News

As summer approaches, City and County officials are supposed to be coming up with a coordinated drought-management plan that will set usage restrictions in case of a water shortage. They haven\’t gotten the job done, but recent rains have eased fears of a summertime drought.

Raja Jabbour was the girls’ junior varsity head soccer coach at Albemarle High until he was dismissed from duties on May 2, six days after his April 26 arrest and almost two weeks after he was indicted by a grand jury for possession of child pornography. He remains behind bars pending a third hearing in federal court to determine whether he will be released on a $50,000 conditional bond.

The 15-year-old Albemarle County High School student found guilty of plotting with three other teens to use explosives on two area high schools has been allowed by an Albemarle County Circuit Court judge to return home to his family. Reached for comment, neither the teen\’s mother, nor his lawyer, David Bruns, would comment on why the court decided that the 15-year-old could—or should—go home, because the case remains closed to the public. The teen\’s mother did say that her son is home permanently, and that she and her husband have plans to home-school him. She says that he needs to catch up on the last quarter of 10th grade since he\’s fallen behind due to his legal woes. He will have the summer off and then, his mother says, will continue his 11th grade studies at home in the fall. She also says that, “He\’s doing great. He\’s doing very well,” and that both she and her husband are pleased with the outcome.

After two weeks of testimony in federal court, a jury came back with a guilty verdict for Louis Antonio Bryant on Monday morning, May 22. The ringleader of the Charlottesville gang the Westside Crew, otherwise known as Project Crud, was found guilty of racketeering and one count of attempted murder. He faces life in prison.

The 17 students who took over UVA\’s Madison Hall for four days in April are off the hook on their trespassing charges. On Monday, May 23, Judge Robert Downer in Charlottesville General District Court dismissed the charges against all the students. He said that because UVA Chief Financial Officer Leonard Sandridge had told the students that they had five minutes to vacate the building, and yet UVA police began arresting students before that five minutes was up, that the case had to be dismissed on lack of grounds. The judge also said that the University had been sending mixed messages to the students, by agreeing to have a dialogue with them, then having them arrested.

What you do with the other guy\’s recruits never matters as much as what you do with your own. UVA head basketball coach Dave Leitao won a berth in the National Invitational Tournament in his first season, but that won\’t satisfy UVA fans (and administrators) when the Cavs are playing in the swanky John Paul Jones Arena next year.

When William Harvey arrived at UVA in November, the campus was still in full boil over a series of racial incidents—epithets yelled from a passing car, racial slurs anonymously scrawled on dry erase boards.