Officials at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia learned in January that an assistant chief medical examiner in the Tidewater district provided an inauthentic letter indicating she’d passed a board exam nearly two years ago when she had not. That, and her subsequent departure from the office, has raised questions about cases in which Dr. Fernanda da Silva Lameira was involved. … Lameira, in January emails to Virginia Department of Health administrators, denied ever learning that she failed her first attempt on the forensic pathology board exam. She wrote that she believed an ex-partner created, without her knowledge, the letter indicating she had passed the exam. In recent weeks, The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press have obtained those emails and other documents that prosecutors have shared with several defense attorneys as part of their legal obligations. … When asked for an interview, Lameira replied in an email last week stating this story “is false and it doesn’t make any sense,” and maintaining there’s no issue with her court testimony. … She indicated that she signed an agreement of confidentiality with the Virginia Department of Health stating her firing was not public information, and that she would not speak publicly regarding it. … It’s not immediately clear how many autopsies Lameira conducted after she arrived at the chief medical examiner’s office in July 2023. The office asked for more time to respond to a public records request for the total number of autopsies she performed.

A judge has rejected a lawsuit alleging the Winchester City Council violated Virginia’s open-meeting laws when it selected John Piper as city manager earlier this year. Judge Amy Tisinger denied Winchester resident Jeffrey Milburn’s petition for a writ of mandamus following an Aug. 13 hearing in Winchester General District Court. Milburn’s petition alleged the council improperly took action on Piper’s appointment during a closed session on Jan. 24 rather than voting on the matter in public. Milburn filed the lawsuit on Aug. 10, one day before the council held a public roll-call vote to formally approve and ratify Piper’s appointment and employment contract. The motion passed 7-2. According to Tisinger’s written summary of the Aug. 13 hearing, City Attorney Melisa Michelsen told the court that the council did not take a formal vote during the January closed session, but instead reached a “general consensus” to continue negotiations with Piper. Michelsen also acknowledged that the council did not take the required public vote on Piper’s appointment after returning from closed session in January. “Once the mistake or problem was discovered, the council conducted an open session vote with the same members at an August 2026 meeting showing ratification of what should have been done formally earlier,” Tisinger wrote. The judge concluded that the failure was not a “willful mistake or oversight” and that the issue had been corrected through last week’s public vote. … “This case is NOT about John Piper and it is NOT about politics,” Milburn said in the statement, which he provided to The Winchester Star via email. “It is about whether the Common Council followed Virginia’s open-meeting law when conducting the public’s business.”

It was a comment made at a town hall meeting Sunday that resulted in Mike Meredith resigning from his seat on the Franklin County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. … “The discussion came up about my comment at the town hall at Scruggs, and they informed me that was actually confidential material and I should not have released that,” Meredith said about his statement from Sunday that plans for a data center in Franklin County, known as Project Flash, was not moving forward. Meredith said he saw no harm in the comments at the time since Project Flash had been written about in the media and online with the discussion over documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. He added that his statements didn’t reveal the name of the company or anyone involved. In the closed session discussions on Tuesday, Meredith said supervisors discussed how revealing that information could be detrimental for the county moving forward as it could harm trust in the county not releasing confidential information. That is when Meredith said he suggested resignation.

A member of the Warren County Board of Supervisors and a local resident got into a physical altercation in the parking lot after the supervisors meeting Tuesday night. Warren County Sheriff’s Office deputies intervened and separated Fork District Supervisor Hugh B. Henry and a member of the audience in the Warren County High School parking lot. … During the meeting, Henry read out loud a series of comments he said the man made in a post on a private Front Royal Facebook group. Henry pointed out to Jay Newell in the audience as the person who posted the comments. Comments Henry read during member reports contain expletives as well as accusations calling the supervisor a liar. “I won’t get into a discussion here but he did post saying Henry ‘is a lying piece of (expletive)’ a while ago,” Henry said. Henry read another post wishing harm upon area magistrates. “I’m not sure what I’ve done to Mr. Newell,” Henry said, then directing his comments to him. “Mr. Newell, I have a white GMC truck out there with a flatbed on it; if you’d like to explain to me after the meeting out in the parking lot I’d be glad to meet you out there.”