault and battery as a third offense.
The most recent guilty plea and sentencing also include acknowledgement that the City Hall incident created probation violations in two of Barbour’s prior cases. Both from 2021, they were a conviction for being a felon in possession of a firearm and a conviction for possessing a weapon while subject to a protective order.
The probation violations constituted about half of the five-year active sentence that Judge Claude Worrell assigned Thursday. In all, Worrell sentenced Barbour to 15 years in prison with nine years and three months suspended — unless he violates his probation or his promise of good behavior.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com