Three months after pleading guilty to his second pair of buttocks-grabbing crimes, the man known as the Rivanna Trail Groper has received additional jail time for his old gropes.
Cole Robinson McNair, 24, learned Tuesday that the Charlottesville Circuit Court was reimposing 18 months of previously suspended time.
The jail-heavy outcome came despite the efforts of the defense to portray a young man in the throes of complicated mental health problems.
“We believe this is mental health-related,” wrote Isabelle Foley, a probation team leader with Offender Aid and Restoration, or OAR, a nonprofit group that oversees substance and mental health counseling.
OAR’s letter was one of four that the defense filed with the court to urge less jail and more treatment for the troubled young man. The OAR letter noted that McNair suffers from major depressive disorder, has been hospitalized multiple times for prior episodes and was placed on a new medication after advising Foley on April 21 that “he was noticing some of his warning signs.”
On April 30, McNair was arrested, accused of grabbing the buttocks of two women near the Rivanna Trail, a popular riverside pedestrian pathway in Charlottesville. He pleaded guilty two months later to sexual battery and assault and battery and received a year of active jail time for the two misdemeanors.
These convictions fueled the good behavior violation case that brought McNair before Judge Claude Worrell Tuesday.
The letters in McNair’s file, including one from his mother, indicate that in addition to his mental health challenges, he is a substance abuser. The letters did not specify the substances.
Meanwhile, a court in Richmond was also troubled by the young man’s new arrests. On Aug. 14, the Richmond Circuit Court reimposed one month of a 12-month suspended assault and battery sentence McNair received last year for attacking a girlfriend in 2023.
Since his April 30 arrest, McNair has been held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
A spate of gropings along the Rivanna Trail caught the public’s attention in January 2024 after city police announced they had arrested a technology executive who promptly proclaimed his innocence and was exonerated days before his scheduled trial. While Charlottesville police later reformed their suspect identification procedures, an apology never came. And the executive has criticized the city for failing to offer compensation for the loss of his job, a threatened apartment eviction and, with the force of city government mustered against him, public humiliation.
McNair was arrested for a pair of gropes in May 2024 and pleaded guilty later that year. His initial sentence was 24 months with all but six months suspended. That was the source of the jail time reimposed Tuesday.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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