It was a busy day on the UVA Corner yesterday. Even as police were investigating a stabbing, yet another truck ran into the 14th St. bridge and tied up traffic.
Robert Sherwood Shrieves is in custody while his still-unnamed victim remains in the UVA Hospital.
Claire Ogilvie, who last February attacked Nancy Tramontin in her home, has been indicted by a grand jury on felony charges of breaking and entering while armed, abduction, and malicious wounding.
Ms. Tramontin and her husband, House Minority Leader David Toscano, befriended the defendant in 2010 when they all participated in the UVA Semester at Sea program and Ms. Ogilvie tutored their son. The friendship continued when Ms. Ogilvie later moved to Charlottesville. But by 2012, according to Ms. Tramontin, Ms. Ogilvie had developed an “unsettling” interest in the family and so they ended their friendship.
In February of 2014, Ms. Ogilvie entered the Toscano home and Ms. Tramontin “was struck by her female assailant in the head several times but never lost consciousness,” according to contemporary reports.
Ms. Ogilvie has remained in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail without bond since her arrest hours after the attack. Her next court date is set for September 17 in Charlottesville Circuit Court.
Charlottesville member of the House of Delegates David Toscano says—and police confirm—that somebody broke into their home and assaulted his wife, Nancy Tramontin. NBC 29, C-Ville Weekly, and the Daily Progress all offer detailed coverage of yesterday’s attack. 35-year-old Claire L.K. Kennedy Ogilvie has been arrested and charged with malicious wounding, abduction, and what’s variously been described as “burglary” and “entering a house armed.” In a statement, Toscano says that “she was struck by her female assailant in the head several times but never lost consciousness,” and was treated at the hospital and released. The suspect is known to the victim, presumably in part because they both participated in Semester at Sea in the fall 2010 semester. Toscano describes Ogilvie as “a person who we knew but had not seen for over a year.”
Ogilvie is a chemistry teacher at William Monroe High School (in Greene County), and apparently holds degrees from Yale, UVA, and the George Washington School of Law. On her bio on WMHS’s website, she says that she used to be a patent attorney, and that she’s been a contestant on “Jeopardy” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
The suspect is being held without bond in the jail. No motive is known for the attack.
On The DTM, proprietor Dave McNair interviews the two men accused of a gleeful, random attack on the Downtown Mall last month, and the picture that the accused paint of themselves is rather opposite of the one painted of them by the thousands of angry racists who descended on C-Ville Weekly’s website to post vile comments.
For starters, Malcolm Stevenson (25) and Richard Spears (23) are both openly gay. Stevenson is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and is a manager at Eppie’s. Spears is a soft-spoken, full-time student of the Virginia School of Massage, where he’s studying to be a massage therapist. Their police records are minimal: Stevenson has a few traffic violations, Spears was once charged with swearing in public and intoxication. Although these facts in no way demonstrate that they are or are not guilty of the attacks, these men certainly are nowhere close to fitting the gangbanger stereotype that Matt Drudge and his followers presented them as.
The two men say that they’d been drinking, and admit to a physical altercation with Marc Adams and his girlfriend, Jeanne Doucette. But they accuse the two of being drunk, and having started the altercation, saying that Doucette called them “black faggots” and that Adams aggressively pursued Stevenson. They say that a third man—a stranger—stepped in, trying to break it up, and that it was he who punched Adams in the face.
Stevenson tells McNair that he understands that he’s going to be charged with something—that’s what happens after a fight—but that “if I’m going to be held accountable for my actions, then they need to be held accountable for theirs.”
After two men turned themselves in for assaulting two people downtown last month, Dave McNair (formally of The Hook) writes on The DTM that a more complicated narrative is emerging. I hope more information comes out about this soon, because this story—what it says about and how it influences race relations in Charlottesville—is important, and potentially powerful.