Tuesday, May 25
Justice O’Connor gives props
Anna-Marie Gulotta, a senior at Charlottesville High School, has a 4.40 GPA. She’s a youth mentor and abstract artist who developed a solar oven that made her an International Science Fair finalist. Thanks to these and other accomplishments, Gulotta today beat out seven other finalists for the $5,000 Emily Couric Leadership Scholarship. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor presented the award to Gulotta in a ceremony at the Boar’s Head Inn, saying, “I have to make some hard decisions sometimes, and I’m glad that wasn’t one of them.” O’Connor picked up an award at the event, too—the Emily Couric Women’s Leadership Award. Security was absurdly tight for O’Connor’s speech—local media were not allowed to take in video or audio recording equipment—in which the most newsworthy nugget was her admission that after getting her law degree from Stanford in 1952, she was told that her that best chance to get a job in the field was as a secretary.
Wednesday, May 26
Kluge rights State’s wrong
U.S. Senator John Warner and Gov. Mark R. Warner today announced that local billionaire John W. Kluge will put up $1 million for the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship and Fund. The General Assembly only gave $50,000 to the program, which seeks to provide educational funds to Virginians whose schools were closed in the late ’50s as a means of avoiding integration. Kluge’s big-bucks contribution is a matching gift, and Gov. Warner promised to submit a budget amendment so the State can kick in its $1 million. According to a press release from the two lawmakers, Kluge, who is CEO of Metromedia, the 28,000-employee company that runs Ponderosa, Bennigan’s and other restaurant chains, approached Sen. Warner “on his own initiative.”
Thursday, May 27
Drug Court graduation
Toni Gray and Jamahl Elder became the 101st and 102nd graduates of the Charlottesville/Albemarle Adult Drug Court in a ceremony held this morning at the Charlottesville Circuit Court. The 12-month supervised drug treatment program, which is an alternative to time in prison, is entering its seventh year of operation. After receiving his graduation certificate, Elder said, “It’s the best day of my life.” Only 9.5 percent of graduates of the Drug Court, which has struggled to retain its funding, are arrested again within a year after completing the program, while 50 percent of other Virginia drug offenders land back in the hands of police in the same time frame.
Friday, May 28
Four TV stations?
As first reported by Patrick Hite of The Observer, a new ABC affiliate is coming to Charlottesville, meaning that locally produced newscasts could be running on four Charlottesville TV stations in coming months. Gray Television, which also owns WCAV, the CBS affiliate slated for Channel 19, will launch WVAW, the new ABC affiliate and will run both stations out of studios in the Frank Ix building, according to Bill Varecha, WCAV’s general manager. Varecha says the launch date for the forthcoming ABC station is “unknown at this time,” but that Gray is shooting for August or September.
—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports
Tag team
Charlottesville Players’ two locations bring 50 Cent fashions to the Keswick crowd
The new line of $27 t-shirts from G Unit, the clothing company founded by the muscle-bound rapper and shooting survivor known as 50 Cent, features gleaming automatic weapons with the phrase “Peace to all my street soldiers killed in the ongoing conflict.”
The message is probably a little lost in Ivy or Keswick, but that’s where you’re likely to see the shirts.
“We can’t get them in here fast enough,” says Sherri Robinson, who on weekends runs the Charlottesville Players store at Fashion Square. While black customers hesitate to buy clothes decorated with guns, white kids, she says, want “anything with 50 Cent’s name on it.”
For seven years, Charlottesville Players has peddled hip hop fashions on W. Main Street. In March, owner Quinton Harrell did what few local retailers do—opened a store at Fashion Square Mall to augment his neighborhood shop and compete with the big chains.
Harrell and Robinson, his girlfriend, say the Albemarle branch has attracted a new multiracial clientele to Charlottesville Players. “I’ve seen people come through that I’ve never seen before,” says Harrell. “Blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Caucasians—it seems like a larger market [in Fashion Square].”
Harrell’s 1,500-square-foot W. Main store relies mostly on walk-ins from the surrounding neighborhoods; he opened the 850-square-foot branch in Fashion Square to find more shoppers.
“The parking [on W. Main] is horrific,” Harrell says, echoing the complaint of many a Downtown shop owner. “At Fashion Square, it’s a whole other environment. It’s built for consuming.”
Harrell’s Fashion Square branch is tucked into a corner of the Mall near the Red Robin restaurant, flanked by bubblegum machines in a space inhabited previously by a Christmas shop. Harrell won’t say how much rent he pays, but before he could move in he had to send financial statements to the Fashion Square’s parent company, Simon Property Group.
“I had to prove to them I was not just a fly-by-night business,” says Harrell.
Right now, his biggest advantage may be the chain stores’ tardiness in catching on to urban fashion trends. Belk, for example, carries Sean John, a prep-hop brand. And a salesclerk at the Fashion Square branch of Sears sniffed that the giant retailer “doesn’t carry the big baggy things.”
Most retailers tend to abandon Downtown Charlottesville when they open up shop at Fashion Square, but Harrell says he’s still true to W. Main.
“This is home base,” he says, leaning on a glass display case full of hip hop CDs in his W. Main store. He founded this store in 1997, after spending three years selling t-shirts and baseball caps in a Cherry Avenue parking lot.
“I used to drive to New York City every week to pick up merchandise,” Harrell says. “I’d leave Charlottesville at 2 or 3am, shop all day and be back here the same night.”
Saying this, Harrell points out his most popular items—blue jeans and colorful collared shirts by Akademiks, a brand popular with rap stars. After hitting prices of $300 or more, the “throwback” sports jerseys from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that dominated the market are giving way to a cleaner, more mature—and slightly more affordable—look, he says.
On a recent Saturday, Harrell himself wore a white linen outfit and a gleaming watch the size of a chicken egg that gives the time for Charlottesville, Las Vegas and Houston. “I consider myself a walking advertisement for the store,” he says.—John Borgmeyer
Rent control
Rose Hill neighborhood and PHA keep apartment building cheap
African-American teachers arriving in Charlottesville in the ’60s taught at newly integrated schools. Housing, however, remained a problem, particularly at a teacher’s salary.
“At that time, there was residential segregation,” says Kendra Hamilton, president of the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association and an incoming City Councilor. “The African-American teachers who moved to Charlottesville from other areas had no place to live.”
That’s where Virnita Court came in. The squat brick apartment building at 800 Rose Hill Dr., which was built in 1966, became a haven for black educators. Stu Armstrong, the executive director of the Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA) says the apartment complex has been “a portal for African-American professionals to come into the community.”
Armstrong says past and present local black leaders have lived in the building, including Alicia Lugo, Claude Worrell and William Lewis. But black teachers were the primary renters of the 16 two-bedroom apartments.
“At one time, if you did not teach, you did not live here,” says resident Catherine Harris, herself a teacher’s assistant.
Though James N. Fleming, Virnita Court’s owner, was African-American, Hamilton says the building’s status as an affordable outlet for black educators was due to word of mouth rather than a deliberate marketing effort by Fleming. However, when Fleming died last December, Virnita Court’s affordable rents seemed likely to expire with him.
BB&T, the bank named executor of Fleming’s will, set the sale price for the building at $1 million. A developer would have to raise rents from the current monthly level of $440 per unit to recoup the investment, particularly with significant rehabbing of the building looming in the near future.
“That apartment complex would empty out and students would come in,” Hamilton says, noting that a developer told her that after renovations, monthly rents could be as high as $850.
In another scenario, as Hamilton says, the entire complex might have been razed and replaced with swanky condos that could have capitalized on Virnita Court’s prime location and hilltop views.
The news of Virnita Court’s likely demise came to Hamilton and other members of the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association when the group was searching for a project on which to spend the last of three $200,000 grants from a Community Development Block Grant. The neighborhood association and the Piedmont Housing Alliance, a private nonprofit organization, began working on a plan to save Virnita Court. Armstrong expected the deal to be closed by press time.
Armstrong says his organization plans to “hold the rent stable for at least a year, hopefully forever.”
Bolstered with the $200,000 from the neighborhood association, PHA acquired the building for $850,000. Armstrong says the complex needs at least $400,000 in refurbishments, the money for which he hopes will come from several other grants.
“We have about a year window to make that happen,” Armstrong says of scoring the grants.
PHA and the neighborhood association have sought to allay worries from Virnita Court residents, some of whom expressed concerns about PHA’s involvement in the project. PHA, which builds and renovates affordable housing for renters and lower-income homeowners in the region, has been criticized for gentrifying certain neighborhoods.
Though she says she has concerns about her building’s future, resident Catherine Harris says a meeting among residents, PHA and the neighborhood association bolstered trust about the project.
“I’d like to think that it’s good thing. Most of us expected some change,” says Daisy Ross, another resident. “It could’ve been worse.”
But Hamilton, who placed emphasis on affordable housing during her successful campaign for City Council, says the collaboration to retain Virnita Court’s character and demographic is a perfect example of “helping neighborhoods to find their own solutions.”—Paul Fain
To death row and back
Earl Washington’s DNA case makes waves
Depending on how you look at it, Earl Washington, Jr. has had the best luck or the worst. Either way, he’s got quite a story to tell, one that raises serious questions about capital punishment and DNA testing in Virginia.
In 1983, Washington, who is black and mentally retarded, was arrested in Fauquier County for the rape and stabbing death of Rebecca Williams, a white Culpeper woman. He spent 17 years in prison, nine and half of them on Virginia’s death row, and he was just nine days away from execution before a team of lawyers caught wind of his plight and eventually proved him innocent. Although former Governor Jim Gilmore granted Washington a full pardon in 2000, he has never received an apology or compensation for his lost years.
Now Washington, who currently lives in Virginia Beach, is suing law and enforcement officers in Fauquier County and the town of Culpeper. The suit, currently pending in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, alleges that police coerced a confession from Washington, who functions at the level of a 10-year-old, then ignored evidence that might have exonerated him in order to get a conviction and “solve” the case.
The suit also revealed that the State crime lab in Richmond botched DNA tests that would have cleared Washington and pointed the way to the real killer. New DNA tests done as a result of the lawsuit confirm Washington’s innocence and identify Kenneth Tinsley—a former Albemarle resident currently serving a life sentence in Sussex County for multiple rape convictions—as the prime suspect in Williams’ rape and murder. Tinsley has yet to be charged.
“It’s 100 percent certain that Washington is innocent,” says Steve Rosenfield, a Charlottesville defense attorney who is assisting in the lawsuit. “So why would he have confessed to the murder? And what is the role of law enforcement? That’s at the heart of this case.”
Rosenfield says that the State lab’s incompetence should cast doubts about other DNA tests performed in Richmond. “It raises questions about their reliability,” he says. (Last year, an investigation of a Houston crime lab found that poorly trained technicians misinterpreted data, kept shoddy records and allowed evidence to be lost or contaminated. Death penalty activists would like to see a similar investigation in Richmond.)
Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo, who has sent dozens of local DNA samples to the lab in hopes of tracking down the local serial rapist, says he hasn’t heard of the Washington case. “I’ve never had a reason to question [the State lab’s] competency or skill in anything involved with our department,” Longo says.
The Commonwealth executes more people than any other state except Texas—91 since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Death penalty activists are mildly optimistic that Washington’s case will spur reform in Virginia.
There’s already been some change—the 2004 General Assembly eliminated a Virginia rule that prohibited courts from hearing new evidence more than 21 days after a conviction. The new rule removes the time limit, but it restricts prisoners to one claim of innocence on any conviction.
Death penalty activists would like a moratorium on executions in Virginia, similar to one imposed in Illinois in 2000 when evidence showed that the state might have executed innocent people.
“In any other state, there would be a moratorium on executions and people would start looking at the death penalty,” says Marie Deans, a Charlottesville activist who helped assemble the team ofpro bono lawyers who freed Washington.
“But I worry,” she says, “because we have legislators who believe Virginians really want the death penalty. I don’t think they do.”—John Borgmeyer