The case of an intercepted $156,693 check that found its way into the bank account of an Albemarle County man was dismissed earlier this month after the prosecutor told a judge that an out-of-state witness was too busy with her newborn baby to come to Charlottesville to testify.
That meant that 24-year-old Avyonne Eugene Cobbs walked free of the felony charge that has dogged him since the fall of 2023.
"In these cases that involve banks and transactions online, it’s very difficult for the commonwealth to make the case unless everything about the case is local," longtime criminal defense attorney Scott Goodman told The Daily Progress. "Without a confession, it’s very difficult for the commonwealth."
Not only was there no confession, but the defendant professed his innocence in one police interview and appeared poised, had the case gone to trial, to challenge the notion that he was the person spotted at a University Avenue automatic teller machine depositing the intercepted check into his account.
As it turned out, Cobbs never actually got the money that somebody tried to place in his account, as his bank quickly flagged the transaction and seized the deposit.
The six-figure check was mailed two years ago by a Nashville, Tennessee-area construction company trying to pay its tax bill and was intended for the regional office of the Internal Revenue Service in Charlotte, North Carolina. The check didn’t reach the IRS but was instead intercepted and, on April 25, 2023 deposited at a Chase Bank via an ATM near the University of Virginia.
In his criminal complaint against Cobbs, Charlottesville police detective Christopher Wagner described what he called a "whitewash" in the payee section of the check.
"The name on the ‘pay to the order of’ section was altered to say ‘Avyonne Cobbs,’" Wagner wrote.
Surveillance video shows a masked man wearing a hooded NASA sweatshirt making the deposit. Wagner contended that the masked man was Cobbs, and the then-22-year-old was arrested in early November 2023 and charged with forgery and obtaining money under false pretenses. Four days after his arrest, Cobbs left his job working at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
The prosecution moved slowly. At one point, Cobbs earned a bail modification that let him travel to Oklahoma for training with the Virginia Army National Guard.
Coincidentally, one delay was caused by another pregnancy. Last August, when the case was slated for a preliminary hearing in Charlottesville General District Court, public defender Lauren Reese urged a postponement because her office’s investigator was on maternity leave.
At that Aug. 15 hearing, Reese also asked for another bail amendment, this time to allow Cobbs to move to Atlanta with his girlfriend. To sweeten the proposal, Reese said her client would willingly waive extradition.
"I can’t do it," replied Judge Andrew Sneathern. "A case shouldn’t take a year and a half to get out of preliminary hearing; it just shouldn’t."
When the case did finally reach the preliminary hearing stage in September, Reese peppered the investigator with questions about his identification of Cobbs in the surveillance footage. Reese asked Wagner if he ever found the NASA sweatshirt, and the answer was no. She then asked how the detective could be so sure it was her client.
"Based on eyebrows and his facial structure" was Wagner’s reply.
Reese asked if Wagner would show the court her client’s Department of Motor Vehicles photo, so Wagner departed and came back confidently with a picture.
"And the overall skin matched as well," said Wagner.
The judge certified the case to a higher court, Charlottesville Circuit. That’s where the case ended earlier this month on a motion from the prosecutor, Nicholas Kalagian.
"An out of state material witness is home caring for a newborn child and is not able to travel to Virginia for the trial," Kalagian wrote in his April 1 motion to cease the prosecution.
Kalagian, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, also noted that the check’s sender, Southerland Construction, agreed with the cessation of the charges against Cobbs, who had no criminal history. Since the bank quickly seized the check the construction company, never lost its money, and neither Cobbs nor any other suspect appears to have gained any ill-gotten gains.
Kalagian also pointed out in his motion that Cobbs had been cooperative and forthcoming with law enforcers in "an unrelated matter."
One unrelated matter in the public record is a now-dropped federal prosecution of Cobbs’ brother-in-law, Raekwon Demitrius Burnette. A man who has been arrested more than 50 times, Burnette has convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, possession of a gun as a felon, oxycodone possession and several probation violations.
Early last year, federal prosecutors indicted Burnette for allegedly possessing weapons as a felon and initially cited, among other evidence, a duffel bag holding powerful guns found at a residence that Burnette frequented.
According to the Feb. 2, 2024, indictment of Burnette, there were four firearms in the duffel bag: a Ruger AR 556 rifle, a Spike Tactical, an Alex Pro Firearms model SF-15 rifle and a Glock 19X pistol.
Cobbs, however, informed investigators that those guns belonged to him.
"Those guns are not charged in this case," Burnette’s legal team noted in one filing. The federal case against Burnette was dropped by order of federal Judge Norman Moon last August.
Cobbs never got a chance to publicly proclaim his innocence in the check case. The closest he came was a brief police interview in which he allegedly blamed Wagner for lying about the ATM footage before terminating the interview.
In court for his dismissal hearing April 10, Cobbs wore a crisp, white, open-collar shirt and let his lawyer Reese do the talking.
"He’s going to decline to make a statement," Reese told The Daily Progress after the hearing concluded.
For Goodman, the legal analyst, this case once looked like a rare opportunity for state prosecutors to break an interstate crime ring. But part of the evidence, slated to be heard in a two-day jury trial to begin April 17, collapsed with the reluctance of the out-of-state witness.
"It’s very difficult to make a case when it’s out of state," said Goodman.
He said that local prosecutors get stymied by complicated rules for getting witnesses over state lines.
"It can be done, but it’s very cumbersome," said Goodman. "State prosecutors are hamstrung."
Source: www.dailyprogress.com