Phoebe Stevens is a pacifist. She says that’s why she wrapped her arms around Jason Kessler at his August 13, 2017, press conference as a crowd of angry protesters closed in on him. But after she knocked him down in the chaos, he accused her of assault and battery—a charge she was convicted of in […]
Tyler Watkins Davis entered an Alford plea February 8, and though it’s technically a guilty plea, it means the man from Middleburg, Florida, is not admitting guilt, but acknowledging that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him of malicious wounding in the brutal parking garage assault of DeAndre Harris. Defense attorney Matthew Engle said his […]
February is Black History Month, a time when schools across the country dutifully trot out lessons about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. In 2015, a minor firestorm ensued when Orange County High School students connected the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter movement in a school performance, and an […]
In 2010, Charlene Green, now head of Charlottesville’s Office of Human Rights, was directing the city’s first Dialogue on Race, an initiative to engage residents in an ongoing discussion of race, racism, and diversity. “As I was having discussions with people around the community on these [...]
Ralph Northam’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week Up until a week ago, Governor Ralph Northam had great approval ratings. Then last week hit, and with the fallout from a photo of a person in blackface beside someone in a KKK robe on his page in the Eastern Virginia Medical School 1984 [...]
By Jonathan Haynes City Councilor Wes Bellamy sat down for a revelatory interview at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center January 10 to promote his new book, Monumental: It Was Never About a Statue. The title alludes to the former vice-mayor’s push to remove Confederate [...]
Knock, knock. Who’s [not] there? Sears. Sweethaus. Performance Bicycle. And Brown’s Cleaners, just to name a few recent local closings that left community members shocked, and in at least one case, without their clothes. The closing of Sears at Fashion Square Mall heralds the demise of one of [...]
By Lisa Provence and Samantha Baars Most of the biggest stories we followed this year were fallout from 2017: both the direct effects of the Unite the Right rally, with its continuing arrests and trials, and the continued furor over monuments, free speech, and present-day inequities as our city [...]
BY Lisa Provence and Samantha Baars Last Friday evening, almost 16 months after white supremacists invaded our town, many of the same counterprotesters who were there on August 12, 2017, were once again gathered on Fourth Street. It was the spot where James Alex Fields, Jr., a self-proclaimed [...]
Attorney General Mark Herring has spent the past few years studying the issue of hate crimes and white supremacist violence across the commonwealth and advocating for new legislation to combat it. On December 5—coincidentally during the state’s murder trial against the neo-Nazi who drove his [...]
After finding him guilty of first-degree murder and nine other charges on Friday, a jury today recommended that James Alex Fields Jr. spend the rest of his life in prison for the carnage he caused here when he drove into a crowd August 12, 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more. [...]
A jury deliberated seven hours December 7 before reaching a verdict in the first-degree murder trial of self-proclaimed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. for the death of Heather Heyer: guilty. Fields also faced five charges of aggravated malicious wounding, three of malicious wounding and one [...]
It’s in the jury’s hands now. The prosecution and defense have given their closing arguments on the ninth day of James Alex Fields Jr.’s first-degree murder trial. The man charged with killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others when he rammed his car into a crowd at an August 12, 2017, [...]
The planned three-week trial of James Alex Fields Jr. is running well ahead of schedule. That’s why it was so jarring that proceedings ground to a halt with a two-hour delay December 5 because of a concern about jurors. When court finally was in session around 11am, Judge Rick Moore said some [...]
The prosecution rested today in the trial of James Alex Fields Jr. and the defense began its case, both sides focusing on the defendant during and after his arrest August 12, 2017. In prosecution videos of Fields after he was taken into police custody, he repeatedly apologized, asked about any [...]
Marissa Blair Martin initially was unsure if she wanted to go downtown the weekend of the Unite the Right rally in 2017. However, after the tiki-torch march through UVA Grounds on August 11, she changed her mind. She and her then-fiance, Marcus Martin, decided, “We had to so stand up for our [...]
“That’s what someone’s eyes look like when they’re dead,” is the only thought that went through anti-racist activist Star Peterson’s mind as she saw Heather Heyer flying through the air. Peterson had just been run over by a white supremacist in a Dodge Challenger on Fourth Street on August 12, [...]
It took three long days to seat a jury of 12 with four alternates. After all, it’s a national story and the video and photographs of a Dodge Challenger plowing into a group of counterprotesters have been viewed over and over. The defense does not dispute that James Alex Fields Jr., 21, [...]
By Jonathan Haynes The vaulted sanctuary of First United Methodist Church fell silent Friday night as survivors of the vehicular assault that killed Heather Heyer spoke one by one about their paths to recovery. Survivors organized the event to raise money for Heal Charlottesville, a local [...]
His lawyer painted a picture of a black father in his early 50s, the sole caretaker of his child with autism, who doesn’t have a computer or read the news, and who came to the Downtown Mall on August 12, 2017, to panhandle for the extra money he needed to buy his son’s medication. Defense […]
When about 40 protesters gathered at the University of Virginia School of Law library April 25 to chase off Jason Kessler, one man was arrested—and it wasn’t the one who brought hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists to Grounds. Eric Martin, a local activist and theologian, entered the [...]
Know your polling place It’s been an eventful couple years, and if you want to speak up when it matters (by voting in the midterms on November 6) your deadline to register is October 15. With that in mind, we also want to remind 15,000 voters in Albemarle County that their polling places have [...]
A judge today said the city’s lengthy list of prohibited items on the Downtown Mall over the August 12 anniversary weekend swept “far too broadly,” and he dismissed a charge against a disabled veterans activist for possession of razor blades that were purchased August 11 at [...]