When University of Virginia pre-med student Ryan Lynch went to see The Ballad of Emmett Till on Sunday with two dozen other students from her African-American Theater class, she noticed one of them sitting by himself during the play.
Lynch, a 19-year-old sophomore who transferred to UVA from Hampton University this year, met student-athlete Christopher Jones earlier in the semester at a tryout for a campus fashion show. But both of them got busy, and neither participated. The two reconnected on Sunday’s outing to Washington D.C., about 2.5 hours from the UVA campus in Charlottesville.
Following the show, Lynch made sure to check on Jones, who wasn’t part of the class but was in another of the professor’s courses and had been invited along.
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“I thought it might have been a little deep for him, so I went out of my way to speak to him on the bus afterwards,” Lynch told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
Some 30 minutes later, as the bus arrived back at the UVA campus, Jones pulled out a gun and killed three student-athletes, according to police. Lynch was sitting up front with a friend, near the professor who had organized the outing.
“We were just talking, and all of sudden we heard loud popping noises,” Lynch said. “We thought it was like, chips, or balloons, we didn’t know what it was. I had never even heard gunshots before, I was so confused… And then, all of a sudden, this huge cloud of smoke filled the bus.”
Lynch at first assumed that “someone had come on the bus and started shooting,” she recalled. “But then I knew it couldn’t be, because we hadn’t stopped.”
After hearing the fourth shot, Lynch and her friend dropped down to the floor. The gunfire, which had erupted toward the back of the bus, “came closer and closer,” according to Lynch, who had covered herself with her jacket and a blanket in an attempt to hide from the danger.
Lynch and her friend, who did not want to be named publicly, “both thought he had shot everyone on the bus, because there were so many shots,” she said.
The noise was deafening and there was a lot of screaming, which Lynch said she didn’t really hear because her brain “tuned that out.”
“We were scared to get off because there were shots coming up the aisle of the bus,” she said. “[Then] Chris came up so slow, we thought he was going to shoot us, too. Then he got off the bus, [and] he shot the gun outside the bus.”
Before Jones fled, Lynch recalled her friend hearing him say, “F y’all.”
All three slain victims—Lavel Davis Jr., D’Sean Perry, and Devin Chandler—were active UVA football players. Jones reportedly made the UVA football team as a walk-on running back in 2018, but did not play in any games. Police have not yet determined a motive for the killings.
Davis, Perry, and Chandler were also in the same African-American Theater class as Lynch, who became emotional as she described trying in vain with her friend to save Davis’ life as he lay bleeding in the aisle of the bus on Sunday.
“We stood up and we were like, ‘What just happened?’” Lynch said. “[Davis] was lying face-flat on the floor, he was bleeding so much. He had been shot multiple times. We were trying to figure out if we should get off the bus, but we stayed to help him. We had both done CPR training, he had a really faint pulse.”
Perry and Chandler were in the rear of the bus—out of reach for Lynch, who had been taught not to move gunshot victims. So, with Davis’ pulse fading, they ran to get help. After calling 911, the pair ran into the UVA theater building and hid in a bathroom.
An active shooter alert was issued by the school; Jones would elude police for another 12 hours. He was apprehended in Henrico County, about 77 miles away from UVA, on Monday shortly before 11 a.m., according to local police.
“It was so scary—we didn’t know if Chris was coming back to shoot us,” Lynch said. “We had to be quiet because we didn’t know if Chris was still around. No one knew his plan or what his intentions were.”
In the surreal aftermath, once they were safe, Lynch said, “We all just sat with each other, crying, hearing each other’s stories and what we saw.”
Jones’ mother, Margo Ellis, said she was “not speaking to reporters right now” when contacted by The Daily Beast on Monday. Tracie Baines, whose daughter went to high school with Jones and said they both knew him well, told The Daily Beast that the shooting seemed “so out of character, so very, very out of character” for the suspect. But in an interview with Richmond NBC affiliate WWBT, Jones’ father, Christopher Sr., said his son had seemed “paranoid” the last time they spoke.
The three victims of Sunday’s shooting “did nothing” to deserve this, said Lynch.
“Those boys did nothing to him,” she told The Daily Beast. “They were the sweetest guys. They were compassionate, always telling jokes, would always ask us if we needed anything. They were so sweet. They lit up the room.They always made me want to come to African-American Theater class. We were a really close group. We were very vulnerable in that class. We talked about our lives and things that had happened to us. It just had the best energy.”
Lynch said she was told by one of her UVA mentors that “Vel didn’t actually make it to the hospital.”
“I just hope he heard us trying to help him and make sure he was okay,” she said, through tears, adding, “It’s just so heartbreaking to know that Chris was on the bus with us that day.”
Jones, who reportedly had a difficult childhood, was nevertheless a standout student in high school. His father left the family when Jones was five, and Jones moved in with his grandmother in 2016 amid interpersonal difficulties with his mom. In July 2018, Jones received the Dr. Porcher L. Taylor, Jr. Scholastic Award for academic achievement, and he was later granted a scholarship to UVA, Virginia’s flagship public university.
A source who knows Jones but asked not to be named told The Daily Beast that he had “been bullied” at UVA, “and it was bad.” Relatives of Jones’ told NBC 12 on Monday that he had been hazed while at UVA. School officials confirmed an alleged hazing incident, according to CBS reporter Olivia Rinaldi, but witnesses at the time reportedly would not cooperate.
In a separate interview, Lynch told CBS Philadelphia that Jones got up and pushed Davis before pulling out his gun, saying, “You guys are always messing with me.”
Jones had previously appeared on the radar of UVA officials, when he was involved in a “potential hazing issue,” the university said in a statement to the Associated Press. Over the course of an internal investigation, it emerged that Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor concealed weapons violation in February 2021, but that he hadn’t reported the incident to UVA administrators, as school rules require.
Administrative charges through the university’s judiciary council are pending, UVA Police Chief Timothy J. Longo said at a press conference on Monday.
The school has made counseling and support services available for all students, faculty, and staff, according to UVA President Jim Ryan.
For Lynch, who now must somehow focus enough to return to her studies, watching her friends die has been a struggle to comprehend.
As she told The Daily Beast on Tuesday, “I have no words.”
