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The
suspect, Christopher Darnell Jones, was scheduled to appear in
Albemarle General District Court at 9 a.m. local time on three
counts of second-degree murder and three counts of using a
firearm in commission of a felony, according to online court
records.
Jones, who also faces two counts of malicious wounding, will
appear through teleconference, local media reported.
It was unclear if Jones had retained a lawyer as one was not
listed online for him.
Jones is accused of opening fire inside a bus full of students
returning from a field trip to see a play in Washington D.C. on
Sunday night. The shooting unfold after the bus pulled into a
parking garage on campus at the school in Charlottesville,
Virginia, attended by 25,000 students.
Killed in the shooting were Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis and
D’Sean Perry, all members of the school's football team. Two
other students were wounded and taken to University of Virginia
Medical Center.
"It feels like it's a nightmare, to be honest with you, and I'm
ready for somebody to pinch me and wake me up and say that this
didn't happen," First-year Virginia football coach Tony Elliott
said at a news conference on Tuesday.
The shooting was the latest episode of gun violence on U.S.
college and high school campuses. The bloodshed has fueled
debate over tighter restrictions on access to guns in the United
States, where the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment
guarantees the right to bear arms.
Minutes after the shooting, school officials issued alerts on
social media telling students and staff to shelter in place,
with one tweet saying to "RUN HIDE FIGHT."
The sprawling campus remained on alert through the night and
morning as law enforcement officers conducted a massive manhunt
for Jones, who was later taken into custody.
In 2007, a massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, about 150
miles (241 km) southwest of Charlottesville, left 33 people dead
including the shooter, and 23 injured in one of the deadliest
college mass shootings in U.S. history.
(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; Editing by Bernadette
Baum)
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