Nearly 15 years ago, after one student-athlete beat another one to death, the University of Virginia intensified its reporting process for students to divulge their arrests and convictions. Had UVa administrators known that lacrosse player George Huguely V had a prior conviction for attacking a police officer, they might have intervened. Administrators could have suspended Huguely or at least suggested some substance and mental health treatment before he murdered fellow UVa lacrosse player and his on-again-off-again girlfriend Yeardley Love.
"It sure would have been nice to know that he had been physically aggressive with the police officer," Julie Myers, who was Love’s coach at the time, told The Daily Progress. "I don’t want anyone else to be lost to violence."
But three more lives would be lost to violence in 2022, when another UVa student with an undisclosed criminal conviction shot five schoolmates. On the night of Nov. 13, 2022, as a chartered bus was returning from a field trip to Washington, D.C., Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. opened fire with a 9mm Glock pistol.
The three fellow students Jones killed were Lavel "Tyler" Davis Jr., Devin Chandler and D’Sean Perry, each of whom played on the school’s football team. Jones’ gunfire seriously injured two other students: football player Mike Hollins and eventual track runner Marlee Morgan.
While the aftermath included the reverential "UVa Strong" motto and the dead men’s football jersey numbers — 1, 15 and 41 — adorned everything from Beta Bridge to T-shirts, it also included the grim revelation that UVa officials received several prior warnings about a gunman on Grounds.
When it released its investigative reports in March, UVa highlighted a passage in the heavily redacted documents suggesting that the university could not have forseen the violence.
"This Report does not conclude that the facts available to the Threat Assessment Team (TAT) prior to the shooting would have put a reasonable person on notice that [Jones] would commit the types of acts for which [he] is now criminally charged," one report reads.
Still, the change enacted after Love’s death could have led to his expulsion.
Love’s legacy
According to testimony at criminal and civil trials, Huguely killed Love in her Charlottesville apartment on the morning of May 3, 2010. In the wake of her death, UVa officials expressed shock that their system of allowing students to self-report their prior crimes didn’t catch Huguely’s earlier transgressions.
One violent incident in Huguely’s past occurred 17 months before he kicked in Love’s bedroom door and left her die on her bed. It was an attack on a police officer, also a woman, in Lexington.
What began as an arrest for public drunkenness in that Shenandoah Valley college town devolved into allegations of resisting arrest and threats to kill the officer who activated her Taser to subdue Huguely.
"He said: ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll kill all of y’all. I’m not going to jail,’" the Lexington officer told the Washington Post, which uncovered the November 2008 incident.
There was another prior allegation of violence, that Huguely beat a lacrosse teammate while he slept. In that early 2009 assault, Huguely and his black-eyed victim reportedly appeared before their coach to downplay the incident and refused to divulge what happened.
In the fall of 2010, UVa officials announced the new system. When signing in with their NetBadge computer authentication, the gateway to educational software, email and course materials, each student was asked to update their profile and specifically prompted to disclose any recent criminal history.
"The thinking behind this was," Allen Groves, UVa’s then-dean of students, told The Daily Progress at the time, "how do we make sure that people know this is the policy and their obligation to disclose arrests."
The system was a merger of UVa’s famed reliance on student self-governance with a 21st-century electronic nudge. It was one of the first announcements from then-incoming President Teresa Sullivan.
"We are now changing from a passive notification system to a more active notification system," Sullivan told the press.
Since 2004, UVa had a standing requirement, under threat of judicial referral or an interim suspension administered by the dean of students, that students divulge arrests and convictions within 72 hours. This older system required students to take the inititative by calling Student Affairs or by filling out a form. The post-Huguely system, by contrast, added a new feature. It denies students access to their online materials after summer break until they affirm, under threat of the former punishments as well the possibility of expulsion under the Honor Code, if they lie, that they have not developed any new criminal history.
An inference, according to public statements by UVa officials, is that Jones lied.
The idea of safety
Since 2021, Virginia has had a law that forbids all public universities from asking prospective students or denying admission on the basis of a criminal past. But universities want to know who’s coming. Radford University, for instance, demands such information after acceptance and before enrollment, according to Radford spokesman David Perryman.
"If any criminal history is disclosed, the university conducts a case-by-case review to determine appropriate next steps," Perryman told The Daily Progress in an email.
Perryman said that the university receives weekly arrest reports from the Radford Police Department, which the university reviews to identify whether any individuals listed are currently enrolled students.
Like UVa, the College of William & Mary demands that a student confess arrests within 72 hours. However, William & Mary vows that omissions will not be punished under its Honor Code, but instead as Student Code of Conduct violations. Virginia Tech also has an obligation for self-reporting all arrests.
The idea of forcing a student to confront their past before starting each term resonates with Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis.
"What that does is it starts a conversation that, ‘Hey, we take safety seriously,’" Kochis told The Daily Progress. "It sets a tone that public safety is a priority."
While UVa runs an address-based criminal background check consisting of searches of courthouse and public databases on each of its 136 incoming medical students, Kochis contended that running a comprehensive background check on all 26,000 UVa students, many of them international, wouldn’t work. He said that using the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, the database of all arrests in the U.S., would not be allowed under current NCIC rules.
"It’s a law enforcement database," said Kochis. "You can’t use it just for someone enrolling in college."
That view against checking every student’s background is seconded by S. Daniel Carter, who heads a consultancy called Safety Advisors for Educational Campuses, or SAFE Campuses.
"That would be logistically impossible," Carter told The Daily Progress. "It would be beyond the logistical capabilities of the UVa Police Department and the system itself."
UVa will run a background check "when circumstances warrant," university spokesman Brian Coy told The Daily Progress. Citing federal privacy law, he declined to say whether one was run on Jones.
In 2008, in the wake of the massacre that claimed 32 lives the prior year at Virginia Tech, the General Assembly ordered each state university to create a threat assessment team consisting of representatives including law enforcement officials and mental health experts, as well as representatives from student affairs and human resources.
"The lesson learned out of Virginia Tech is that you bring the information pieces in together, you analyze them, and determine if there is something that is actually a threat, and then you act on it," said Carter.
"The goal is not to arrest someone, although that may be necessary, but get them the help they need," said Carter. "That’s the primary goal: stop something before it truly does become a threat."
Prior warnings
On the day after the 2022 killings, UVa Police Chief Tim Longo revealed that Jones was the subject of no fewer than three UVa investigations, each of which reached the university’s threat assessment team before the fatal attack:
In September, Jones had been sought for questioning in a hazing investigation, Longo said. Having served his Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity as president and "polemarch," a title that literally means warlord, Jones may have held useful information. However, that investigation was closed, Longo said, due to a lack of witness cooperation.The hazing investigation led officials to discover that Jones had an undisclosed firearms conviction. In June 2021, after a traffic stop found him in possession of a concealed weapon he received a suspended sentence in Chesterfield County General District Court. Longo alleged that Jones failed to properly notify UVa of that conviction. Petersburg Circuit Court records show that Jones also got a hit-and-run conviction four months later, but UVa officials have not publicly mentioned the subsequent case or whether it also went undisclosed. Nor have they said what consequences, if any, Jones faced for the disclosure failure.More than two weeks before he opened fire on schoolmates, Jones was the subject of an investigation into a report that, in contravention of school rules, he kept a gun in his dormitory. But police were not the investigators because that wasn’t a crime, only a violation of his housing contract, and a roommate reportedly denied having seen a weapon. Coy, the university spokesman, has told the press that the university emailed Jones in late October to urge him to speak with administrators or face a possible referral to a student-run judiciary committee with the power to levy discipline. Jones did not cooperate.
Ironically, UVa’s own rules in place at the time declared that any student possessing a gun can face "disciplinary action up to and including termination and expulsion." Moreover, the policy gives enforcement power to UVa police, to Facilities Managment and to Student Affairs. In Jones’ case, however, the investigation appears to have stayed in Student Affairs.
After the 2022 shooting, police executed a search warrant on Jones’ room and found a semi-automatic rifle, a pistol, ammunition, magazines and a device used to make bullets fire faster, according to an inventory that the Daily Progress obtained.
UVa’s housing contract gives Student Affairs the right "in its sole discretion and at any time" to enter dorms for maintenance, inspections "or any other reasonable purpose."
UVa’s then-head of Student Affairs, Dean of Students Robyn Hadley, appeared at the university’s press conference the day after the killings, but she let the police chief do most of the talking, and Longo said his department did not handle the investigation of Jones’ guns or his alleged failure to divulge his concealed weapon conviction.
"I can’t speak for Student Affairs," Longo said. "We did not have any contact with Jones regarding that incident."
After just one year at the helm, Hadley left UVa the summer after the killings, has not spoken publicly about the investigations and could not be reached for comment.
One thing UVa has made clear is the school’s position that Jones, although now a convicted murderer, has privacy rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, which preclude the university from discussing his actions and which resulted in the number of redacted pages exceeding the number of unredacted pages in the reports released in March, which cost Virginia taxpayers $1.5 million.
While that view has received opposition from open government advocates, UVa clearly has the support of the state government, as the reports were commissioned and redacted under the authority of Attorney General Jason Miyares. Gov. Glenn Youngkin has now appointed a majority of members to UVa’s governing Board of Visitors, the body that controls both the reports and the employment of the university president, and that board has not demanded the reports’ full publication.
While the reports remain shrouded in secrecy, UVa has made no secret of its desire to elevate gun possession on campus from a housing infraction to a crime. Had that been the case, then it might have been police and not administrators from Student Affairs investigating the allegations that Jones had a gun and an undisclosed firearms conviction. And they might have used greater force than sending Jones unanswered emails.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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