A witness to the shootings on a bus of UVA students returning from a field trip on Sunday told investigators that the suspect appeared to be aiming at “certain people.”
This was among the sad new details that emerged Wednesday at a court appearance for Christopher Darnell Jones, 22, who is facing second-degree murder charges in the shooting deaths of UVA Football student-athletes Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry.
A fourth football student-athlete, Mike Hollins, has undergone two surgeries after being shot in the back, and a fifth student who was shot, Marlee Morgan, was discharged from UVA Hospital on Tuesday.
Jones also faces charges in those shootings, and a judge ordered him held without bond until his next hearing, which is scheduled for Dec. 8.
The shootings happened at the end of a day-long field trip with students in an African American theatre class.
The group had departed Charlottesville at 11:30 a.m. to take in the 3 p.m. Sunday performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., of The Ballad of Emmett Till, the first in a trilogy of powerful plays about the 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old that was among the moments that sparked the civil rights movement.
A member of the group on the trip, second-year student Ryan Lynch, told the Washington Post that Jones, a fifth-year student, was not a member of the theater class, but was on the trip because he was taking another class with the professor who had organized the trip.
Lynch said Jones, who she had met earlier in the fall semester when the two were trying out for a fashion show, sat at the back of the bus and didn’t interact with other members of the group, and sat apart from the group at the play.
After leaving the theater, the group had dinner together at an Ethiopian restaurant, then got on the bus to head back to Charlottesville.
According to Lynch, the bus was making its way to the parking lot at Culbreth Theater when she heard noises that she’d first associated with balloons popping, or perhaps a bag of potato chips being opened loudly.
It was actually the sound of gunfire.
Moments before the gunfire, others on the bus told Lynch they heard Jones say something to the effect of, “You guys are always messing with me,” which Lynch said made no sense, because no one was really talking to him the whole trip,” she said.
According to Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney James Hingeley, another witness said Jones shot Chandler as he slept, and that Chandler’s body “sunk to the floor.”
Lynch found Davis face-down in the middle of the aisle with gunshot wounds to his head and back.
“They were just, it looked like they were all over him,” Lynch said. “He had on a bright orange sweatshirt, so you could, like, could see all of where the gunshots had hit him.”
Lynch and other students tried to aid the shooting victims in the chaos, and Hollins, who had made his way off the bus, went back to try to help as well, his mother, Brenda Hollins, told CBS News.
Jones was to have been the subject of a student judiciary committee action regarding his failure to report a 2021 conviction on a concealed weapons charge, but a UVA spokesperson confirmed Tuesday that the school itself had failed to report that infraction to the committee.
Jones was given a 12-month suspended sentence on that charge in June 2021, and in October 2021 was given 12-month suspended sentences on unrelated hit-and-run and reckless driving charges.
University officials said Monday that they had investigated an alleged hazing incident involving Jones and a separate matter involving a student who said Jones had made a comment to him about possessing a gun.
The UVA spokesperson said Jones “repeatedly refused to cooperate” with investigators.
Jones was very briefly a member of the UVA Football program, for a few weeks in the summer of 2018. Former UVA coach Bronco Mendenhall told ESPN that Jones never practiced with the team, was not involved in preseason training camp and was not a part of the team during the 2018 season.
None of the four football student-athletes who were victims in the Sunday shooting were members of the football program in 2018.
A reporter at a Tuesday press conference asked UVA Athletics Director Carla Williams to address the investigation into an alleged hazing incident involving Jones this fall, and whether that had anything to do with the football program, to her knowledge.
“I can speak to that. I’m not aware of anything related to that. And I don’t have any details beyond that, but I’m not aware of anything related to that,” Williams said.
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Chris Graham
