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Jane Harper covers state and federal courts for The Pilot. A native of Southeast Texas, she earned her journalism degree from The University of Texas at Austin and worked at newspapers in Texas and Maryland before moving to Norfolk in 1994.
Skysha Nettles had only been a Chesapeake police officer for about eight months when she admitted to forging a suspect's signature on a criminal summons after failing to get the man to sign the document.
Jamie Thomas has been protesting outside Rock Church every week for the past few months. He was arrested Sunday after the pastor filed a criminal complaint against him, claiming Thomas had been behaving in a threatening and intimidating manner.
Local attorney Matthew Morris has had his law license suspended three times in the past year, including for a series of threatening texts he sent to a former client. He started working for the Portsmouth Commonwealth's Attorney's Office last year and is still employed there despite a six-month suspension that begins later this month.
Joan Allison, who is Black, had taught 3rd-grade boys at Norfolk Academy for 22 years. She sued the school and Headmaster Dennis Manning in 2020 after being told she could no longer serve as a homeroom teacher and would need to take on a new role.
Four families who live at or near an intersection in the Historic Freemason District where a house was demolished in 2018 sued the city in U.S. District Court in Norfolk. A judge, however, ruled they didn't have legal standing in the case and ordered them to pay the city's attorney's fees.
Men and women incarcerated in local city-run lockups can have special meals and other popular offerings delivered right to their cells while they await trial or serve short sentences. The meals available at some of the jails include things like chicken wing baskets, steak fajitas, Philly cheesesteaks and rich desserts.
Former Norfolk Academy teacher Joan Allison sued the school in 2020, claiming she was reassigned to a job outside the classroom because of her race. The case first went to trial last year but ended with a hung jury.
Jacquan Wilson was 17 when he fatally shot Bryant Austin Cueto during a 2016 drug deal in the parking lot of an Applebee's restaurant in Virginia Beach. Now 24, Wilson could get up to life in prison when he's sentenced in June.
A Brunswick County prosecutor offered the information during an expungement hearing held Tuesday for Rock Church pastor John Blanchard in Chesterfield County Circuit Court, according to Del. Tim Anderson, who was among the participants.
The men all played a role in the April 2016 hired murder of Lillian "Resa" Bond outside her house in Norfolk's Ingleside neighborhood. Bond, 59, was wheeling her trashcan to the curb when a gunman got out of a car and shot her six times.