Shonn Bell resigned his job as the head football coach at Waynesboro High School on Wednesday, four days after his arrest on DUI charges related to a single-vehicle accident on Hopeman Parkway on Saturday.
Bell, 50, was 0-10 in his single season as the head coach at WHS Football, with his team losing its games by an average score of 49-13.
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The Waynesboro native, an NAIA All-American and two-year NFL veteran, was a splash hire when his appointment was announced last spring, even as questions arose from an AFP investigation that found Bell had pleaded guilty to operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol and interference/resisting arrest charges from 2008 and 2010 in Iowa, and had faced a rape charge in Virginia in 1993 during his sophomore year at Clinch Valley College that was later dismissed.
Bell was sentenced to 120 days of jail on the 2008 operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol charge, with all but two days suspended, and a year of unsupervised probation, which the court record discharged on Oct. 14, 2010.
In 2010, another Iowa court record indicated that Bell had pleaded guilty to a simple misdemeanor charge of interference/resisting arrest, with the offense date listed as May 29, 2010, the guilty plea being entered on July 12, 2010, and the sentence being a $65 fine.
In 2016, another court record from Iowa lists two misdemeanor charges for Bell – for possession of a controlled substance-first offense, and possession of drug paraphernalia.
The offense date, according to the court record, was April 1, 2016.
Bell was arraigned on May 19, 2016, pleaded not guilty, and both cases were ultimately dismissed on July 22, 2016.
The Iowa court system also has a record of a petition for relief from domestic abuse filed against Bell on Oct. 26, 2016, that was later dismissed on Feb. 1, 2017, and several records related to child support debt, the most recent of those filed on July 17, 2023.
We reached out to Waynesboro Public Schools during our review of Bell’s past to ask if these matters had come up during the hiring process, and got this response, from Ryan Barber, the assistant superintendent who heads up the human resources office at Waynesboro Public Schools:
“As part of our employment process, searches of the FBI database, Virginia State Police database, and central registry for sex offenders are completed for all employees. Currently, the school division does not know of crimes that would constitute a legal barrier to employment,” Barber said.
Fast forward, then, to this past Saturday, when Bell was charged with DUI related to a single-vehicle accident in the 900 block of Hopeman Parkway at 4:40 p.m., according to Waynesboro Police.
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Bell was booked at 7:36 p.m., and the charge is for driving while intoxicated/blood alcohol level greater than .20.
A conviction on this charge would carry with it a mandatory minimum jail sentence of 10 days and a mandatory minimum fine of $250.
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Chris Graham
