Three football players have been killed at the University of Virginia, and police have taken former Cavaliers football player Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. into custody in connection with the alleged killings.
Jones is accused of shooting and Three members of the UVA football team killed – Devin Chandler, LeVell “Tyler” Davis and De’Sean Perry – and injured two other people on the bus on the way back from a field trip to Washington, DC.
Jones’ bio at UVA indicates he was on the team in 2018, but did not appear in any games. A school official said that he had not been a member of the team for “more than a year”.
He played for three years at Warina High School, and played back and linebacker in his senior season at Petersburg High School, about half an hour south of Richmond.
In 2018, the Richmond Times-Dispatch Elaborate Jones’ Unexpected Upbringing, living in residential complexes such as Essex Village. a local legislator Essex Village condemned for Richmond Free Press prior to its sale in 2017 due to being in an “unsafe and unhygienic condition for a very long time”.
In the Times-Dispatch story, Jones said his parents divorced when he was five, and he did not see his father again until he was a teenager.
“My dad and I were really close. I was sad when he had to leave,” Jones said. “It was one of the most painful things that happened to me in my life. I didn’t understand why he left. When I went to school people didn’t understand me.
Jones said that his mother worked at night, which meant she was often responsible for feeding her three younger siblings. He went to live with his grandmother for his senior year, which is why he changed schools in Petersburg.
While he got into several fights, he excelled on the football field and in the classroom, and the football coach became his “mentor”.
“He always had strong goals. He was ambitious, but his temper just got in the way,” one of his mentors, Xavier Richardson, said in a 2018 story.
“I used to get upset because my intelligence was being insulted. The kids would pounce on me – ‘Why did you do that? Why did you answer that question?’ Jones said. “And in that world, disrespect means you must fight.”
Jones’ mother, Margo, spoke briefly to The Washington Post on Monday before hanging up.
“I can tell you now that Chris was a good kid,” he told the outlet,
On Monday, UVA Police Chief Tim Longo told reporters that Jones been on their radar since september due to a prior event.
“Cause I want to be transparent with you, I want you to know [that] … Mr. Jones came to the attention of the University of Virginia’s threat assessment team in the fall of 2022,” Longo said. “They received information that Mr. Jones had made a comment about a man holding a gun that was unaffiliated with the university.”
The comment was reportedly not made as a threat, and Jones’ roommates told investigators that they had never seen him with a weapon.
All three victims were current members of the football team. Davis Jr. was a junior wideout from Dorchester, Va. He took 16 catches this season for 371 yards and two touchdowns. Chandler, a junior wideout from Hunterville, NC, had relocated from Wisconsin. Perry, a junior linebacker from Miami, made a total of seven tackles this season.