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On Oct. 8, 2017, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office Special Response Team arrived at a trailer on Golden View Lane in Abingdon to serve a search warrant for suspected drug possession and distribution. Hours later, Roberto Avendano was dead. Avendano, believed to have been 41 years old, fled the trailer when the team arrived, according to officer statements. He barricaded himself in a hidden room in a shed nearby. While officers saw him flee, the shed appeared empty on their first sweep. A small dog kept returning to the shed, though — sometimes sniffing the covered door, sometimes sitting calmly on the couch. Such details are only publicly available because the Washington County Sheriff’s Office agreed to share nine officer statements with the Bristol Herald Courier. Those statements represent a sliver of the investigation into Avendano’s death conducted by the Virginia State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. In Virginia — where police killed 30 civilians last year and six were unarmed, according to an activist-compiled database called the Police Violence Report — investigative records are released at the discretion of law enforcement. Virginia State Police refused to release two such investigations to the Herald Courier last month. Just south in Tennessee, a law that went into effect last May offers civilians greater transparency.
Bristol Herald Courier
Maybe it’s the sunshine in House of Delegates subcommittees and committees, where votes on bills are now recorded on electronic voting machines, or maybe it’s just what happens in a 51-49 Republican-Democratic split, but there’s plenty of attention paid these days to where legislators stand.
Daily Press
Virginians will soon have the chance — perhaps their only chance — to participate in person in the Trump administration’s plan to open more than 90 percent of the country’s coast to offshore drilling. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is holding its only scheduled public meeting in Virginia on Wednesday at a hotel and event center in Richmond. There, participants will have the chance to meet one-on-one with BOEM staff, ask them questions, hand them written comments or type their comments into laptops that the agency will provide. It’s an open-house format where participants can arrive and leave at any time, rather than a public hearing with an open microphone that opponents of offshore drilling prefer for the chance to give formal testimony. But, according to news reports, BOEM’s open-house format has already frustrated some attendees in Oregon, where agency staff were unable to answer some questions, and in California, where people thwarted from being allowed to speak publicly chanted “Where’s our hearing?”
Daily Press
A group of corporate leaders headed by Dominion Energy CEO Thomas F. Farrell II submitted the lone pitch in response to a city request for proposals aimed at replacing the Richmond Coliseum and redeveloping a valuable swath of publicly owned downtown real estate. The city received a single proposal in response to its request for proposals, which had a deadline of Feb. 9. In a news release, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney said the city would review the group’s proposal over the next month, and may initiate negotiations on the project afterward. The statement did not name the group that submitted the proposal, but a spokesman for the group, NH District Corp., confirmed that it had submitted a proposal. The Richmond Times-Dispatch requested the number of proposals the city received by the Feb. 9 deadline on three occasions this week, but city officials declined to provide the figure. A news release was posted on the city’s website about the RFP on Friday afternoon. The delay was due to an internal review of the proposal, Stoney spokesman Jim Nolan said. The mayor was not briefed on the proposal until Friday morning, he said.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
High medical costs have left many people in the Shenandoah Valley unable to afford their care. According to a Northern Virginia Dailyanalysis of over 100,000 court cases filed between 2010 and 2016, thousands of people in Shenandoah County, Warren County, Frederick County and Winchester are taken to court every year in order to pay debts to medical providers. The analysis, which uses data provided by Ben Schoenfeld, a computer engineer, of every single general district civil court case filed in the seven-year period, shows the extent to which high medical costs leave patient after patient facing financial trouble.
Northern Virginia Daily
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