Media reports are telling us that family members of the UVA student who shot and killed three members of the school’s football team on Sunday are saying Chris Jones was being bullied.
None of the reports are linking the alleged bullying to Jones’s victims – Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry – and a fourth UVA Football player who was wounded in the mass shooting, Mike Hollins.
“It was just bullying. He just got fed up. It was too many bullies, and nobody was listening,” an unnamed family member told the Washington Post. “He had nowhere to go, he had nobody to talk to, so he finally gave up. And that’s life, right? Everybody’s got their breaking point.”
University of Virginia spokesman Brian Coy confirmed that school officials had learned from a UVA student on Sept. 15 that Jones, who was a walk-on on the football team as a first-year student in 2018, had made a comment about possessing a gun as administrators were investigating a possible hazing issue.
Coy didn’t offer details on the possible hazing issue, which was first brought up in a Monday morning press conference by University Police Chief Tim Longo, also without further detail.
According to Coy, school officials learned during the investigation that Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor concealed weapons violation in Henrico County in 2021, for which he received a 12-month suspended sentence and had to pay a $100 fine, and which he did not report to the university as required by school rules.
Jones refused to cooperate with school officials, according to Coy, and a threat-assessment team decided on Oct. 27 to escalate his case for disciplinary action.
That disciplinary action was pending at the time of Sunday’s shooting.
Jones, a top student and football player in high school, had a troubled childhood, according to several media reports. A profile published in the Times-Dispatch on the eve of his high school graduation in 2018 noted that he had grown up in public housing with three younger siblings, and described him as having struggled after his parents divorced when he was 5.
According to the profile, Jones had earned top grades and membership in the National Honor Society, but along the way, he was regularly disciplined in high school for getting into fights.
The story noted that Jones had moved in with his grandmother in Petersburg in 2016 after the relationship with his mother deteriorated. It also said that in the two years before he started at UVA, “mentors helped him let go of his anger.”
“People would say, ‘You’re too smart to be doing something like that,’” Jones was quoted in the 2018 Times-Dispatch piece. “But it’s because of where I was at. Sometimes I’m not in a good head space. Fighting at first was my only way of relieving stress.”
Antoine Brown, who played football with Jones at Petersburg High School, told the New York Times that he remembered Jones as a “good student, good player, good person to be around,” and the only one from his graduating class who had gone on to enroll at the University of Virginia.
“You would have thought he was one of the ones who was going to get out of the city and make it,” Brown said.
Traci Baines, the mother of a student who attended Petersburg High School with Jones, told The Daily Beast that the news of the shooting is “so out of character, so very, very out of character.”
“I know a different Chris,” said Baines, who remembered Jones as a conscientious teen who did well in school and worked to help out at home.
“I know a Chris who helped take care of his grandmother, who helped take care of his family,” Baines said. “I know a Chris who got a scholarship to UVA, and it’s just a tragedy for all those involved.”
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