U.Va. community mourns shooting victims at memorial

Six days after a University of Virginia student opened fire aboard a bus returning from a field trip — killing three of his fellow students and wounding two others — the university gathered for a memorial Saturday afternoon to honor the dead.

Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry were remembered during a public ceremony beginning at 3:30 p.m. at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville. The event was set to take place on a Saturday when U.Va.’s football team — for which Chandler, Davis and Perry all played — had canceled its scheduled game against Coastal Carolina University.

“Shared grief … is a keen reminder that it is our bonds with each other and with a common community that give us the strength to endure,” U.Va. President Jim Ryan said in a videotaped message to students on Wednesday evening, observing that “there’s nothing normal about what we’re going through as a community.”

The memorial comes as members of the public and university struggle to understand what motivated suspect Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. to allegedly carry out the killings Nov. 13 — and amid questions about whether university officials could have done more to prevent the tragedy.

On Thursday, Virginia’s state attorney general announced the appointment of a special counsel to review how university officials assessed the threat Jones posed to the campus. U.Va. officials say the 22-year-old had come to the attention of an internal threat-assessment team after another student reported that Jones said he had a gun. University officials requested and are cooperating with the attorney general’s review.

Jones was arrested and is being held in custody as Virginia State Police investigate the shootings.