On Friday, March 21, the University of Virginia finally released the long-awaited independent review of the tragic 2022 shooting that claimed the lives of three students.
On November 15th, 2022, around 10:15 PM, then-student Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. opened fire inside a bus near the Culbreth Road parking garage upon returning from a class field trip to Washington DC. Three student football players were killed: Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry. Two more were injured: football player Michael Hollins Jr. and Marlee Morgan. The subsequent lockdown lasted 12 hours until law enforcement arrested Jones near Richmond, about 80 miles from Grounds.
After the shooting, the University asked Commonwealth Attorney General Jason Miyares to appoint independent counsel to review the circumstances of the shooting, and, in particular, the University’s response.
Months later, as the investigation neared conclusion during summer break of 2023, President Jim Ryan suddenly announced the departure of Robyn Hadley, Dean of Students and Vice President of Student Affairs, who held supervisory responsibility for investigations into student housing and student behavior. Hadley did not issue a statement upon her departure.
The reports were completed in October 2023, at the cost of 1.5 million taxpayer dollars, but their release was delayed by UVA for over a year. Initially, UVA claimed that the report was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act due to “attorney-client privilege,” and that they would delay the release of the report until early November of that year so they could review for “factual accuracy.” Then, November came, the justification for withholding the report changed to a fear of interference with Jones’ criminal proceedings.
“Making the report public at this time, or even releasing a summary of their findings and recommendations, could have an impact on the criminal trial of the accused, either by disrupting the case being prepared by the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney, or by interfering with the defendant’s right to a fair trial before an impartial jury,” President Ryan said in a statement.
Later, The Daily Progress filed a Freedom of Information Act request and found that, days before UVA made its decision to withhold the report until the trial had concluded, UVA police chief Tim Longo invited Commonwealth attorney Jim Hingeley to an “urgent” meeting with himself and University chief operating officer JJ Davis “at President Ryan’s respectful request.” It is unclear what was discussed or why Longo requested the meeting.
“I think from the emails and the text messages and the sequence of events, it’s very clear that the university wanted to keep it secret. And they reached out to Mr. Hingeley to see if they could use him to accomplish what it is that they really wanted to do,” said legal analyst Scott Goodman. He believes that UVA officials, having read the report, determined that it would give the university a “black eye.”
“It appears there was an effort not to release the report, and the most important people should’ve been consulted first,” said John Fishwick Jr, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. “Is there something in the report they’re concerned about the public knowing about?” he speculated. “I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but why wouldn’t the university want it released?”
After the shooting, Virginia State Police found a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic rifle, a Smith & Wesson Model 39 pistol, a box of Winchester .223 ammunition, two Glock 9-millimeter magazines, a gun-cleaning kit and a Franklin Armory binary trigger in Jones’ Bice House dorm room. With certain exceptions, students are not allowed to have weapons on University property.
The September before the shooting, a student had reported to the university that Jones had talked about having a gun. While investigating this claim, university officials discovered that in 2021, Jones was convicted of a misdemeanor concealed weapons charge and had not informed UVA, violating university policy. On October 26th, after Jones repeatedly refused to cooperate with the investigation, the office of Student Affairs emailed him a warning that his failure to report the conviction would be referred to the Student Judicial Council. A referral was never made. None of this public information was referenced in the unredacted sections of the reports that UVA released.
In February, after Jones pleaded guilty, Hingeley withdrew his concerns about interfering with the criminal trial, and UVA finally released the report to the family of the deceased. However, it quickly became clear that they didn’t contain much new information.
“There’s nothing in there,” Happy Perry, mother of victim D’Sean Perry, told The Daily Progress upon receiving a copy of the report. “They’ve taken everything out. […] They won’t tell us what they’re hiding.”
The next month, UVA released the redacted review to the public confirming Perry’s description. The review consists of two reports created by separate law firms. The report by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP reviewed University policy and procedures leading up to the shooting, and the Vinson & Elkins LLP focused on the actions of law enforcement prior to and directly after the shooting. 29 full pages of the Quinn Emanuel report are redacted, as are 40 pages of the Vinson & Elkins report, with many paragraphs and sentences therein also redacted. Christopher Jones’ name never appears in the unredacted sections of either report, and there is very little new information regarding UVA’s policies prior to the shooting.
However, the unredacted portions of the review do contain some valuable information. The Quinn Emanuel report states that it “does not conclude that the facts available to the Threat Assessment Team (TAT) prior to the shooting would have put a reasonable person on notice” that a shooting would occur. The report also found that UVA’s “student governance” system results in officials being “unwilling or unable to assert authority and require student compliance” without “recourse to cumbersome and slow-moving student-run disciplinary bodies.” This apparently also led to an unwillingness on UVA’s part to involve UPD in non-criminal investigations. Furthermore, UVA’s Threat Assessment Team had no independent authority to compel compliance with investigations. There are no specific examples of these claims in the unredacted sections of the report, but they may line up with prior University statements revealing that, when Jones refused to cooperate while being investigated for possessing firearms, UVA did nothing more than threaten to refer him to the UJC, a student-run judicial body. Interviewees even communicated that “it was unclear to what extent University officials viewed it as their role to enforce the University’s policies and code of conduct.”
“No question that they could have prevented this tragedy had their TAT done what they were supposed to with the knowledge they had,” said Michael Haggard, an attorney representing the families of the deceased. “They knew they had a troubled student on campus with a gun.”
The report also states that “there appeared to be a lack of understanding regarding whether the University may enter and conduct administrative searches of student housing.” Although UVA’s housing contract has a provision allowing officials to enter on-Grounds housing “for any […] reasonable purpose,” most officials appeared to believe that they weren’t permitted to search on-Grounds housing at all. According to the report, “no University official interviewed was able to provide the University’s position as to the import of this provision either with respect to administrative searches, or the Fourth Amendment.” Once again, none of the unredacted sections of the report contain examples of how this hindered the University. We do know that Jones possessed multiple guns, ammunition, and a firearm attachment that were not found until Virginia state police searched his dorm room after the shooting.
The Vinson & Elkins report concluded that “UVA’s extensive critical incident policies and training enabled a quick response to a dynamic and multifaceted traumatic event by UPD and other University officials. The initial emergency response in the aftermath of the shooting appropriately prioritized the preservation of life and the prevention of further injury by the perpetrator. Measured against that critical metric, the response was a success.”
The unredacted portions also consist of recommendations for how UVA can improve safety, as well as steps UVA has taken since the shooting to do so. The Quinn Emanuel report’s recommendations included properly allocating resources to threat prevention programs, improving investigation processes, prioritizing “weapons-related concerns,” creating resources for distressed students outside of threat prevention, increasing admin involvement in discipline and public safety, better defining a position on UVA’s right to access on-Grounds housing, and improving the incident management and referral system. The Vinson & Elkins report recommended that UVA empower UPD to issue emergency alerts, establish a permanent emergency operation center, and create a designated search plan for law enforcement. It also recommended that UPD ensure it shares information with the incident assessment group in real time during emergencies, give its officers more training, and ensure its officers announce their presence during emergencies “where safe and feasible to do so.” Two more of the recommendations from the Vinson & Elkins report were entirely redacted.
In response to these recommendations, UVA has increased the capacity of the threat assessment team, which is now prioritizing weapon-related concerns, by providing it with additional resources and personnel, as well as the capacity of student Care and Support Services (CASS). It has created the Policy, Accountability, & Critical Events unit (PACE), to support discipline and compliance processes. It has provided more training regarding on-Grounds housing policies, implemented technological improvements to SafeGrounds, the case management system, and approved a dedicated facility for public safety, including a permanent Emergency Operations Center. UVA has also been seeking state legislation to criminalize guns on campuses.
Not everyone was satisfied with the conclusions of the report or the extent to which it was censored. “It’s absolutely absurd,” said Haggard. “These families have wanted to know one thing since this tragedy occurred. For the report to take this long, and then be redacted to the extent it is, it’s frustrating.”
UVA justified the report’s extensive redactions using the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, a federal law protecting the privacy of students’ educational records.
“I recognize that the necessary redactions in these reports will likely make reading them a frustrating process, but we are bound by law,” said President Ryan in a message accompanying the reports’ release. Expert Megan Rhyne, director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, disagrees.
“FERPA doesn’t mean that you can’t mention somebody… there’s this tendency to think it shields anything and everything about a student… You can redact names; you can redact identifying information, but you can still say what they say,” she says.
Rhyne says that the redactions should not censor entire pages at a time, and that FERPA was never meant to cover every aspect of student life: “Universities and school districts tend to over-rely on FERPA, but they say things about students all the time — whether it is to highlight them on the basketball team roster, winning this great award or listing them in the credits to a play, and they put students in promotional brochures and videos.” Rhyne also contends that FERPA specifically excludes law enforcement records and references a Department of Education webpage showing that FERPA should not be interpreted to prevent the release of information that may save lives.
There’s also the fact that every time UVA names the killed and injured students in the report, it violates its own interpretation of FERPA. Furthermore, in 2007, after the shooting that killed 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech, a 260 page report was released with no redactions, including a timeline of events of the incident and a detailed profile of the perpetrator, including his childhood, mental health, and prior interactions with teachers, fellow students, police, administrators, and mental health professionals, even while his educational records were protected by FERPA.
The Daily Progress has said that it will continue pushing for the full release of the reports in court.
“There is no profit in this for us,” said Reynolds Hutchins, the newspaper’s editor. “This is a matter of principle, a matter of ethics and a matter of justice, which makes it a matter worth fighting for. I know where we stand: We stand with the families of the dead, with the university community, with the Virginia taxpayers and with every mother and father who sends their child away to college hoping and praying for their safe return. As far as I see it, we stand on the higher ground.”
“The families and victims are incredibly frustrated to have waited this long for the report, and they still don’t have answers about what happened that night,” said Elliot Buckner, an attorney representing some of the families and victims.
“Tell me what happened on the night of Nov. 13, 2022,” said Happy Perry. “I still don’t know what happened to my child.”
The redacted reports can be accessed at this link.
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