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.
I think there are a lot of us in Stony Point waiting nervously for details, because odds seem pretty good that we’re going to know the victims, the perp, or possibly both.
Confirmed murder-suicide on Newsplex: http://www.facebook.com/Newsplex/posts/114631092017431
Terrible.
Two males and two females dead.
A young-ish couple live(d) there. They moved in about two years ago. White, mid- to late-twenties. I never talked to them, but I always thought they looked nice. Well, I always thought she looked nice. The guy gave me the hairy eyeball a couple of times.
The latest information is that a mother and three kids lived there, so either the prior folks moved out, or the woman I’ve seen there had kids and the guy I’d seen there didn’t live there.
To clarify, the word of a mother and three kids living there is from the Stony Point gossip mill, not from media outlets.
Mom killed three kids , then herself. This from a newsperson that had up to date deets.
danpri, I’m so sad to read your comment. I’ve been trying to find out information as I hear there were children involved. I just can’t understand why this happens….such heartbreak.
It’s becoming harder and harder to escape that conclusion, Dan.
I’m told that one of the victims is a female high school student who
attendsuntil this fall attended the Charlottesville Catholic School. (It’s not for me to release her name.)When we dropped our last off at college, we calculated that we had over 51K in child rearing days under our belts, and while they often made us feel crazy… this remains unfathomable.
Apparently, the mother in question worked at the paper I write for, C-VILLE Weekly. The editor just posted this: http://www.c-ville.com/beth-walton-c-ville-employee-killed-in-murder-suicide-on-stony-point-road/
They have released the names on the C-Ville website.
Oh, man.
danpri – not cool to those involved to spread info that you don’t know to be correct.
@Lee. Agreed. New reports stating NOT the mother, but still contained to the house.
Please don’t worsen tragedy by repeating what you don’t know for a fact. The father and stepfather are the only surviving members of this family, and I know them and Beth personally. From what police have told them, it seems the oldest son, who has a history of mental troubles, was the shooter. It’s horrid any way you slice it, but spreading rumors makes a tragedy even more horrid.
You all that are spreading rumors should be ashamed of yourselves. You have no idea what happened, but make general assumptions that are not true. Thank you “AM” for speaking up. The rest of you need to be be quiet until you have factual information.
If everyone on the internet “was quiet” until they had “factual information”, there would be nothing left but cats and porn.
I mean no disrespect, but I think your umbrage has been misdirected from ‘people who believe everything on the internet is true, relevant and important’ to ‘people who speculate online when there is nebulously detailed breaking news’.
This is a family you are talking about, not “cats & porn”. Spreading rumors is not nice, and can be harmful. Especially to the kids who are grieving.
No, I’ve not said a thing about the family, nor will I. I was talking about the internet.
I read through the thread again, and no one was ‘spreading rumors’ or being disrespectful at all. In fact, this is probably the most civil message board in town. Everyone here was just trying to make sense of a hopeless tragedy in the absence of any real information. You know, speculating. I understand you must be upset because people died, but scolding anonymous fellow citizens for utilizing a message board for its intended purpose seems to me to be relatively unproductive.
Then again, it is not place to tell you how to grieve, so by all means, if it makes you feel better, tear me to pieces. But its not going to stop me from defending people’s right to crowd source some kind of understanding of events that shape our lives.
My apologies for chiming in in the first place. Peace.
i knew andrew and he was one of the funniest people i know. he always had a smile on his face and just a really harry kid. NBC29 has not said that there older brother Noah was the killer but was not the one in the ambulance. at school we had a whole service and he and the family are gone but will NEVER be forgotten.
i ment NBC29 has said
It has been my experience that when I am closely impacted by a tragic news story that it is better for my mental well being to NOT read any comment threads.
This is a very civil forum but even so, if you know this family you may be hurt by what is just speculation which has no intent to damage anyone.
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Anybody personally connected to this should stop reading now. Really. Don’t do this to yourself.
This is a street corner where we gather to glean news & express our opinions and assumptions and extrapolate into what we know and what we don’t know. That’s human nature. Waldo’s right: don’t venture down to this street corner if you’re personally connected. Belmont Yo is right: this is among the most gentle & thoughtful street corners in town.
Quote: “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”
Online ‘evidence’? Are you hacks for real? Your interpretation of evidence is garbage. Before you ‘glean news & express our opinions and assumptions and extrapolate into what we know and what we don’t know’ (shooting your uniformed mouths off online) do some real journalism and try to discern facts before wanting to be the first to report shit. This is the kind of journalistic bottom feeding that has news outlets like yours perceived as unreliable. This isn’t news, not in the slightest.
takedown and expose of sonofject coming in three…two…one…
LOLZ Scientologist pew pew news tactics
sonofject outed himself already at the Hook’s site. Some hilarious and to the point comments from a Jeff D follow.
http://www.readthehook.com/107114/dark-designs-did-satan-play-role-stony-point-murder-suicide
sonofject August 30th, 2012 | 7:15pm
I’m an admin over at SIN, the site that had Noah’s profile you cited in your blog. I’m a little annoyed at how you are framing this incident in the context of your blog title. Instead of jumping the gun with sensational and typical speculation about Noah’s ‘motivations’, perhaps you should refrain from interpreting his activity on SIN in such a negative and counterproductive way. There were no indications that his involvement at the site influenced anything negative in his life, and from the people that interacted with him on our chat feature, he was known as a quiet and unassuming user that functioned in a socially acceptable manner. Before you go hounding his surviving family members, please keep this in mind and try not to spin your speculation as involvement in some sort of ‘dark side’ that family members weren’t aware about. The social networks that Noah was involved in don’t bear any responsibility for his actions.
Wait a minute, did a spokesperson for the Satanic International Network (SIN), a purloined reference to THE Dark Lord, just take umbrage to an investigation of the “dark side” of one of their members, an alleged mass murderer?
Move along. Find another street corner to peddle your nonsense.
Yep, they sure do beat people with an ignorant stick around here, when you have editors telling people involved in the case not to read comments made on their stories, you gotta wonder how much more nonsense this garbage site is gonna pull in the name of good journalism. What a bang up job these ‘reporters’ are. Anything for site traffic I guess.
I was his friend, and he told me he was a satanist
I went out of my way to make clear that the fact that the apparent shooter claimed to be associated with Satanism in no way explains the death of his family, and this guy still gets offended. Satanists are awfully touchy, I guess.
Editors? Reporters? Site traffic? You’ve apparently stumbled across this website with no understanding of what you’re looking at. There’s no editor. There are no reporters. I have no interest in site traffic, because there are no ads. Why don’t you take a few deep breaths, look around the site, and figure out what you’re looking at before you make yourself look any more foolish?
Your garbage site has been linked all over our site because of your grade school attempts to write sensational bullshit. Don’t go around telling people not to be touchy when you are linking SIN network with your piss poor articles you label ‘news’. For fuck sake your original ‘blogger’ Courteney changed the title and tone of her writing several times to hide her rookie bullshit mistakes, at the expense of some teenager’s memory. Is this how you people waste bandwidth in VA?
Foolish? Yeah buddy.
Waldo: take him down, please & thank you.
What a joke.
Just a word to the wise, Courteney Stuart is a reporter (and imho a good one) for ‘The Hook’ http://readthehook.com. cvillenews is something else entirely.
Apparently ol’ stupid thinks he is posting here to Ms. Walton’s colleagues at C-VILLE Weekly. It is just so easy to be deceived when you serve Satan!
Funny to see someone who boasts of starting a dumb-assed “satanic” website toss out accusations of wasting bandwidth.
No, what’s funny is someone calling themselves the ‘boss of me’ telling other people how they think things are. I didn’t start the site, I’m an admin. You’re the one wasting bandwidth commenting about something you don’t even know about, lol.
Yes, it certainly seems that the S.I.N. forum is a wonderful place for scintillating conversation and well reasoned debate…
You idiots linked the Hook blogger in the last paragraph of this article, really, does anyone even read anything you people put out before making inane comments? Absolutely hilarious.
You people? You don’t have a clue dude.
LOLZ, you changed your name to dickride on me, when I didn’t even mention you directly after my last post! There there, poor little keyboard warrior, what don’t I have a clue about? Oh you changed your name, that’s a clue that you are a nobody that wants attention. Dipshit.
Have fun talking to yourself, boss of me, this is too pathetic for me to waste any more bandwidth on trolololol. This shit blows cocks.
The devil made me do it….
I wonder if anyone could find any sort of factual links between the shooting in Stony Point, the shooting in New Jersey earlier today, the shooting at the Empire State Building, the shooting at the Family Research council last week, the shooting at the Sikh Temple, and the shooting in Aurora last month?
Oh, wait. The answer is in the question. They were all shootings.
I guess this proves that unless more people have guns, only criminals will have guns. Or, wait, if more people had a gun, there would be fewer shootings. Wait a minute…. The argument is that if there were fewer guns, more guns would be necessary to protect the gunless from those with guns! There, I think I nailed it.
It’s also interesting that the biggest advocates for gun control are public servants responsible for public safety in areas with the highest levels of gun violence, but what do they know?
sonofject “This shit blows cocks.”
Dude, you came to one of the most open-minded websites/blogs in Charlottesville that reports news and took a dump on it. That’s silly. I understand your frustration with The Hook’s story; their headline was abysmal and clearly was intended to generate traffic, ugh.
But here? This was practically the *only* outlet that clearly stated Satanism would not explain the shooter’s actions. I really would have liked to see and participate in a discussion about how most news outlets denigrate and so easily apply the label Satanism to any story that will generate fear/views/viewers.
Why couldn’t you just embrace that and make your case without being so offensive? Sigh.
OK, for the record, I apologize for being reactionary. This incident was bound to start unsavory reactions from a lot of people. I’m a member/admin of the site that was linked in the original Hook article, it was done so without even addressing anyone from the site. Hundreds, if not thousands, of users frequent our site, so it was to be expected that anyone catching wind of any publicity to ‘news’ outlets would seek it out. Sensationalizing something tends to do that, so when something is hyperlinked, edited or not, it doesn’t help to control the blowback when initial intent in reporting skewed the facts. I got overzealous with damage control, admittedly.
My attempt to state facts about Noah’s involvement at SIN and keeping it civil on the Hook article was lost to the lookie loos and random comment posters. The OP didn’t even respond to comments, probably because it overwhelmed her. I knew this would happen also. It’s the internet. Guilt by association is amplified compared to the real world. Points were lost and transposed. She was seen as a muckraker.
I’m all for robust insight also, but the issue boils down to journalistic integrity in the case of SIN network. We weren’t the only site that had ties to Noah, and we remembered him in a respectful way and honored his privacy, pretty much all we could do for his surviving family. The implication of ‘responsibility’, even before Noah became the suspect, was put on his association with online websites. This is not news reporting, you simply speculate until the real facts prove you wrong, then change the story. I take great offense to that, and this site for linking the Hook article.
Damage control is never pretty, especially when you strike nerves in a community. Something to learn from.
Unusually formatted obit in DP today.