On May 5, Earl Washington got his due. After a two-week civil case in federal court, a jury awarded Washington $2.25 million, plus attorneys fees and costs, for the nine and a half years he spent on death row for a crime he did not commit.
An attorney for Kurt Kroboth, the former investment banker accused of donning a vampire mask and attempting to murder his estranged wife back in November 2004, has filed a motion calling into question the constitutionality of the sentence his client was handed on May 9. Judge William Shelton sentenced Kroboth to 25 years for attempted murder, with all but 10 years suspended. The defense had recommended a sentence of two and a half to five years; the prosecution recommended four and a half to eight years.
The federal drug and conspiracy case against Louis Antonio Bryant, the alleged drug dealer and ringleader of local gang the Westside Crew, continues into its second week of testimony on Monday, May 15. The first week prosecutors brought to the stand numerous police investigators, as well as former associates of Bryant\’s who had dealt with or bought drugs from him.
On May 9, The Virginia Quarterly Reviewâa four-man publishing operation run out of the University of Virginiaâwon two National Magazine Awards, the industry\’s highest honor. VQR won for General Excellence in the under 100,000 distribution category, as well as for fiction, a category in which they were pitted against such tough competitors as The Atlantic Monthly and McSweeney\’s.
The white board at the front of the room announced the outcomes from the individual precincts: Democratic candidate for City Council Dave Norris won seven of Charlottesville’s eight precincts and took home 3,835 votes; his running mate, former fire chief Julian Taliaferro, won 3,637. Republican incumbent Rob Schilling came in dead last with 2,389. Given that the Dems’ campaign made the election all about Schilling, the Dems’ victory party at the Charlottesville Ice Park was predictably raucous: booze flowed, Beyoncé blared, Norris even spilled his beer on an unsuspecting reveler.
Waving American flags, singing hymns in Spanish and English, and holding signs that declared “We struggle for what is right with dignity” and “I am an immigrant, not a delinquent,” about 350 local Hispanics and community members gathered outside the County Office Building on McIntire Road at 6:30pm on May 1 to tell Charlottesville loud and clear: “We\’re here, and we matter.”
In late November, after 10 days of testimony and arguments in federal court, jurors were preparing to go into deliberations in the RICO trial against four alleged members of the Westside Crew (a.k.a. Project Crud), a local gang.
At about 11pm on Thursday, May 4, Bishop Rufus Hayes of the Charlottesville Church of Christ was awakened to a telephone call telling him that his church was burning.
By the time he arrived at the church he’s led for 17 years, flames had engulfed the Fifth Street building’s smaller sanctuary and offices, and firefighters were working to keep the main sanctuary from succumbing to the fire.
A change can do a body good. And a refreshing change is what Hawes Spencer hopes will come to the mixed-use Jefferson Theater building, the Downtown stalwart and second-run movie palace, now that he is selling it to local megadeveloper Coran Capshaw.
On a recent sky-blue spring day Monticello hosted a gaggle of reporters atop Montalto, the mountain across from Monticello that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation snatched from the poised paws of hovering developers last year when the property came up for sale. The occasion for mountaintop sunning? On May 1, twice-daily tours of the property began, continuing whenever the weather is fine through October.