Officer Stuart Bruce writes tickets for trespassing on the railroad tracks in the Corner Parking Lot on August 15.
PHOTO BY KATIE HARTWELL

Signs haven’t stopped them. Scores of trespassing tickets haven’t stopped them. Heck, even a stretch of yellow police tape stretched last week along the tracks at 15th Street after a boxcar derailment hasn’t stopped them. Nope. When it comes to crossing the railroad tracks that traverse the Corner and run alongside 15th Street, UVA students are a little like the Colorado River as it forged the Grand Canyon millions of years ago: relentless.

In a mere 10 minutes on Monday morning just before 10am, a Hook reporter counted at least three dozen backpack-toting students pouring over the tracks. And a contractor working on the former Satellite Ballroom building says the flow is strong all day long.

“More than 1,000 people cross this stretch of tracks every day,” estimates Steve Johnson, owner of Albemarle Enterprises. From his perch in a backhoe in the Corner Parking Lot, he says he’s been surprised at the students’ audacity– particularly (more)

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While John McCabe admits ‘dead or alive’ is a bit of hyperbole, the Meade Avenue resident is serious about offering a $1000 reward for evidence of whomever put cinderblocks in the middle of his street.
HOOK PHOTO

Though Charlottesville’s a long way from the O.K. Corral, Meade Avenue got a dose of frontier justice this morning when flyers began appearing offering a reward for the body of a local outlaw “dead or alive.” No, the crime wasn’t train-robbin’ or horse-rustlin’, but cinderblockin’.

Last night, Meade resident John McCabe was driving back home when he saw a line of about six cinderblocks in the middle of the road near Meade Park.

“When I came up on them, I just stopped, got out of my car, and moved them out of the way,” McCabe says.

But hours later, the varmint(s) had struck again, and this time McCabe wasn’t so lucky.

“I came back, and most of them had been put back,” he says, “and I hit them with my car.”

While McCabe says his car (more)

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Plaintiff Mitch Miller lost his lawsuit that accused his neighborhood association of racketeering and extortion, but plans to appeal.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

U.S. District Court Judge Norman Moon has ruled for the Dogwood Valley Citizens Association, the defendants in a civil Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization Act lawsuit brought by some neighbors in the Greene County subdivision called Dogwood Valley.

The plaintiffs did not prove a “pattern of racketeering” against the homeowners association, Moon writes in his August 28 decision. Nor, Moon ruled, did the association commit extortion when it levied special assessments in 2005– in apparent defiance of the 2004 Dogwood Valley v. Winkelman state high court ruling that said the association couldn’t levy special assessments and auction off the property of non-paying homeowners as it had done in 1998.

The special assessments levied after the state Supreme Court ruling, writes Moon, were made in “good faith” because the association attorney had filed curative documents to meet the Virginia Property Owners Association Act and allow collection of special assessments to fix roads.

After the Supreme Court of Virginia said for the second time in 2006 that the Dogwood Valley Association lacked (more)

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Terry Martin was on the verge of losing the Outback Lodge, when Lady Luck– or something– stepped in.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Preston Avenue nightclub owner Terry Martin figures he was about a week from losing everything he’d worked for. The phone had been cut off. He couldn’t pay to renew his liquor license, and the $15,000 he’d recently spent renovating the Outback Lodge appeared wasted, as he was drowning in debt. That is, until fate intervened. He won the lottery— $100,000 worth.

The timing of his August 13 win and the $71,000 after-taxes giant check couldn’t have been better for Martin.

“I was the brokest I’ve ever been,” says Martin, who was also reeling from bad publicity and a whole lot of police attention stemming from a November shooting in his parking lot after a hip-hop event at his new downstairs dance hall, Club OBL.

But the threat hanging over his head was the imminent loss of his liquor license.

“I never lost it,” explains Martin. “But it was so bad (more)

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Kevin Strom in a pre-arrest Wikipedia page photo.

Kevin Strom, who was sentenced to 23 months for possession of child pornography and who proudly counts himself a white separatist, gets out of prison tomorrow, and his pending residence in the 1100 block of St. Charles Court is causing some neighborhood consternation.

Filling neighborhoods with unwanted racial pamplets and papers has long been a tactic of white supremacist organizations. In this case, however, it appears someone in the neighborhood, or someone who doesn’t like Kevin Strom, may be doing the leafleting.

The Charlottesville neighborhood where Strom, founder of a now-defunct white separatist organization called the National Vanguard, will live with his mother, stepfather, and two children has been papered with fliers warning about the registered sex offender who will be residing among them.

Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo, who lives in that neighborhood, hopes Strom gets a fair treatment in his transition back into society.

“We talk a lot about redemption,” says Longo. “He’s served his sentence. I would hope (more)

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Reyn Snelling alleges the door to Miller’s was unlocked.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Her late-night arrest inside Charlottesville’s venerable jazz bar and restaurant provoked the Hook to name Reyn Louise Snelling the “most dedicated Miller’s patron.” The 46-year-old UC Berkeley grad, however, says the events the night of May 25 are no laughing matter, and there’s a perfectly good explanation for why police found her inside the downtown restaurant and bar about three hours after closing time.

“The door was open,” says Snelling, “and I went inside.”

For Snelling, what followed turned into nightmare and she was charged with what she says is someone else’s crime. And because she’d just had a tiff with her boyfriend, there was nobody to post her $250 bail, so she remained in jail for eight days, including her birthday.

The police report for May 25, which her attorney copied at the Charlottesville Commonwealth Attorney’s office, indicates that Officer G.E. Wade responded to an alarm activation at Miller’s at 4:42am. After a manager arrived to unlock the front door, the officer found evidence of a crime.

Police spotted a broken window in a door on the third floor, another broken window in a second-floor bathroom, and drops of what appeared to be blood around the cash register drawer. Police seized the drawer and a carton of cigarettes for forensic testing.

Snelling says she’s looking forward to the results of such tests because they’ll exonerate her. Police say results have not come back from the state lab. (more)

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Nervous residents around Meade Park can breathe easier three days after the Daily Progress reported that a loose pit bull had attacked a woman walking on Fairway Avenue on Sunday. She was bitten, it seems, just not randomly.

“It was a false report,” says Charlottesville Animal Control Officer Bobby Durrer. “It was her own dog.”

According to Durrer, the woman, who reportedly suffered minor injuries and had said she would be receiving rabies shots, called him yesterday after she saw the story in the Progress to tell the truth. Durrer says there’s no record that her dog, a pit bull, has ever bitten anyone else. Durrer also believes it’s up-to-date on its vaccines. However, the woman, Durrer says, does have a history of allowing it to roam.

Durrer says he spent time looking for the dog up and down Fairway and Caroline avenues following the incident. Now, he says, the dog’s owner could be charged with filing a false report.

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PHOTO COURTESY ALBEMARLE POLICE

The man accused of abducting his wife from the Dairy Queen in Crozet Saturday night was denied bond today in both Albemarle General District and Juvenile & Domestic Relations courts. Kevin Lee Stone, 36, of Crozet picked up six felony charges– abduction, child endangerment, malicious wounding, eluding, possession of a firearm by a felon, and use of a firearm during a felony– and a DUI when he allegedly left the ice cream spot with his wife and a gun.

A witness at Dairy Queen observed a woman being forced into a car and called 911, according to Albemarle police Sergeant Amos Chiarappa. Police arrived at 7:48pm, and while they were interviewing the person who called, the witness saw the 2002 gray Honda Accord carrying Stone, his wife, and a two-year-old child drive by.

A brief pursuit ensued, and at one point Stone momentarily lost control of the car on White Hall Road and hit an embankment. But he kept on driving, according to Chiarappa. Stone stopped on Clark Road in White Hall and was taken into custody.

He has two previous convictions for domestic assault, Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Darby Lowe told a judge in juvenile court this afternoon.

County records also show that Stone has a prior conviction for grand larceny and DUI. In 1999 and 2000, he amassed six charges involving illegal hunting, including spotlighting and hunting out of season.

On a video monitor, Stone told the judge that he’d just gotten out of jail in December and was taking classes on Tuesdays that he’d like to finish. The judge said bond would be inappropriate at this time, and he scheduled a September 15 preliminary hearing. Stone has a September 11 hearing in Albemarle General District Court.

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After Hours Video owner Rick Krial (right) received a $2,500 total in fines for the obscenity conviction. The jury found his employee Tinsley Embrey (left) not guilty.
PHOTO BY LINDSAY BARNES

At the conclusion of a trial unlike any Staunton Circuit Court has ever seen, it seemed oddly fitting that the jury would come back with an equally unusual verdict. After deliberating one hour and 44 minutes, the jury in the Staunton obscenity trial found Rick Krial, owner of After Hours Video, guilty of only one of two misdemeanor counts of obscenity, deciding that the first of the two DVDs they watched— Sugar Britches— was not obscene, but the second— City Girls Extreme Gangbangs— was. For his crime, the jury fined Krial $1,000 and his company $1,500. Cashier Tinsley Embrey was found not guilty.

Krial declined comment after the jury rendered its verdict, except to say, “We’re going to place our appeal.”

Embrey told reporters that while he was happy to be exonerated of the charges against him, this was not a completely happy day.

“I’m very happy to be acquitted, but I don’t agree with the decision,” he said. “I do not agree that Rick Krial or the company are guilty.”

Staunton Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Robertson, who has received much criticism as a result of his dogged prosecution of this case, touted the ruling as a victory for “decency and morality.”

“I’m elated,” said Robertson, “that the people of the City of Staunton have spoken on behalf of their friends and neighbors and spoken out about how they feel about this stuff.”

Paul Cambria, the Buffalo-based defense attorney and former Hustler counsel representing Krial, says he’s never seen anything quite like this.

“It’s a surprise that it’s a split,” says Cambria. “I’ve never seen a verdict like this when the acts in the movies were so close in context.”

Just what was the big difference between the two movies? While (more)

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Without calling any witnesses, renowned obscenity defense lawyer Paul Cambria rested his case today at 9:09am in the four-day misdemeanor trial against After Hours Video owner Rick Krial and cashier Tinsley Embrey in Staunton. The jury should get their instructions at 10:30am, according to Hook reporter Lindsay Barnes, and then deliberations about whether Sugar Britches and City Girls Extreme Gangbangs are obscene will begin.

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