Buried in a Washington Post story examining the possible motive for mass shooter Chris Jones is mention of a November 2019 brawl reportedly involving UVA football players that the authors seem to want to imply could have involved one or more of his victims.
The matter does merit examination, but it doesn’t appear that the brawl is connected.
The Post report ascribed to former Charlottesville Police Chief Rashall Brackney the claim that Jones was a participant in the brawl, and offers that Charlottesville Police denied a public records request related to the incident, then links to January 2020 article in the Daily Progress that noted a UVA student had been injured in the incident and transported to the hospital.
The juxtaposition would seem to make you think that Jones might have been the victim.
The Daily Progress story doesn’t name the victim, but reports that Brackney implied in an email to University Police Chief Tim Longo that the victim was a track athlete, and the author of that piece said this had been corroborated by several sources familiar with the investigation.
According to the Progress account, the brawl, in the early morning hours of Nov. 17, 2019, a Sunday on a bye week for the football team, was the second of two events involving a group that had earlier gotten into a fight at The Standard, an apartment complex located off-Grounds.
That fight prompted a call to police at 12:31 a.m. A second call was logged at 1:48 a.m. at Asado Wing and Taco Co. on The Corner.
That one was the one we’re calling “the brawl.” The fight at Asado spilled out into the street, and the victim was beaten and stabbed, according to Charlottesville Police, and Brackney called the event a “severe beating, stabbing and possibly attempted homicide,” though UVA officials downplayed the injuries and incident as being much less serious, and a Charlottesville Police spokesperson told the paer that the victim had been treated and released from UVA Medical Center, which would seem to back the school’s side of the story in terms of the seriousness.
The owner of the restaurant told the Progress that security footage from the event showed the fight being initiated when an unidentified man approached two football players, and said the football players weren’t involved in the stabbing and “got themselves out of it.”
According to the Progress article, at least one football player was suspended for Virginia’s final two regular-season games – against Liberty and Virginia Tech – in the aftermath of the incident.
Mike Hollins, who was wounded in the Nov. 13 mass shooting that killed teammates Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry, got on the field for eight snaps in Virginia’s 55-27 win over Liberty on Nov. 23, gaining 27 yards and scoring a touchdown in the win.
Perry was on the team as a true freshman in 2019, but according to a university source, he was on the dress list for the Liberty and Virginia Tech games, meaning he wasn’t serving out any suspensions.
Davis was a high-school senior in 2019, as was Chandler, who spent his first two years as a football student-athlete at Wisconsin before transferring to UVA earlier this year.
So, as tidy as the article in the Post might have made it seem, the November 2019 doesn’t seem to factor into the Chris Jones story.
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Chris Graham
