A Martinsville City Council meeting last week has resulted in the disclosure of bank card expenses from city officials showing thousands of dollars in travel, hotel stays, food, and conferences, including trips to Las Vegas and luxury resorts. Bank card statements, downloaded by the Martinsville Bulletin from a publicly available folder on the city of Martinsville’s OneDrive SharePoint server, contain redacted monthly statements from Bank of America from January 2024 through March of this year. City Councilman Aaron Rawls requested the statements under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and shared them with the Bulletin.

The Augusta County Sheriff’s Office has become the third local law enforcement agency to utilize body-worn cameras, nearly a year after the devices were approved. The sheriff’s office was a little late to the party as both the Staunton and Waynesboro police departments have had body cam devices in use for about a decade. The Augusta County Board of Supervisors approved the body cams in April 2024. However, implementation of the system could not begin until the sheriff’s office went through some upgrades. “We didn’t have good enough internet service here,” Augusta County Sheriff Donald Smith admitted. The drive for more transparency doesn’t come cheaply and running the system will continue to incur costs. “That’s been the whole hiccup from the beginning of this,” Smith said. “It’s extremely expensive and you have to be willing to pay for it, and you have to be willing to fund the program.”

“They not getting off this bus,” the killer informed his mentor 100 minutes before unleashing the fusillade that claimed the lives of three fellow University of Virginia students and Cavalier football players, seriously injured two others and left a community searching for answers. “Tonight I’m either going to hell or jail,” Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. texted Xavier G. Richardson. “I’m sorry. Just tell my story.” Today, going on three years after those texts and that life-shattering blast of leaden horror inside a chartered bus returning to Charlottesville from a field trip to Washington, D.C., the full story remains untold. That’s because the mentor, who sits on UVa’s School of Education and Human Development Foundation, isn’t speaking about what he did in those 100 minutes, and UVa has redacted the bulk of the investigative reports detailing what officials did or didn’t do before the mass shooting on Nov. 13, 2022. Unlike Virginia Tech, which saw the release of then-Gov. Tim Kaine’s 260-page report four months after the slaying of 32 students and faculty in 2007, UVa has kept mum. UVa’s determination to seal its reports went beyond blanking half the pages in the two investigative documents it commissioned at a cost of $1.5 million to Virginia taxpayers. The university also waged a legal battle to delay even the redacted versions.