Former UVA Student Sentenced In Shooting That Killed 3 Football Players

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA — A former University of Virginia student was sentenced to life in prison for fatally shooting three football players and wounding two others when he opened fire inside a charter bus in 2022.

On Friday, Judge Cheryl Higgins gave Christopher Darnell Jones, Jr., who had been on the football team, the maximum possible sentence after listening to five days of testimony. Jones pleaded guilty last year.

The penalty includes five life sentences, one each for the killings of Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry, and the aggravated malicious wounding of Michael Hollins and Marlee Morgan, Cville Right Now reported.

The shooting happened on Nov. 13, 2022, after the chartered bus returned to Culbreth Garage on UVA's campus following a day trip to Washington, D.C. As the students were getting up to leave the bus, Jones pulled out a gun and began firing, Virginia State Police said.

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Perry, a linebacker for the Cavaliers and a South Florida native; Davis, a junior receiver from South Carolina; and Chandler, a junior receiver from North Carolina, were killed in the shooting.

Prosecutors said Jones appeared to be aiming at specific people on the chartered bus and was not randomly firing. Jones was a former member of the university’s football team at the time of the shooting.

The shooting set off panic at UVA and prompted a 12-hour lockdown of the campus until Jones was captured. His trial on murder charges and other counts had been scheduled for January.

Within days of the shooting, university leaders had asked for an outside review to investigate UVA’s safety policies and procedures, its response to the violence and its prior efforts to assess the potential threat of the student who was eventually charged. School officials acknowledged that he had previously been on the radar of the university’s threat-assessment team.

In June, a lawyer representing some of the victims and their families announced the university had agreed to pay $9 million in a settlement.

Kimberly Wald said at the time that the school would pay $2 million each to the families of the three students who died, the maximum allowable under Virginia law. The school would also pay $3 million total to the two students who were wounded.

Following the settlement, some of the families had also called for the immediate release of an independent probe into the shooting, which was completed last year.

Wald had said the university should have removed Jones from campus before the attack because he displayed multiple red flags through erratic and unstable behavior.

University officials said they had postponed the report’s release last year over concerns that it could affect a trial that had been scheduled for January.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.