Chris Jones should not have been on that bus with a gun, and a chip on his shoulder, thinking that the world was out to get him.
His friends and family could have prevented what happened on that bus Sunday night from happening.
The criminal justice system could have – should have, had multiple opportunities.
The University of Virginia could have intervened.
One person from among dozens who could have done something could have stopped what happened Sunday night from happening.
Because even one person didn’t do something, Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry are no longer with us.
Criminal (in)justice
The story of how the system failed Chandler, Davis and Perry begins with Jones, who faces three second-degree murder charges in the shooting deaths, being convicted in 2021 in Chesterfield County on a concealed weapons charge and was given a 12-month suspended sentence.
Four months after that June 2021 conviction, Jones was given two additional 12-month suspended sentences on reckless driving and failure to stop at the scene of an accident charges in Petersburg.
That’s three essentially concurrent suspended sentences.
It seems to stand to reason that the second judge and the second prosecutor would have had to know that there was already a 12-month suspended sentence on record for Jones, and armed with that knowledge, one or the other of them would seek actual jail time for Jones.
But Jones was allowed to plead no contest, and through his lawyer was able to bargain his way to having the felony charge for failing to stop for the accident reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor, and in the process avoid jail time.
Relevant here is that Petersburg is among the Virginia localities with an understaffed and overwhelmed Commonwealth’s Attorney office.
The caseloads for the Petersburg Commonwealth’s Attorney office are such that Attorney General Jason Miyares has offered help in the form of assigning attorneys from his office to assist the local prosecutors there.
When you consider that bit of context, you realize that the prosecutor accepting a no contest plea and recommending two suspended sentences for an offender already serving out a suspended sentence isn’t just being lazy, it’s the system creaking, and then the judge accepting the recommendation of the prosecutor for suspended sentences, same thing, because if the city Commonwealth’s Attorney office is overwhelmed, surely the Circuit Court is overwhelmed as well.
You could, then, point back to the first judge, the one in Chesterfield who handed down the first suspended sentence, for the concealed weapons charge.
In a perfect world, that judge learns of the suspended sentences from Petersburg and decides to revoke the terms of the suspended sentence handed down in Chesterfield and orders Jones to jail.
But then this assumes that there’s adequate space in the local jail, which is another issue to consider.
Localities across the state have issues with having adequate local jail space because the state’s prison system is so overcrowded that the Department of Corrections delays transfers of people with felony convictions from local jails to where they’re supposed to be.
A significant portion of the overcrowding is the result of lawmakers getting tough on non-violent offenders like those found to have been in possession of illegal narcotics who would benefit more from rehab than time spent behind bars.
This is more system creaking.
And then one other issue here: a first offense of the state’s concealed weapons law is a misdemeanor, not a felony.
Second and subsequent offenses are felonies.
That the state code lets someone found to be in possession of a concealed weapon who we have to presume wasn’t in legal possession of the weapon – for reasons we’ll go into in a moment – walk away with a misdemeanor is, again, the system failing.
Just one of the many things that could have happened and didn’t here could have kept Jones off that bus, because he could have, should have, gotten jail time.
How was he able to legally purchase two guns?
And yes, even if Jones had been ordered to jail in either June or October of last year, he would have been out in a few months; but would he have been able to legally purchase two guns from a Colonial Heights gun dealer this year?
Jones bought a Ruger AR-556 rifle and a Glock 9mm pistol from Dance’s Sporting Goods, the rifle in February, the Glock in July, according to the store’s owner, Marlon Dance.
A quick aside on Dance’s Sporting Goods: the store has been on the radar of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for several years, racking up seven ATF violations and being cited in a federal indictment of gun traffickers who visited the store to make so-called “straw purchases” to evade federally required background checks in 2019.
The legal counsel for Brady, a Washington, D.C.,-based gun reform advocacy organization, told the Times-Dispatch that there are “red flags” about the store’s “ability to comply with the law.”
“Gun dealers are gatekeepers of the firearms that leave their store and go to the public. They are responsible,” the legal counsel, Josh Scharff, said.
Jones apparently picked the right place to try to buy a gun, and it wasn’t the first time he tried; in fact, he had tried, and failed, two other times to buy guns from Dance’s Sporting Goods, in 2018 and 2021.
After those two failed efforts, with a concealed weapons conviction on his record, with two other criminal offenses, one pleaded down from a felony, he was able to leave Dance’s Sporting Goods, two times, with legally purchased guns.
The University of Virginia failed
Reams of media attention has been given to the fact that the University of Virginia was made aware of the convictions, and the fact that he had failed to report them as required, then failed to follow through, as the University is required, to refer Jones to a student-led judiciary committee for possible sanction.
The school also learned that Jones had told a fellow student that he had a gun, but investigators, after failing to make direct contact with Jones, somehow, ended up moving on from diving into that matter further after talking to his roommate, who said he hadn’t seen Jones with a gun.
The bigger issue here is the failure to follow up on the report that Jones might have a gun.
What happened there was the report from the student who heard Jones talking about having a gun also included the tidbit that the comment about him having a gun was not related to a threat.
An investigator could be inclined to downplay the matter because it didn’t seem to involve a threat, but then, Jones “repeatedly refused to cooperate with University officials,” according to a UVA spokesperson.
You can’t make people talk, but someone repeatedly refusing to talk about an issue involving a gun on Grounds should raise a red flag.
This isn’t the system failing so much as people at this chokepoint in the system exercising bad judgment that resulted in a process that could have worked to stop Chris Jones from being able to get on that bus with a gun.
And as it turns out, the Virginia State Police is now telling us that he not only had a gun, he had at least three.
Jones’ family and friends failed
One last failure – those close to Jones didn’t speak up.
OK, one did – the person who contacted the University to say that he was told by Jones that he had a gun.
But even that report didn’t give University officials much to go on in terms of attaching the presence of a gun with any kind of threat.
In multiple interviews with family and friends of Jones, we’re learning that he was a threat, if not to others, at least to himself.
His father told WTVR that Jones was “real paranoid,” and when you consider the idea that Jones might have actually been clinically paranoid, that should give you some context for the idea being floated out there by those close to him that he had been telling them that he was being bullied.
It’s hard to buy into the idea that a former football player – Jones was an all-conference player in high school who tried to walk on to the football team at UVA – could actually be bullied to the point that he’d need to have a gun in his pocket for protection.
Even his father said he told Jones to “just go to class and ignore them.”
We know from a Times-Dispatch profile that Jones, while being a top student in high school, had anger issues in his teen years, getting into fights in school that led him to serve several suspensions.
And we know from the gun shop that he’d tried as early as 2018 to buy a gun.
People around him had to know that Jones, who despite all his issues was able to earn admission to the University of Virginia, one of the top academic institutions in the country, was dealing with something that might have been more than something he could handle all on his own.
That so many people who know him mention the idea that he was being bullied tells you at least that was out in the open.
If one of those people had said to him, Hey, Chris, have you thought about talking about this with a counselor, he starts on the road to getting help for something that has to have been an issue for him his entire life.
Depending on when the intervention happened, it might have been the case that he doesn’t go through life with the criminal record that would have followed him around even before last Sunday night happened.
Everything went wrong
We didn’t need all these things to go the right way to prevent what happened last Sunday night from happening.
Just one, and he’s not on the bus with a gun.
The ATF could have stopped the sporting goods store from being able to sell him guns because of its record of violations, but ostensibly people exercising their judgment erred on the side of letting things be.
Either of the two judges or Commonwealth’s attorneys in Chesterfield and Petersburg could have pressed harder to put Jones behind bars, but for reasons involving being understaffed, overworked, overwhelmed, they weren’t able to.
He could, yes, still buy a gun illegally, but if he’d served actual jail time, it’s hard to imagine that he would have been back on Grounds this semester – or that he would have even been allowed back on Grounds this semester.
One thing goes the right way, one person chooses the harder right instead of the easier wrong, he’s not on the bus with a gun.
We all failed Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry.
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Chris Graham
