Gunman charged with killing three fellow students at the University of Virginia

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia - A 22-year-old student at the University of Virginia has been charged with

fatally shooting

three members of the university’s football team and wounding two others as they returned from a class field trip on Sunday night, an attack that led to an overnight campus-wide lockdown while authorities searched for the gunman for roughly 12 hours.

The three killed in the shooting – Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr and D’Sean Perry – were juniors, and remembered by classmates, coaches and teachers as affable students and dedicated activists. The university’s first-year coach Tony Elliott said they were “incredible young men with huge aspirations and extremely bright futures”.

As tributes to the victims poured in, questions proliferated about the fellow student accused of killing them: Christopher Darnell Jones Jr, a former football player who two months earlier had come to the attention of a university task force formed to identify and respond to threatening behaviour by students.

Mr Brian Coy, a university spokesman, said that on Sept 15, amid an investigation into some hazing incidents on campus, officials with the university’s department of student affairs “heard from a student that Mr Jones made a comment to him about possessing a gun” – a remark, Mr Coy added, that was not made in conjunction with a threat. No one whom officials spoke with, including Jones’ roommate, said they had seen him with a gun, Mr Coy said.

But in the course of the probe, officials discovered that Jones had been convicted of a concealed weapons violation in 2021, for which he got a 12-month suspended sentence and had to pay a US$100 (S$137) fine.

It was one of several misdemeanour charges that Jones had been charged with over the past few years, according to court records. He was obligated by campus policy to report the concealed weapons conviction to the university, but did not. When university officials tried to question him about it, Jones refused to cooperate, Mr Coy said. The task force called a threat assessment team, “escalated his case for disciplinary action” before a student judiciary body on Oct 27. Authorities said the matter was pending.

It was not immediately clear who was representing Jones, and no representative could be reached on his behalf by late Monday.

At a news conference on Monday, chief of police for the University of Virginia Timothy Longo said Jones would be charged with three counts of second-degree murder and three counts of using a handgun in the commission of a felony.

Minutes later, Mr Longo was briefly pulled aside by another law enforcement official, returning to the microphone with an announcement: Jones had just been arrested by the police in Henrico County, Virginia, in the Richmond suburbs, about 75 minutes away.

“The search for the suspect may be over, but the work of understanding this terrible crime and what motivated him to commit it is just beginning,” said Dr James Ryan, president of the university, in an e-mail to the students. announcing that classes would be cancelled on Tuesday, as they were on Monday.

The shooting in Charlottesville was at least the fifth since February on or near college campuses in Virginia alone. President Joe Biden and the first lady Jill Biden sent their “deepest condolences” to the families, friends and neighbours grieving the victims and the injured.

“Too many families across America are bearing the awful burden of gun violence,” the White House said in a statement, once again calling for an assault weapons ban “to get weapons of war off America’s streets”. NYTIMES