Author: jayson-whitehead

What was supposed to be just another night out on the town ended with a man’s guts spilling from his side on Water Street, according to the transcript of the city General District Court preliminary hearing for Joseph Ray Wells, Jr., who is charged with felonies for mob assault and malicious wounding.

One night last March, Jerald Lee Gibson, Jr. and his friend Joseph Eddy piled into Gibson’s truck and went to Rivals off Rio Road, according to Gibson’s testimony in June, from which the rest of this account is drawn.

After a brawl here, Jerald Lee Gibson, Jr. discovered a ball of his guts hanging out of his side because of a knife wound.

There they found girls, three of them, with names straight out of a Terry Southern novel. They left with Sunshine, Big Mama and Candy to travel to the Downtown Mall in a convoy of vehicles, bringing along a man they met at Rivals, Sergio Tello, repeatedly described by Gibson as “the Mexican.”

When the caravan got Downtown, they parked in the city parking lot on Water Street and went to Atomic Burrito before hiking over to Miller’s to play pool. Eddy and Candy stayed behind in a vehicle, but Eddy eventually showed up alone at Miller’s and Big Mama went to check on Candy, who was passed out in her car.

According to Gibson, around 1 or 2am, Sunshine and the boys decided to go back to their vehicles with a new person, Wells, who had joined them at Miller’s. He would soon get into a jawing match with a visibly intoxicated Eddy as they walked back.

“I was avoiding the conflict with all due diligence,” Gibson said in court, describing the incident to Wells’ attorney, Valerie L’Herrou.

When they got back to their vehicles, Gibson said he grabbed his friend and shoved him in the truck. By the time he got to the other side, Eddy was being pulled out.

“As I was going in, he was going out,” said Gibson. Racing to the passenger side of his truck, he found Eddy in a fetal position getting “a whoopin” by Wells and Tello. “If you know someone was a friend of yours, you just ain’t going to let them get whooped up on without giving them some help.”

After grabbing Wells, Gibson dragged him over to a nearby car and threw him on the hood. “As far as I know, I think I might have dropped an elbow…to his face,” he recalled.

He then turned his attention to Tello, who was still “whipping” Eddy, but Gibson was hit in the side. Gibson gathered himself enough to shove “the Mexican” off Eddy and the two jumped in his pick-up.

That’s when he noticed a “ball of guts hanging” out of his side. “As I got into my truck and I pulled my shirt up, I felt the blood running down my side and I could not put my hands around that ball of guts,” Gibson said. When they got out of the parking lot, the two switched sides so Eddy could rush his friend to the hospital. “I could feel my blood pressure just dropping off to nothing,” he said.

In court, Gibson showed his scar. “I got stabbed right there and they had to go in and pull all my internals out and fix my insides.”

Wells’ trial is scheduled for April.

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Just four years ago, Peter Wurzer retired from his position at the Dr. Pepper/7-Up company in Dallas, Texas, and moved to Albemarle to build his dream house. “For the first three years, I was busy with that house,” he says. “When I finally got finished, I said, ‘Let’s take a look at what’s going on,’ and all of a sudden I started to see the tax situation.” The talk was of a 30 percent increase in assessments, something Wurzer saw as unacceptable. So he went to a budget meeting of the Board of Supervisors, “and I heard all these people get up and rail against the taxes but they had no facts,” he says. “It was all emotion.”

Peter Wurzer thinks government inefficiency is no more reasonable than murder.

Wurzer decided to investigate, and after joining the local Republican party, he became the Director of Research for its budget spin-off, the Albemarle Truth in Taxation Alliance (ATTA), helping to lead an effort to reduce the county’s tax rate last year to 68 cents from the previous 74 cents.

As the budget process begins this year, ATTA is once again drawing its focus on the Board of Supervisors and the tax rate they feel is still too high. The following are excerpts from a discussion with the local tax hawk.

C-VILLE: Last year, ATTA was successful in marshalling people out to the county budget meetings to demand a lower tax rate. How much of a role do you think ATTA played in the final rate of 68 cents?

Peter Wurzer: Certainly I would say we had some part in it, but only to the extent that we provided a platform and a critical mass. The big thing that got the reduction down was that the county couldn’t look us in the eye and say they wanted to raise taxes 30 percent.

It seems that ATTA is particularly sensitive to the allegation that you don’t want to fund schools or teacher raises.

Absolutely. I think the reason that charge is made is because it’s convenient to say we’re nothing but cheapskate taxpayers, and that’s not the case at all.

I think there’s two key decisions that have to be made in any government or business situation. Number one is, how much money do we want to spend? Second, and maybe even more important, how do we want to spend it? I think we get too tied up with how much, but just focusing on the revenue is a bad thing to do.

You urge government efficiency, but doesn’t a certain amount of bureaucracy exist at every level?

I don’t accept that anymore than I accept the fact that since the beginning of time, human beings have murdered.

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Before Jean Rinaldi and Richard Bean could plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of selling uninspected meat, Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Enforcement Officer F.C. Lamneck was called to testify to the convoluted fracas that led to the farmers’ dramatic arrest September 21. That arrest resulted in 11 misdemeanor charges each and a felony intent to defraud charge for Bean. But Lamneck told the Charlottesville Circuit Court February 20 that he had done everything he could to keep the arrest from happening.

Double H farmers Jean Rinaldi and Richard Bean were “begged to comply” by state agriculture officer F.C. Lamneck, he testified in court.

Despite his repeated warnings—including one in 2006 that Bean and Rinaldi signed promising to voluntarily comply—the Double H farmers continued to sell uninspected meat at the Nellysford Farmer’s Market and Charlottesville City Market. Lamneck testified that he had once overheard Rinaldi shooing a customer away at the Charlottesville farmer’s market and encouraging the prospective buyer to return after he had left.

“They were playing me for a fool,” he said on the stand, his voice nearly trembling, “by selling some of this meat.”

As the officer described the lead-up to their arrest, he protested his depiction by the media as an overzealous persecutor of the local food movement (“I begged the man to comply,” Lamneck said after the hearing of Bean), recounting the time he spotted the yellow Double H van parked outside Shebeen restaurant and then a body bag being carried inside. After Lamneck stopped in to take a look, he discovered a black market pig. (Summarily, Shebeen was forced to cut up the hog and put bleach on it, thereby “denaturing” it.)

That was on September 6. Two weeks later, Lamneck showed up at the farm in Lovingston with state and local police officers in tow. They found Bean in his makeshift butchery and promptly handcuffed him. Rinaldi was mowing the lawn but was soon placed in a squad car herself.

Unless you count the loss of their home computer and the emotional toll from the arrest and subsequent prosecution, the two farmers have escaped relatively unscathed. In Nelson County, where they were up against four misdemeanor charges each, they only pleaded guilty to one and received a year’s probation with a list of conditions. The judge there actually encouraged them to seek legislative remedy.

In Charlottesville, Bean and Rinaldi pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor each, two years of probation and a similar list of conditions. Judge Edward Hogshire, however, had no consoling words.

“It’s extremely important to fully comply,” he said. “I hope this is the last time we have this difficulty.”

Bean’s attorney, Steve Rosenfield, disclosed that the farmers have outfitted their own facility so that it is now up to regulatory snuff (they can process but not slaughter their hogs on site). As Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Claude Worrell surmised afterwards, if Bean and Rinaldi are to have any trouble, it will likely come from the plea’s mandate that 75 percent of their meat products be sold to household customers. Only a quarter can be doled out to restaurants. The Organic Butcher recently started stocking Double H pork, and Orzo now uses the resulting sausages.

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Carmello “Pee Wee” Martinez walked into Charlottesville Circuit Court in the customary striped prison garb. Martinez, an avowed member of the “Bloods”—of Crips and Bloods gang war renown—was arrested this summer in connection with a shooting. On February 13, he was sentenced to four years in prison for the events that occurred last March when he brandished an AK-47 assault weapon outside the Blue Ridge Commons apartment complex.

On that day in March, according to Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Elizabeth Killeen, a crowd had gathered and watched as the 19-year-old waved the gun and demanded, “Who wants some of this?” Apparently, no one did. Martinez returned to the Jeep he had arrived in.

Carmello “Pee Wee” Martinez apologized to the shooting victim’s mother in court.

Moments later, an associate named Javier Garcia emerged from the same vehicle with the AK-47. This time, he fired into the crowd and struck a 16-year-old in the back as he was running away. Despite the severity of his injury, the victim recovered. He was in the front row of the courtroom with members of his family as Judge Edward Hogshire and the attorneys worked over Martinez’ plea deal.

The shooting was the end result of a verbal altercation that began earlier in the day at a local rec center, according to Killeen. She described it as a “king of the hill” contest that was largely ego driven, a “beef” that almost killed someone because of Martinez’s actions. Even though he wasn’t the shooter, Killeen recommended that Martinez serve a minimum sentence of four years, with three years of heavily restricted probation. Under the sentencing guidelines, Martinez could have received 20 years.

The victim’s mother groaned as Killeen spoke, tears making a film over her eyes. She stared at Martinez, who stretched his arms as best he could with handcuffs restricting his reach. Throughout, his gaze remained mostly downward unless he was looking at his infant son, who whimpered from the front bench.

“There was extremely poor judgment on this young man’s part,” said Kelly Hobbs, Martinez’s attorney. Next, Martinez stood and looked over at the shooting victim and his mother. “I apologize for what happened,” he said. “I’m sorry he and his family had to go through that.”

“Thank you,” the victim’s mother replied. “I want to say, ‘Thank you.’”

After the March shooting, Martinez and Garcia fled to New York but were arrested in June and extradited from the Bronx. Garcia faces a March 5 sentencing and Killeen told the court that she will seek a sentence of up to 15 years. Martinez’s younger brother, Indio, was also involved and a judge threw out a proposed plea deal last week. He goes to trial on March 27.

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A little more than a year ago, representatives from the still-conceptual Albemarle Place gathered with the city, county and Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) to discuss the Meadow Creek interceptor, the main hub for sewage all along Route 29N. For the owners of Albemarle Place—a mixed-use project planned for 700 residential units and roughly 40 new stores surrounding the Sperry Marine facility—the meeting was a flabbergasting experience. Frank Cox, its master planner, listened with a slack jaw as officials disclosed that the interceptor—installed in the 1950s—was already at capacity and would have to be replaced before Albemarle Place could be built.

Albemarle Place has changed developers, but plans should still be the same—if it ever gets built.

“It caught everyone with their pants down,” says Cox. “Certainly Mark Graham.”

“I don’t know that it was surprising,” says Graham, the county director of community development. According to him, questions were raised about the interceptor’s capacity as early as 2001. “We just simply didn’t know.”

Regardless, when that news broke, Albemarle Place’s ownership group was rattled and shaken. Whole Foods—Albemarle Place’s first planned tenant—announced that it would instead move to a site off Hydraulic near K-Mart, taking their 55,000 square feet of retail space with them.

To add wood to the fire, one of the owners sold their stake to national developer Edens & Avant, which “develops, owns and operates community-oriented places in primary markets throughout the East Coast,” according to their website. They are responsible for over 140 shopping centers in 16 states, including Albemarle Place.

Even adding a national firm to the mix can’t ameliorate the effects of the housing market’s recent downturn. “Retail development follows residential rooftops,” Cox says euphemistically, going on to explain that for now “the ownership group is taking a pause.”

“There are a lot of doubting Toms wondering if it’s ever going to get off the ground,” Cox says, including himself in the skeptical category despite news earlier this month that design has begun on a new and expanded Meadow Creek interceptor. According to the RWSA’s Tom Frederick, consultants Greeley and Hansen will finish the design this spring, allowing for 16 months of construction on the $25 million dollar sewage router. December ’09 is the predicted finish date. Gary Fern of the Albemarle County Service Authority says that his staff is currently meeting with Edens & Avant to try and coordinate the simultaneous construction of Albemarle Place.

Nevertheless, Cox has been connected to the project since 2000 and the years of frustration seem to have worn away his capacity for blind belief. “Until the marketplace re-emerges and until all the utility services are finalized, it is very doubtful that the ownership group will pull the trigger,” Cox says. “We need to know there is sewer capacity for the entire project.”

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