- Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. killed three members of the school’s football team and wounded two other students.
- The shooting occurred on a chartered bus after a class trip to see a play in Washington, D.C.
- Defense attorneys argued for a lighter sentence, citing the physical and mental abuse Jones suffered as a child.
A former University of Virginia student who shot and killed three members of the school’s football program in 2022 was sentenced on Friday to the maximum of five life sentences, plus 23 years on gun charges.
Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., 26, apologized for his crimes Friday before the sentencing, which led some victims’ family members to walk out as he spoke.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as reported by Cville Right Now, a news outlet in Charlottesville. ‘I caused so much pain.’
Jones pleaded guilty last year to the murders of D’Sean Perry, Lavel Davis Jr. and Devin Chandler. He also pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated malicious wounding and five counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Judge Cheryl Higgins handed down the punishment — a life sentence for each of the five shooting victims, two of whom survived.
Over the course of several days of testimony this week, prosecutors and witnesses described the nightmarish scene of the shooting, which came aboard a chartered bus that shuttled members of an African American Theatre class to Washington, D.C., to see a play about Emmett Till.
“My heart will never heal,” said Perry’s mother, Happy. “Until I get the closure I need, this hurt will never go away.”
Perry’s younger sister, D’Shandra, testified that his murder “shattered the whole foundation of who we are.”
The shooting began at approximately 10:15 p.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, in a parking garage on campus, taking the lives of the three football players and wounding two others: sprinter Marlee Morgan, who was shot in the leg, and football running back Mike Hollins, who was shot in the back. Morgan and Hollins both recovered. Morgan joined the Virginia track team. Hollins returned to play in the 2023 season and won the ACC’s Brian Piccolo Award as the league’s most courageous football player and the FWAA Courage Award.
Hollins testified at the sentencing hearing this week.
‘I realized I was the one who was spared,” Hollins testified. “It’s three years later and I can still feel it.”
Jones joined the Virginia football program as a walk-on true freshman in 2018 but did not play in any games and then left the program, though he did remain enrolled in the university.
Defense attorneys argued for a lighter sentence, citing Jones’ “scars of childhood,” and that the physical and mental abuse he suffered in his home led Jones to become “delusional.”
A forensic psychologist who testified on behalf of the defense said Jones’ childhood caused him to have an ‘exceedingly distorted perception’ of reality.
