WaPo Alters Headline Claiming UVA Killer ‘Flourished’ After ‘Troubled Childhood’

Christopher Darnell Jr
Henrico County Sheriff's Department
Warner Todd Huston

In the immediate aftermath of the murders on the University of Virginia campus on Sunday, the Washington Post took heat for saying the shooter had “flourished” after a “troubled childhood.” Now the paper has quietly erased that headline.

The suspected shooter, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., 22, is a UVA student and former football player. Police took him into custody off campus after the shooting that took three lives.

Breitbart News reported that the shooting occurred around 10:30 p.m. at the school’s Culbreth Garage, leaving five victims. Two of the victims were wounded, and three were killed on site. Killed were D’Sean Perry, Lavel Davis Jr., and Devin Chandler.

But in its original story about the shooting, the Post tweeted a headline saying that the suspect had a “troubled childhood. but then flourished.” It appears that this was not true because as the hours rolled on, it became clear that the suspect had been reported for threats quite recently.

By Monday evening, though, the paper had deleted its “flourished” tweet and altered its headline to read, “Suspected U-Va. gunman was scrutinized by threat assessment team for weapon, police say,” according to Fox News.

Twitter users were shocked that the Post would seek to soften the perception of a man accused of gunning down his classmates.

The paper’s original headline wasn’t the only exculpatory language in its coverage. The story also spoke glowingly of how the suspected shooter looked after his siblings while his mom worked and how he was “bullied” in high school.

“Jones, who is listed in U-Va.’s student directory as an undergraduate in the College of Arts & Sciences, spent his early years living in Richmond public housing complexes, where it was often too dangerous to play outside, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported,” the Post’s story read. “At night, while his mother worked, Jones was sometimes responsible for feeding his three siblings, walking to nearby grocery stores to pick up Ramen noodles or bologna. When he was 5, his parents divorced and his father left, a loss that he called ‘one of the most traumatic things that happened to me in my life.'”

“‘When I went to school, people didn’t understand me,’ said Jones, then 18, telling a reporter that he attacked other children who bullied him for being smart, leading to suspensions and stints in alternative school,” the paper’s coverage added.

Those sections remain in the paper’s story.

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