Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 29
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court's conservative majority on Wednesday allowed Virginia to resume its purge of voter registrations that the state says is aimed at stopping people who are not U.S. citizens from voting. One Virginian, whose registration was canceled despite living in the state her entire life, called the purge "a very bad October surprise." The high court, over the dissents of the three liberal justices, granted an emergency appeal from Virginia's Republican administration led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The court provided no r...
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A former assistant principal at a Virginia elementary school has been charged with felony child neglect more than a year after a 6-year-old boy brought a gun to class and shot his first-grade teacher. A special grand jury in Newport News found that Ebony Parker showed a reckless disregard for the lives of Richneck Elementary School students on Jan. 6, 2023, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday. Parker and other school officials already face a $40 million negligence lawsuit from the teacher who was shot, Abby Z...
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — The mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in Virginia pleaded guilty Tuesday to a charge of felony child neglect, seven months after her son used her handgun to critically wound the educator in a classroom full of students. Prosecutors agreed to drop a misdemeanor charge of reckless storage of a firearm against Deja Taylor. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors said they will not seek a sentence that is longer than state sentencing guidelines, which call for six months in jail or prison. The crime is p...
Abortion providers in three states filed a lawsuit Monday aimed at preserving access to the abortion pill mifepristone, even as the drug is threatened by a separate Texas lawsuit winding its way through U.S. court system. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia on behalf of clinics in Virginia, Montana and Kansas, is the latest legal action over the decades-old pill, which is part of the two-drug regimen used in most U.S. abortions. A federal judge in Texas issued a ruling last month that would have revoked the U.S. Food and Drug...
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A grand jury in Virginia has indicted the mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher on charges of child neglect and failing to secure her handgun in the family's home, a prosecutor said Monday. A grand jury sitting in Newport News charged the boy's 25-year-old mother with felony child neglect and a misdemeanor charge of endangering a child by reckless storage of a firearm, Commonwealth's Attorney Howard Gwynn said in a news release. The Associated Press isn't naming the mother to shield the identity of her son. T...
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — The Virginia elementary school where a 6-year-old boy shot his teacher reopened Monday with stepped-up security and a new administrator, as nervous parents and students expressed optimism about a return to the classroom. Richneck Elementary School in Newport News opened its doors more than three weeks after the Jan. 6 shooting. Police have said the boy brought a 9 mm handgun to school and intentionally shot his teacher, Abby Zwerner, as she was teaching her first-grade class. Zwerner, 25, was hospitalized for nearly two...
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — A witness who saw a University of Virginia student open fire onboard a bus returning from a field trip told police the gunman targeted specific victims — many of them football players — shooting one as he slept, a prosecutor said in court Wednesday. The details emerged during the suspect's first court appearance, the same day students returned to classes and the university announced it was canceling its Saturday football game in the wake of the deadly shooting. A witness who was shown a photo of the shooting suspe...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The national reckoning on race and policing that followed the death of George Floyd -- with a Minneapolis police officer's knee on his neck -- spurred a torrent of state laws aimed at fixing the police. More than two years later, that torrent has slowed. Some of the initial reforms have been tweaked or even rolled back after police complained that the new policies were hindering their ability to catch criminals. And while governors in all but five states signed police reform laws, many of those laws gave police more p...
FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — A jury sided Wednesday with Johnny Depp in his libel lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard, awarding the "Pirates of the Caribbean" actor more than $10 million and vindicating his allegations that Heard lied about Depp abusing her before and during their brief marriage. But in a split decision, the jury also found that Heard was defamed by one Depp's lawyers, who accused her of creating a detailed hoax that included roughing up the couple's apartment to look worse for police. The jury awarded her $2 million. The verdicts b...
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — A jury ordered white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $25 million in damages Tuesday over violence that erupted during the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. After a nearly monthlong civil trial, the jury in U.S. District Court deadlocked on two key claims but found the white nationalists liable on four other counts in the lawsuit filed by nine people who suffered physical or emotional injuries during the two days of demonstrations. Attorney Roberta Kaplan said the plaintiffs'...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Nine people who sued white nationalist leaders and organizations over the violence at a deadly rally in Charlottesville in 2017 won a $26 million judgment for the injuries and trauma they endured. But whether they will be able to collect a significant chunk of that money remains to be seen. Many of the defendants are in prison, in hiding or have dropped out of the white nationalist movement. At least three of the far-right extremist groups named as defendants have dissolved. And most of the defendants claim they will never...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A crowd erupted in cheers and song Wednesday as workers hoisted one of the nation's largest Confederate monuments off a pedestal where the figure of Gen. Robert E. Lee towered over Virginia's capital city for more than a century. The statue was lowered to the ground just before 9 a.m., after a construction worker who strapped harnesses around Lee and his horse lifted his arms in the air and counted, "Three, two, one!" to jubilant shouts from hundreds of people. A work crew then began cutting it into pieces. "Any remnant l...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld Dylann Roof's conviction and death sentence for the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation, saying the legal record cannot even capture the "full horror" of what he did. A unanimous three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond rejected arguments that the young white man should have been ruled incompetent to stand trial in the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. In 2017, Roof became the first person in t...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Asking dogs to follow their noses won't work anymore in states that have legalized marijuana. As Virginia prepares to legalize adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana on July 1, drug-sniffing police dogs from around the state are being forced into early retirement, following a trend in other states where legalization has led to K-9s being put out to pasture earlier than planned. In Virginia, the rush to take marijuana-detecting dogs out of service began even before lawmakers voted last month to accelerate the t...
Daunte Wright became a father while he was still a teenager, and seemed to relish the role of a doting young dad, his family and friends said. A family photo shows a beaming Wright holding his son, Daunte Jr., at his first birthday party. Another shows Wright, wearing a COVID-19 face mask and his son wearing a bib with the inscription, "ALWAYS HUNGRY." Wright, 20, was fatally shot Sunday by a police officer in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center. As protesters and civil rights advocates called for justice and police accountability over...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Work crews wielding a giant crane, harnesses and power tools wrested an imposing statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson from its concrete pedestal along Richmond, Virginia's famed Monument Avenue on Wednesday, just hours after the mayor ordered the removal of all Confederate statues from city land. Mayor Levar Stoney's decree came weeks after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam ordered the removal of the most prominent and imposing statue along the avenue: that of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which sits on state land. The removal o...
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Four were engineers who worked to maintain streets and protect wetlands. Three were right-of-way agents who reviewed property lines. The others included an account clerk, a technician, an administrative assistant and a special projects coordinator. In all, they had served the city of Virginia Beach for more than 150 years. These 11 city employees and one contractor were wiped out Friday when a fellow city worker opened fire inside a municipal building. A day after the shooting, city officials sought to honor them b...
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — In a case that stirred racial tensions across the country, a self-avowed white supremacist pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal hate crime charges in a deadly attack at a white nationalist rally in Virginia, admitting that he intentionally plowed his speeding car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters, killing a woman and injuring dozens. James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, pleaded guilty to 29 of 30 federal charges stemming from the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. Under a plea a...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A movement to rename a Richmond, Virginia, thoroughfare for groundbreaking black tennis player Arthur Ashe Jr. is cresting just as the state finds itself in turmoil over a blackface scandal involving the governor and attorney general. The man behind the street renaming says the confluence of the two unrelated developments involving race and history could become an opportunity to start a conversation about race at a pivotal time. "If we can rename the Boulevard after him, it would be a huge cultural step forward. This is w...
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — No one disputes James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Virginia last year, killing a woman and injuring dozens more. The only question, jurors were told Thursday, is why did he do it? During opening statements at his murder trial, prosecutors and defense lawyers painted two starkly different pictures of what prompted Fields — a 21-year-old reputed Hitler admirer — to drive his gray Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2...
BOSTON (AP) — A Mafia hit man who is said to hate "rats" is under suspicion in the slaying of former Boston crime boss and longtime FBI informant James "Whitey" Bulger, who was found dead hours after he was transferred to a West Virginia prison, an ex-investigator briefed on the case said Wednesday. The former official said that Fotios "Freddy" Geas and at least one other inmate are believed to have been involved in Bulger's killing. The longtime investigator was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. A...
Six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania joined the list this week of those around the U.S. that have been forced to face the ugly truth about child-molesting priests in their ranks. But in dozens of other dioceses, there has been no reckoning, leading victims to wonder if the church will ever truly take responsibility or be held accountable. "It happens everywhere, so it's not really so much a question of where has it happened, but instead, where has word gotten out, where is information about it accessible?" said Terry McKiernan, founder...
Duck boats like the one that sank in Branson, Missouri, killing 17 people, have a long history of safety problems and have been linked to the deaths of more than 40 people since 1999. The deadly sinking in Missouri brought back painful memories of a similar accident nearly two decades ago in Arkansas. Both duck boats had overhead roofs or canopies that the National Transportation Safety Board warned could greatly increase the risk of passengers becoming trapped in the boat and drowning. The sinking on Table Rock Lake near Branson Thursday came...
TAUNTON, Mass. (AP) — A woman who encouraged her suicidal boyfriend to kill himself in dozens of text messages and told him to "get back in" a truck filled with toxic gas was sentenced Thursday to 15 months in jail for involuntary manslaughter. Michelle Carter, now 20, was convicted in June by a judge who said her final instruction to Conrad Roy III caused his death. Carter was 17 when the 18-year-old Roy was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in July 2014. Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz gave Carter a 2½-year jail sentence but sa...
BOSTON (AP) — The co-owner of a pharmacy deemed responsible for the deaths of 76 people in a national meningitis outbreak tearfully apologized to the victims on Monday and was sentenced to nine years in prison, far less than the victims had wanted. "I'm sorry for your extraordinary losses," Barry Cadden said, wiping his eyes. A dozen victims who were sickened or lost loved ones asked the judge to give Cadden the harshest penalty allowed under the law for the deadly 2012 nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak, which sickened hundreds of p...
