Couple Randomly Assaulted Downtown

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 29, 2013 in Crime. 16 Comments

Do you recognize this man?

Charlottesville’s Marc Adams and his girlfriend, Jeanne Doucette, were seriously injured by this guy and two others on the Downtown Mall last week, Courteney Stuart writes in C-Ville Weekly. The two were walking downtown at 1 AM, after he finished his shift at work, when a group of four people—all African-American—approached the couple, and the three men set upon the couple with apparent glee. Adams was left unconscious with a concussion, amnesia, a broken ankle, a black eye, a missing tooth, and cracked ribs, while Doucette has bruises on her head and torn cartilage in her ear. While the three men attacked, a female friend looked on. The assault ended when passersby called 911 and Doucette starting taking pictures with her phone, including the above this photo of the female friend (and others, in the C-Ville Weekly article):

beating2

Adams wrote about the incident on Facebook immediately thereafter, but otherwise the Charlottesville Police raised no warnings and didn’t circulate the photos, leading the victims to post the photos to Facebook today, in an effort to warn others and to catch the attackers. Despite Adams’ immediate suggestion to the police that video from Wells Fargo’s security cameras would be helpful, it took a week before they requested that video, on Friday, and they haven’t gotten it yet. Department spokesman Ronnie Roberts says that they kept it quiet to avoid letting the attackers know that they were being sought by police.

Red Light Cameras—Still Not Reducing Accidents

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 28, 2013 in Transportation. 4 Comments

In today’s Daily Progress, J. Reynolds Hutchins revisits the question of how effective that the red light cameras at Rio and 29 have been, and finds that they’ve correlated with a sharp increase in accidents that the intersection. There were 38 crashes there in 2010, before the cameras were installed. There were 49 and 2011, 31 in 2012, and 33 in 2013 as of July (on pace for 56 for the year). CBS-19’s Rachel Ryan reported this story last year, which the Albemarle County Police Department disputed via a story reported by Dave McNair in The Hook. The police explained that if you only look at the lanes covered by traffic cameras then there’s actually been a decrease in accidents, but why you would only look at those lanes, I cannot imagine. (How about if you only look at accidents when the moon is waxing? Or in days of the month that include the number “3”?)

The cameras are under scrutiny because of the county’s intention to put another photo-red system at the intersection of Stony Point Road and 250. I go through that intersection at least twice each day, on my way to and from town, and I can think of just one time in my life that I’ve seen somebody run the light there. I don’t have the faintest idea of why the county would want to put a camera at that intersection.

Vinegar Hill Photos

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 23, 2013 in History. 5 Comments

From UVA’s Vinegar Hill Project comes this great collection of historical photos of Vinegar Hill prior to its razing—houses and businesses, in particular. Anybody interested in local history will get a kick out of this.

Returning to the Velvet Rut

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 20, 2013 in General News. 9 Comments

In C-Ville Weekly, Jordy Yager writes about the pattern of middle-class kids moving away from Charlottesville for college, but returning a decade or two later. This is a pattern I’ve seen in the past 20 years—I’m 35—as many of my friends decided to shake the dust of this crummy town off of their feet and move to Brooklyn / Austin / Seattle / San Francisco, only to return 5, 10, or 15 years later, having figured out that Charlottesville isn’t so crummy after all. (Some, of course, remain happily in their new city.) Those of us who never left looked a bit lame to some (“no, seriously, he still just lives in Charlottesville”), but now look prescient for escaping the gravity of New York, never having needed to share a 600 square foot apartment with three roommates, the rent eating up 70% of our budgets.

Warning: If you’re sensitive to stories about privileged white kids becoming yuppies, this story is going to annoy the hell out of you.

Notorious Rapist Changes His Name

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 20, 2013 in Law and Justice. 3 Comments

Super-creepy convicted rapist Jeffrey Theodore Kitze has changed his name to Jeffrey Ted Miller, Courteney Stuart writes in C-Ville Weekly, after a judge made the terrible decision to permit him to do so. You might know Kitze/Miller for the 1989 rape and beating of his sister’s UVA roommate, or you might know him for his more recent creepy stalking of volunteers for the Virginia Organizing Project and Food Not Bombs, which has him in prison again, eligible for release in five years. The part that’s especially troubling is that there’s no legal obligation that any of Kitze/Miller’s victims be notified of his name change. In this case, the guy’s probation officer spotted the name change and notified Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Denise Lunsford, who has notified his victims.

So, let it be known that Jeffrey Kitze and Jeffrey Miller are the same guy. To help out Google, here’s that data as HTML, formatted to allow search engines to understand that one equals the other:

Jeffrey Kitze
Jeffrey Miller
Jeffrey Theodore Kitze
Jeffrey Ted Miller

You’re welcome, future googlers.

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