re: UVA shooting suspect Christopher Darnell Jones' parents speak out ahead of arraignment

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Sounds like it could have been a schizophrenic episode. It’s not uncommon for someone his age to have their first psychotic episode and it can be very severe.

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That happened to a gal I knew at LSU. She started eating rocks and giving them away as “magic rocks” after collecting them when they came out the other side. Within a few months she went from seemingly normal to committed to a psych hospital. Really sad thing.

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I'm sorry, it's just really odd that you are having trouble wrapping your head around how a walk-on football player was still a student if he quit the team. This part made me laugh though. We are on tigerdroppings, baw.

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Not sure what the insinuation is here. I saw kids with 4.0s from a blue ribbon high school in NOVA crying in the bathroom because they didn’t get into UVA. So yeah that makes me scratch my head when someone from the area said earlier that he went to a poor high school and bounced around central VA without much parental involvement in his life. I saw kids who pretty much prepared their whole life to go there get the door slammed shut on them with sterling credentials. (I never had a prayer of going there and gladly ended up at LSU )

Then we find out he’s had a bit of a disciplinary history even before this incident both criminal and with the school. I don’t think the kids who usually go to UVA suddenly turn to a life of crime once they leave high school and get to campus because the classes are too hard. I’d imagine there were other issues before then that UVA likely knew about but overlooked.

Some other articles said they were investigating all that at the university level so we shall see.

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Could be the attorney told his father to start laying groundwork to save the son's life? He'll get the needle in Virginia unless some sort of diminished capacity is introduced at trial. If there are no texts, all we have is the fathers interpretation of an oral conversation.

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Virginia eliminated the death penalty either earlier this year or sometime last year. I believe last year pre Youngkin.

He’s being charged with 3 counts of 2nd degree murder so I’m not sure he’ll even get life in jail.

ETA:

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If convicted of second-degree murder, you can be sentenced to 5 to 40 years in prison. You may also be ordered to pay a fine of up to $100,000. In addition, you will have a permanent criminal record and the stigma of being a felon. Being labeled a felon can make it much more difficult for you to find a job, housing, and much more for the rest of your life.

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He’s being tried in albemarle county (which must handle Charlottesville’s criminal proceedings even though they are separate entities with separate local governments.) which is a progressive stronghold in the state. I’d bet folding money his sentence lands much closer to the 5 year side per count than the 40 side.

Saying he can’t believe it was him is different from saying it wasn’t and seems like would be fairly normal response, but his father wasn’t around for awhile. He also moved away from his mom and lived with grandmother at 16.

Besides being under threat assessment at university and concealed gun charge in 2021 he seems to have been showing stability issues before college and before move to his grandmother’s house in 2016. The 2018 article below can show culture’s attitude towards those that focus on education which is still being ignored, but it can also show beginning of his issues with violence and paranoia of others being against him without his father being around or getting much support from his mother.

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“When I come into the classrooms, everything flowed,” Jones said. “You knew what you were walking into every day.”

But much of the time, he said, the other kids didn’t expect a kid from the projects to raise his hand in class.

“I would get upset because my intelligence was being insulted. Kids would pick on me — ‘Why did you do that? Why did you answer that question?’ ” Jones said. “And in that world, disrespect means you should fight.”

The fights were also an escape. With the punches went the stress and sadness of not seeing his father...

“People would say, ‘You’re too smart to be doing something like that,’ ” he said of fighting. “But it’s because of where I was at. Sometimes I’m not in a good head space. Fighting at first was my only way of relieving stress.”

He eventually started welcoming the suspensions and the punishment of alternative school. Alternative school meant more solitude, where he could maintain straight A’s without the bullying. His mother didn’t understand that, he said, and saw him as a troublemaker.

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https://richmond.com/news/local/central-virginia/petersburg-high-graduate-navigated-a-fractured-path-to-graduation/article_17a60432-0b1b-5a54-acfd-b4158d434819.html

Paranoia during shooting

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"Chris got up and pushed [victim] Lavel [Davis]. And then after he pushed him, he was like, ‘You guys are always messing with me.’ He said something weird like that. But it was very bizarre because they didn't talk to him the whole trip,"

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“I know he had a downfall,” she said about her grandson’s state of mind. “I believe he had some problems there,” she said, referring to UVA.
Jones’ father Christopher Darnell Jones Sr. told NBC 12 Monday his son told him “some people was picking on him” and “he didn’t know how to handle it.”

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Almost looks like a different person.