CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — John Paul Jones Arena is normally a place of excitement, of fun, of thrilling fast breaks, game-winning buzzer beaters and roar-inducing three-pointers.
Built on a hill towering over the University of Virginia’s campus, the 16-year-old venue is a theater for basketball. There is history here—the good kind. Since opening in 2006, the Virginia men’s basketball team has won six conference titles here and in ’19 claimed the school’s first hoops national championship.
In its lobby, shimmering golden trophies sit within a glass case. All-American portraits hang from its walls. And banners grace its rafters.
But on Saturday afternoon, no game was played here. The fast breaks, the buzzer beaters, the three-pointers were replaced by somber prayers, by cascading tears, by heart-wrenching reflections from family and friends of three football players murdered a half mile from here six days ago.
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More than 9,000 Virginians and Cavaliers fans, most of them clad in their orange and blue, solemnly paraded into this venue and sat quietly side by side before an emotional outpouring on a raised stage.
They wore orange ribbons, bloodshot eyes and sorrowful expressions. They prayed, they sang and they remembered the lives of receivers Devin Chandler and Lavel Davis Jr. and linebacker D’Sean Perry, each of them shot dead Sunday night while on a charter bus after returning from a class trip.
“This tragedy has pushed me to my limits,” athletic director Carla Williams said while addressing the crowd. “But God is faithful, and my faith sustains me.”
On this day, in this arena on a campus swallowed by devastation, the incident itself was nary mentioned, the gunman’s name not uttered, the questions that still envelop the tragedy not asked.
They gathered here to remember the victims, a stirring two-hour memorial that even featured a serenading tune from Grammy Award–winning gospel singer CeCe Winans. The Virginia marching band played “Amazing Grace.” Former coach Bronco Mendenhall was in attendance, too.
Poems were read, prayers said and memories shared.
Instead of playing a football game on campus Saturday—the Cavaliers were scheduled to host Coastal Carolina—UVA players voted to cancel the affair and instead remember the victims. Not just those who lost their lives, but also running back Mike Hollins, who is recovering in a local hospital after two surgeries to mend a gunshot wound to his back, and Marlee Morgan, who is recovering at home from injuries.
More than 20 students, a faculty member and a bus driver were on a charter bus when suspected gunman Christopher Darnell Jones, a former walk-on football player, opened fire in what seemed to be a targeted attack on football players.
As the bus arrived on campus following a trip to Washington, D.C., it filled with gun smoke and terrified screams as shots rang out. It unfolded outside of a campus parking garage that’s visible from the upper reaches of John Paul Jones Arena.
“This was no typical loss, if there is such a thing,” school president Jim Ryan said. “To pierce the peace and innocence that graced our grounds, it changed our world. We will move forward together, not to dishonor the lives lost but to honor them.”
Images of the three players flashed on the jumbotron as football players, in a single-file line, marched into the arena. Players’ families followed, all around them the thousands on hand standing silently. In a reminder of perspective, Ryan announced that the basketball locker rooms had been turned into counseling areas. Grief counselors and members of the clergy set up at lockers for those who needed them.
On the stage, coaches, administrators and teammates remembered the dead.
There was Chandler, a Tennessee native who transferred from Wisconsin this offseason. He was an honor-roll student with a contagious personality, always first to celebrate touchdowns.
There was Davis, the most accomplished on the field of the group. A giant of a man from South Carolina, he stood 6'7", and he emerged as the team’s breakout player after missing last season with an injury. He caught a pass in each of the first eight games, had a career high in catches in one and scored the season’s first touchdown—a 56-yard reception.
Perry was a linebacker from Miami who himself set a career high earlier this year, in tackles. Friends described him as a Renaissance man: creative, colorful and majoring in art. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, says Hunter Stewart, a junior linebacker, but one of Perry’s favorite music artists was Adele.
“My father used to speak about great men,” says sophomore linebacker Josh McCarron. “From the time I got to Virginia, it was obvious that D’Sean was one of those great men.”
These were sons and grandsons, leaders and friends, players of the highest character, friends said. Their bright futures were cut short, none of them living to age 23.
“It was never supposed to be this way,” said running back Cody Brown. “You lit our lives up like a shining star in the sky.”
They brought laughs into the lives of so many. For example, Davis had emblazoned on his arm three numbers: 187. Friends always thought it was the area code of his small hometown of Ridgeville, S.C. It turns out, it was the highway exit number into town.
An exit number for a tattoo? Cornerback Elijah Gaines chuckled while telling the story.
“I struggle to find words to articulate how much Lavel will be missed,” said junior quarterback Jared Rayman. “Even though I am two years older than Lavel, I looked up to him—literally.”
He towered physically and figuratively over those around him. He was determined to win every argument, too. In his favorite debate—who is the best basketball player of all time?—no one could ever move him off his answer: Kobe Bryant.
Erin Edgerton/Pool/USA TODAY Network
Defensive tackle Ben Smiley III, one of Davis’s closest friends, acknowledged to the crowd that he thought about exacting revenge on the man who shot his friend. And then he thought about Davis’s outlook on life. “I know you had peace and love,” Smiley said.
Here in Charlottesville, the page must now be turned.
Virginia, 3–7 on the season, is scheduled to play at Virginia Tech next weekend. A decision on that game has not been made. The criminal investigation into the incident is ongoing and so is a separate campus investigation by the university.
A quaint picturesque college town, Charlottesville has attracted the national spotlight for a second time in five years. In 2017, alt-right neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched across campus and throughout the town, an event spurred by the removal of Confederate monuments.
The Virginia governor declared a state of emergency, and a white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a crowd, killing one woman and injuring more than 30 others.
Larry Sabato, a 70-year-old politics professor, confronted the neo-Nazis as he raced from his residence on UVA’s historic Lawn at the center of campus. Five years later, a new terror arrived here. “It’s a dagger to the heart,” Sabato says.
This week, students called him in tears. He’s worked to get one student, friends with one of the victims, into counseling. He plans to ease his students back into class. The university sent a directive to professors to avoid giving any exams or mandatory assignments until Thanksgiving.
As a political junkie, in light of the shooting, Sabato points toward one of the most hotly debated U.S. issues: gun control. “Guns are just too easily available to too many people,” he says.
This week’s event impacted a unique place. Virginia is known for having one of the more rigorous admissions processes among public institutions. It’s become an attractive option for academics who don’t wish to attend a small private college.
UVA’s athletes are tightly integrated into its student population, says Craig Littlepage, a former Virginia athletic director who retired in 2017 and has lived in Charlottesville for more than 40 years. That was evident this week, when thousands of students marched across campus for a 90-minute vigil of silence and tears.
“Without a doubt, the things I hear about from people in this region is, ‘How can something like this happen, particularly at a place and on a campus like UVA?’” says Littlepage.
“People feel like this is a great college town,” he continues. “But these acts of violence occur everywhere. There’s no place immune. But everybody would like to think that their own community is one in which nothing like this could happen.”
The answers to why this happened are for later. On Saturday, inside John Paul Jones Arena, a community gathered not to watch jumpers and free throws but to mourn those lost too soon.
“You will see them again,” Williams told the families seated in the front row of the arena floor. “We love your sons and we will make sure their legacy never fades at the University of Virginia.”
