Monthly Archive for August, 2012

Four Dead in Stony Point Shooting

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 29, 2012 in Crime. 50 Comments

Four people were killed in a shooting in the sleepy hamlet of Stony Point last night, NBC-29 reports, under conditions that remain wholly unclear. A 911 call was received at 11:43 PM from a small rental house across the street from Stony Point Elementary School from a gunshot victim. That person died in the hospital a short time later. Police say that this is an isolated incident, and that there’s no threat to the community or the school, but aren’t identifying a suspect. Given the lack of manhunt or a story of an arrest, one must assume the suspect is among the dead.

5:00 PM Update: C-Ville Weekly editor Giles Morris reports that the dead include Elizabeth Walton and her three children, and that Walton was an employee of C-Ville Weekly. An e-mail from Albemarle High School identifies two of the victims as eighth-grader Andrew Romando and eleventh-grader Lily Romando, while Morris names the third as Noah Romando. According to Noah Romando’s Facebook profile, he’s an employee of Harris Teeter, a student at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and a 2011 graduate of AHS. Elizabeth Walton had just gotten married in June, and started working for C-Ville Weekly in April. There is not yet word on who was the shooter and who were the victims.

08/30 Update: Police believe that 19-year-old Noah Romando is responsible for the death of his family, Courteney Stuart reports for The Hook. Stuart documents a trail of online evidence that leads to him describing himself as a Satanist, which surely wouldn’t explain his actions, but it would start to paint a picture of what lead up to the death of this family.

C-Ville Weekly Relaunches Website

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 24, 2012 in General News. 13 Comments

Charlottesville Tomorrow isn’t the only local media outlet with a new website—C-Ville Weekly has also had a total overhaul, complete with a new CMS. The weekly long had a custom CMS that had become awfully restrictive, but they’ve replaced it with a WordPress-based site (that’s what cvillenews.com has run on for many years) with Disqus-based commenting. Using a standard platform will make it easy for them to add new features, stay current with emerging technologies, and ultimately integrate it into their document workflow. (The Bangor Daily News has a famously amazing document workflow, which is entirely open sourced, that makes it a snap for their articles to flow both into their print layout tool and their WordPress-based website.) WordPress is liable to serve them well for years to come.

The one catch of the new website—and it’s a big one—is that they’ve failed to redirect their old URLs to their new URLs. That is, all of their old stories are still on the website, but every link on the web to every one of those stories is now broken. Here’s hoping that they have a plan to deal with that. There are some other bugs and oddities still to be resolved, but that’s just how it goes with a new website.

President Obama Campaigning Here

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 22, 2012 in Politics. 22 Comments

President Obama will be campaigning for reelection in Charlottesville on Wednesday of next week. UVA is the most likely location for his visit, though specifics are not yet available. Rumor has it that first dibs will go to folks who held tickets to the Michele Obama’s cancelled visit last month.

08/24 Update: In an interesting twist, UVA has declined the Obama campaign’s request to use their facilities. There were two locations that the campaign inquired about (adjacent to Alderman Library and the McIntire Amphitheatre), and using either of those locations would have been enormously disruptive on the second day of classes. The university offered the use of the John Paul Jones arena, but it wasn’t what the campaign was looking for. The downtown amphitheater is said to be the next most likely place.

Council May Beef Up Noise Violation Fines

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 18, 2012 in Crime and UVa. 5 Comments

City Council is considering quadrupling fines for noise violations, Graham Moomaw writes for the Daily Progress, in an effort to deal with noisy parties around UVA. Currently the top fine is $250, which apparently is treated as the cost of throwing a big party by some students. The proposal is to move the offense from a Class 4 misdemeanor to a Class 2 misdemeanor, which would allow a fine of up to $1,000 and, theoretically, six months in jail. (Six months in jail is inherent with a Class 2 misdemeanor—increasing the fine means raising the possibility of jail time.) For somebody convicted twice in a one-year period, that’s a Class 1 misdemeanor, which is a fine of up to $2,500 or a year in jail. A city representative says that they don’t intend to pursue jail time except for people who demonstrate no interest in complying with the law. Council will take up the issue on Monday night.

Strine Resigns from UVA

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 7, 2012 in UVa. 19 Comments

UVA COO Michael Strine is stepping down, effective immediately, CBS-19 reports. Strine was brought on by President Teresa Sullivan as a part of her core team on July 1 of last year, replacing Leonard Sandridge. It’s a fair guess that Strine’s resignation is connected to Sullivan’s near-death experience at the hands of Board of Visitors Rector Helen Dragas, although right now nobody’s talking.

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