Christopher Darnell Jones shot five UVA student-athletes, killing three – Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. D’Sean Perry – with two others, Mike Hollins and Marlee Morgan, surviving, by pure luck.
Jones, a fellow UVA student, and very briefly a student-athlete at UVA, is going to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
What I’m about to write isn’t going to make me any friends, but I need to say it anyway.
Chris Jones is a victim here, too.
ICYMI
- Thursday marks three years since the murders of three UVA Football players
- There’s a better way to honor Chandler, Davis, Perry: Release the report
- Jones pleads guilty to Nov. 13, 2022, murders of three UVA Football players
- UVA agrees to pay out $9M to victims in Nov. 13, 2022, shootings
Not because, as way too many online commenters are trying to say, Jones was the victim of bullying – either by the people that he shot, or more generally, the entirety of the UVA Football team.
Jones was only briefly a member of the football program, for a couple of weeks in 2018, as a guy trying to make the team as a walk-on.
None of the three football players who died the night of Nov. 13, 2022, were even on Grounds when Jones was briefly involved with the UVA Football program.
Jones had long since quit the team.
He quit when he realized he wasn’t going to make the team; no sin there.
He may have carried some resentment about the experience, but that’s just speculation.
The bigger issue for Chris Jones was, tough upbringing, to say the least.
There was abuse, years of it, and because of the unstable situation at home, he was shuttled here and there as a kid, eventually ending up with his grandmother, who he cared for – working the late shift at Taco Bell, walking home after getting off work at 1 a.m., then getting up to go to school the next day.
In spite of his circumstances, he was a top student, and earned admission to UVA – which, I can attest, isn’t easy to do, even for the privileged.
Like Jones, I wasn’t privileged, either, had a tough upbringing, rife with abuse, but I worked hard, and got myself into UVA.
My best guess is, as was the case for me, Jones would have viewed admission to UVA as the door opening to a better life.
In my case, it still wasn’t easy.
Coming from a poverty, it can be unnerving to be surrounded by people who come from privilege.
I wouldn’t say that I necessarily felt, at the time, that I was being looked down upon by people in my social circle, but, I dunno, looking back on it, maybe – and maybe I just suppressed the negativity.
My nickname among my social circle was “Moose,” because I was the big guy among the group – I was also “Big Country” to the guys in my advanced basketball class.
I wasn’t fond of the nicknames – of being talked about like an oversized country bumpkin.
The more I’ve read about Chris Jones, I wonder if he internalized the negativity of being a poor kid in a sea of privilege like I assume now, decades later, I did.
And if the only difference between Chris Jones and me is …
Man, I don’t know.
From what we’ve come to know, he had issues with anger management even in high school.
My approach to anger management was, and is, sarcasm.
It seems for Chris Jones, it’s acting out physically – there was an incident in 2019 when he had to be restrained after erupting at a fellow UVA student in a classroom; and another in which he got into a fight at a bar on The Corner.
We’re also learning, this week, that he was a low-level drug dealer, and apparently had fears that he was seen as a “snitch” in the drug-dealing community because he’d been able to avoid getting jail time on a weapons charge.
One family member described Jones as “paranoid,” and a second said Jones “looked like he went through war,” constantly looking over his shoulder, talking about people who were out to get him.
I’ll assume here that the drug dealing began as drug use, and that the drug use was self-medicating his undiagnosed and untreated mental-health issues – which were likely exacerbated by the drugs and the dealing, and the sense that straddling the worlds of privilege and poverty made him more vulnerable.
Mix guns into the equation, and we get what happened – and why the story of Chris Jones isn’t, poor kid-turned-UVA alum, overcame drug addiction and mental-health issues, productive citizen, and is instead, triple-murderer, life in prison, no good to anybody.
Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis and D’Sean Perry are also UVA alums – maybe playing in the NFL, maybe contributing to society in even better ways post-football.
Mike Hollins and Marlee Morgan aren’t riddled with survivor’s guilt.
Nothing about this story is good, including the part about the guy who could have been a success story, probably should have been.
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