The three University of Virginia football team members who police say were shot dead Sunday by a fellow student were identified Monday.
The University of Virginia’s president, Jim Ryan, said during a news conference that Devin Chandler of Virginia Beach, Lavel Davis of Dorchester, South Carolina, and D’Sean Perry of Miami, Florida, were gunned down by a fellow student in a bus as they returned from a school field trip.
Perry, a linebacker and defensive end for the UVA football team, was a junior and graduated from Gulliver Prep in Miami. He was named the South Florida Conference’s 2018 Defensive Player of the Year his senior year at Gulliver, NBC Miami reports.
Davis was a wide receiver for the Cavaliers who was also in his junior year. Sean Lampkin, Davis' cousin and the assistant football coach at Newberry College in S.C., asked for prayers for the family in a Twitter post.
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"Saddening, saddening news this morning. God took one of his most kind, humble, loving soldiers off of the battlefield last night," Lampkin wrote. "Please pray for my family as we are devastated by the passing my cousin Lavel Davis Jr."
Chandler was a wide receiver in his senior year and had transferred last season to UVA from the University of Wisconsin, according to NBC affiliate WMTV. The former Huntersville, Virginia, resident graduated from Hough High School. The school's football coach, Matt Jenkins, told The Charlotte Observer that Changler was "a wonderful student and he was a heck of a football player."
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“Devin was a great kid, you know,” Jenkins said. “He was a great young man. He was a joy to coach and he had an infectious smile. He brought great energy every day. He was a wonderful student and he was a heck of a football player, but that’s the least important of all of them."
The gunman was identified as Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., a former football player who was listed on the team's 2018 roster as a freshman running back, though he did not play in any games. Law enforcement officials were in the middle of a late morning news conference when they received word that Jones was in custody after a 13-hour manhunt.
“Just give me a moment to thank God, breathe a sigh of relief,” university police chief Timothy Longo Sr. said after receiving word that Jones was apprehended.
Two other students were wounded in the shooting late Sunday night, which happened near a campus parking garage as a charter bus full of students returned from seeing a play in Washington, D.C., for a class field trip. Ryan said one of the students was in critical condition and the other student was in good condition at a local hospital. Ryan did not identify the other students.
Jones is being charged with three counts of murder and three counts of using a firearm in the commission of a felony.
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