A former University of Virginia student pleaded guilty Wednesday to fatally shooting three football players and wounding two other students on the Charlottesville campus in 2022.
Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., 25, pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated malicious wounding and five counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. A four-day sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin Feb. 4 in Albemarle County Circuit Court.
Jones had been scheduled to stand trial on charges that included aggravated murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole in Virginia. The first-degree murder charges he pleaded guilty to in a plea agreement with prosecutors carry a sentence of 20 years to life.
Authorities said that Jones opened fire on a charter bus as he and other students arrived back on campus after seeing a play and having dinner together in Washington, D.C.
Authorities had not released a motive. Jones was a former member of the university’s football team at the time of the shooting. A witness told police that he had targeted specific victims.
Football players Lavel Davis Jr., D’Sean Perry and Devin Chandler were killed, while a fourth member of the team, Mike Hollins, and another student, Marlee Morgan, were wounded.
The shooting erupted near a parking garage and set off panic and a 12-hour lockdown of the historic campus until the suspect was captured. Many at the school of about 23,000 students huddled inside laboratory closets and darkened dorm rooms, while others moved far away from library windows and barricaded the doors of its stately academic buildings.
The university was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, a now cosmopolitan town that’s about 72 miles (115 kilometers) west of Richmond. It endured the violent “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, which drew hundreds of white nationalists to protest the planned removal of a Confederate statue. A car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one person and hurting more than a dozen others.
Jones’ trial on charges stemming from the shooting had been scheduled for January. UVA President Jim Ryan said in a statement on Wednesday that Jones’ guilty plea represents “another step in a lengthy and painful journey for the families of the victims and for our community.”
“We continue to grieve the loss of three beloved members of our community and the injuries suffered by others on the bus,” Ryan said.
Within days of the shooting, university leaders asked for an outside review to investigate UVA’s safety policies and procedures, its response to the violence and its prior efforts to assess the potential threat of the student who was eventually charged. School officials acknowledged that Jones previously had been on the radar of the university’s threat-assessment team.
In June, a lawyer representing some of the victims and their families announced that the university agreed to pay $9 million in a settlement.
Kimberly Wald said at the time that the school would pay $2 million each to the families of the three students who died, the maximum allowable under Virginia law. The school would also pay $3 million total to the two students who were wounded.
Following the settlement, some of the families called for the immediate release of the independent probe into the shooting, which was completed last year. Wald said then that the university should have removed Jones from campus before the attack because he displayed multiple red flags through erratic and unstable behavior.
Attorney Michael Haggard, who represented the families of three of the five shooting victims in the civil case, said the families were initially opposed to the plea agreement with Jones because they wanted him to go on trial and to receive the maximum punishment possible under the aggravated murder charges, which is life without the possibility of parole.
“It was difficult for them. They would have wanted more, but they are anxiously awaiting this sentencing. They want life in prison,” Haggard said.
Haggard said the families are eager for UVA to release the report on the independent investigation.
“The families want that report, they have never gotten that report,” he said. “They wanted a trial to learn more about what the heck happened.”
University officials said they had postponed the report’s release last year over concerns that it could affect Jones’ trial.
The school’s leadership said in its statement Wednesday that officials remain committed to publicly releasing the report. They said they plan to do so once Jones’ sentencing is final in February.
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