Month: January 2015

When presented with a petition signed by more than 250 aggrieved residents calling for the closure of the West Main Street ABC store, City Council passed a resolution December 1 in support of the petition. Now that nearly 500 citizens have signed a petition urging that the store be kept in its current location, councilors are backtracking, acknowledging they acted too hastily in what some people are calling a race and gentrification issue.

“We feel like we didn’t have the whole picture,” said Vice Mayor Dede Smith at the January 20 City Council meeting.

“I agree,” said Councilor Kristin Szakos. “It was a complete breakdown on the ABC store. It was brought to us, and we took a position.”

City Council has a history of making resolutions on issues normally out of the scope of local government, such as the war in Iraq and drones. Said Szakos of the resolution to move the ABC store, “We didn’t think it was binding.”

Raymond Mason, a lifelong resident of Charlottesville, led the counter-petition effort. “You made a rash decision, a hasty decision,” he told councilors when he presented his petition.

The original petition to end the ABC’s lease at the West Main location was powered by Fifeville Neighborhood Association president Mike Signer and included graphic testimonials of fear, litter and urination inflicted upon those living and working around the liquor store. Delegate David Toscano, Mayor Satyendra Huja, City Councilor Bob Fenwick and a number of business owners signed a letter to the ABC demanding the store be moved.

Currently a Rose Hill neighborhood resident, Mason said he used to live in Fifeville, and a lot of residents there said they weren’t approached to sign the first petition.

“I talked to people who say they never have a problem with the store,” said Mason. “One couple said they see liquor bottles. That’s not the ABC’s problem.” He compared the littering to someone finding an empty McDonald’s bag in his yard and trying to close McDonald’s.

For Mason, who is African-American, the issue is not the ABC store but “the influx of white people moving into the neighborhood. What they have to remember is that they moved into the neighborhood with these problems,” he said. “That’s an area on Main Street where you can see black people travel in numbers.”

Added Mason, “How a black person sees things and how a white person sees them is different.”

Cyndi Richardson has lived in the historically black neighborhood for more than 40 years and is a member of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association. She told city councilors her view differed from the first petition signers. “I feel like we are being asked to accommodate the new look of my neighborhood and not accept that this is the neighborhood and this is what it looks like.”

The loiterers in the neighborhood help shovel out her car when it snows or help her 85-year-old father get up when he falls in the front yard, she said. “I feel more comfortable walking by those loiterers than I do Blue Moon Diner.”

It was Fenwick who brought up the G-word: gentrification. “We have to have that conversation because across the country, never has that process been stopped. If we’re going to do something for Charlottesville to maintain its charm and character, we’ve got to talk about that and find a way to handle it.”

Housing activist and Hardy Drive resident Joy Johnson decried the targeting of alcoholics. “They’re the fabric of my neighborhood,” she said. “When you’re talking about gentrification, you’re talking about removing a certain fabric or thread from the fabric.”

“Is this city comfortable with having no ABC?” Dede Smith asked, noting the city’s goals of urban walkability. “I’m not comfortable with that and I don’t even frequent it.”

Despite the second thoughts on the resolution, councilors seemed reluctant to change it. “If we did a do-over,” said Szakos, “we open ourselves up any time people don’t like the way we voted to do it again.”

Signer, the Fifeville Neighborhood Association president who brought the first petition, declined to follow up by phone, but issued this statement after the City Council meeting.“This began with hundreds of residents’ serious concerns about public safety and litter around the ABC store, which the neighborhood association brought to City Council,” he wrote. “Now hundreds of our neighbors are expressing equally valid concerns about the inclusiveness of the West Main corridor. City Council and the ABC should listen to all of these folks and work to find a compromise solution.”

A decision on whether to renew the lease on West Main has not been made, according to ABC spokesperson Becky Gettings. “We are taking everyone’s input into full account,” she said. “In making a final decision on the lease, we remain committed to providing service to all our customers and neighbors while maintaining an emphasis on public safety and the community’s varied interests.”

 Correction January 29: Raymond Mason lives off Rose Hill Drive, not on it as previously reported.

In a plea agreement in Charlottesville General District Court January 28, former city registrar Sheri Iachetta pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of intentionally removing city property, as did co-defendant Stephanie Commander. Both women originally were charged with multiple felony embezzlement counts for approving or using cell phones paid for by taxpayers.

Iachetta was charged with six felony counts when it was revealed that her husband, Pat Owen, continued to use a cell phone for years after he stopped working for the registrar’s office. Commander kept her cell phone after leaving the Electoral Board in 2011, and the city paid around $7,000 of taxpayer funds for both unauthorized phones.

As part of the plea agreement, each received a 90-day suspended sentence on every count, must do a total of 200 hours of community service within six months and must be on good behavior for two years.

Nelson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Anthony Martin, who was special prosecutor for the case, said the four counts—two of Iachetta’s were nolle prossed—represented the four years of illegal phone use. Neither woman had ever been in trouble before and both immediately paid the phone bills after City Manager Maurice Jones launched an investigation in August after the Daily Progress reported the improper phone use. After the hearing, Martin pointed out that Commander, an attorney, now has a criminal conviction and Iachetta resigned her job as registrar two days after the November election.

“I think both of them used bad judgment,” said Martin. “Nothing was done to hide these phones. They were clearly on the bill for four years. If it had been an orchestrated attempt to hide it, we probably would have taken a different approach.”

After the hearing, Commander declined to comment. Her attorney, Fran Lawrence, said he didn’t necessarily agree with everything in a press release Martin would be putting out, but didn’t elaborate further.

Iachetta’s employee, Dianne Gilliland, first reported the phones to Jones last March. When she voiced her concerns about Commander’s phone bill to Iachetta, according to Martin’s release, Iachetta told her to submit the bill for payment because Commander would be back on the Electoral Board eventually. The city paid $2,532.22 for Commander’s phone from 2011 to August 2014.

Gilliland brought the matter to then-Electoral Board chair Joan Schatzman in August, and Schatzman reported it to police. Schatzman herself became a casualty of the incident, angering some of her fellow Dems by allowing Iachetta to remain in the job through the election. At a January 10 meeting, Schatzman, who had served nearly 12 years, was not reappointed to the Electoral Board by her party.

Owen was not charged because, when questioned by police, he said he thought his wife was paying for the phone and “seemed genuinely surprised” to learn that the city had picked up the tab of $4,663.84 from 2010 to August 2014, according to the release. Iachetta paid for his phone August 20.

“We could have fought it,” said Iachetta’s attorney, Janice Redinger, but she said jury trials are risky and expensive. Iachetta, said Redinger, contended all along it was an oversight, not a crime.

“People plead guilty all the time to crimes they didn’t commit,” said the attorney.

“Of course it’s a relief,” said Iachetta after the hearing. “Now I’m going on with my life.”

See Anthony Martin’s press release here.

Story updated at 11:40 am.

Correction 2/2/2015: The dates the city paid for Pat Owen’s phone were from 2010 to August 2014.

When Albemarle County Sheriff Chip Harding learned last week that Glenn Barker has been dead for six months, he said he slept well for the first time in decades.

“It’s a relief, because he had threatened me and my family during the course of the investigation, and even in the courtroom,” said Harding of the man convicted of killing 12-year-old Katherine Sybil “Katie” Worsky in Charlottesville in 1982 and suspected in several other homicides.

“He was not someone to take lightly,” said Harding, who said he and his family were so shaken by the threats that his now adult daughter carried a photo of Barker with her starting in high school so she would recognize him if he approached her and Harding’s wife got a concealed weapons permit.

“He was one of the few that I viewed as a true threat to my family,” he said. “I feel much more relaxed now.”

According to online records in Moore County, North Carolina, Barker died July 20, 2014, at age 55 while living in the golfing resort town of Pinehurst. Harding said he has tracked Barker’s whereabouts since he was released from prison in April 1992 after serving just nine-and-a-half years for Worsky’s murder, and has regularly asked police in jurisdictions where Barker has lived to keep an eye on him.

“I was told he had a heart attack,” said Pinehurst Deputy Chief Floyd Thomas, who said Barker had lived in his jurisdiction without incident since 2012. He’d been aware of Barker’s past, he said, because “the Charlottesville Police Department called and spoke with me and gave me a heads-up about him.”

Harding was a detective in the CPD when Worsky was reported missing from a sleepover at a friend’s house in the Fry’s Spring neighborhood on July 12, 1982. Exhaustive searches using dogs and helicopters turned up no sign of the girl, and police quickly zeroed in on then 23-year-old Barker, a convenience store clerk who had visited the home earlier in the evening and admitted giving beer to Worsky and her friend.

In a search of Barker’s apartment, police found a pair of girl’s underpants inside a rolled up pair of Barker’s socks. Worsky was a diabetic, and a tiny spot of blood on the underpants matched the location where she would have given herself insulin injections. Police also discovered men’s wet, blood-stained clothes in between Barker’s mattress and box spring. Rumors about the location of Worsky’s remains swirl to this day, with ongoing speculation that she is buried in the foundation of the Pantops Hardee’s, which was under construction at the time of her disappearance. Worsky’s younger brother, John Worsky, said his family received an anonymous letter making that claim two years ago, and they submitted it for forensic testing in an effort to determine the sender. “We called the police, and they sent it down to Richmond,” he said, but no results have come back.

Barker, who admitted assaulting a young woman in North Carolina at knifepoint in 1981, a year before Worsky vanished, always maintained his innocence in Worsky’s disappearance, even after he was convicted of her second-degree murder in 1983. The earlier assault case was dismissed when the victim refused to testify. Barker claimed he’d never intended to harm the woman in that case and cited it as the reason law enforcement unfairly targeted him as a suspect in other crimes.

Harding, however, said he never had any doubts that Barker was a killer, and he recalls Barker’s threatening demeanor as the months-long investigation unfolded, particularly after Harding contacted a woman Barker was dating to warn her about him.

“There was information that he had surveilled my wife a couple of days as the investigation was going on, and he was telling other investigators that he would get back at me at some point,” said Harding, who retired from the Charlottesville Police Department and has served as Albemarle County Sheriff since 2008.

The investigation and trial drew intense media coverage, and Barker moved to Richmond after he was paroled in 1992, nine years before his 18-year sentence officially ended. Three years later, Governor George Allen abolished parole, and in a 2007 interview in The Hook cited Barker’s release as one reason why.

Worsky’s death wouldn’t be the last time Barker was connected to a crime. In 1996, as detailed in a 2007 feature story in The Hook, a young woman and her 7-year-old daughter were found “ritualistically” slaughtered inside their South Richmond home, which had been set on fire. The woman had recently ended a romantic relationship with Barker and had taken a trip to Florida with a new love interest. Although a witness reportedly claimed seeing Barker’s pick-up truck near the home at the time of the murders, police were unable to build a case against him. In an interview for that article, Barker denied any involvement in the slayings and said the break-up had been amicable, a result of health problems that had caused him to become impotent. He moved to New Jersey soon after their deaths, where national controversy erupted when Virginia police, who suspected him in a slew of other disappearances and killings and had continued to track him, learned he was volunteering as a girls’ basketball coach and alerted local authorities.

For Worsky’s family, who never learned what happened to their child, the pain of her loss will be lifelong. Her parents, Robin and Alan Worsky, divorced the year after her disappearance, something they attributed to their grief in a 2007 interview. Robin twice visited Barker in jail, pleading fruitlessly with him to tell her where to find Katie’s body. Robin died in March 2014 without ever getting an answer.

Katie Worsky’s family may never know what happened to her, but her brother, who was five when his sister vanished, said he gave up long ago on getting answers from Barker.

“If he had any remorse, he would have at least attempted to make amends,” said John Worsky, who also expressed relief that Barker is gone.

“My condolences to his family, but I’m not sorry,” he said. “There’s no reason to feel remorse for someone like that. No matter what the circumstances it was or is, I can’t forgive.”