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VIRGINIA BEACH — Lisa McClenney knew something was wrong when she hadn’t heard from her son.
From a state prison outside Richmond, Davin McClenney called on the regular. But several months after he got there, the calls stopped coming.
So Lisa McClenney began phoning the prison, pleading for information about her only son.
While Davin McClenney was robbing a Virginia Beach 7-Eleven in 2017, a store clerk shot him in the neck, paralyzing him. Just before the onset of the cononavirus pandemic, McClenney was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison.
There was a reason his calls to his mother had ceased: Now quadriplegic, he was bedbound on a feeding tube and catheter. McClenney couldn’t physically use the phone or operate Zoom.
A prison doctor recently told his family he has less than three months to live. Because of restrictions during the pandemic, family members couldn’t visit to say goodbye.
Attorneys for the McClenneys scrambled last month to piece together a pardon petition — a last-ditch effort appealing to the governor for his release. His father wrote a letter.
“My name is David A. McClenney,” it began, “and I am writing this for my son Davin A. McClenney, because (he) cannot write for himself.”
Last week, Gov. Ralph Northam granted McClenney a medical pardon, sending the 31-year-old home.
“I was ecstatic. It was like a whole weight just got lifted off of me, that I would finally see him,” Lisa McClenney said. “No matter how he was, I just needed to see him and touch him.”
Pardons of any kind are rare, but medical ones perhaps even more so. During his time in office, Northam has granted seven medical pardons, according to Secretary of the Commonwealth Kelly Thomasson.
Lisa McClenney said her son was released from custody Saturday. He cannot speak. He can hear his mom but doesn’t know who she is, she said. He remains hospitalized locally.
“It means a lot to see him,” she said.
On June 24, 2017, Davin McClenney demanded money from two clerks at a Virginia Beach 7-Eleven, his gun drawn. He took $86 from the cash registers and ordered them to give him more from a safe, court documents say. The employees said he threatened to shoot if they didn’t listen.
One clerk pulled a pistol from under the counter and shot at McClenney, but it didn’t fire. McClenney tried to shoot back, but his gun also didn’t go off, according to court documents. The clerk fired again — this time hitting McClenney. The bullet remains lodged between two vertebrae in his neck.
After months in the hospital, he regained some movement in his arms and hands and could eat and use an electric wheelchair.
In September, seven months after McClenney was sentenced, Virginia Beach prosecutors opposed a request from McClenney’s defense lawyers to reconsider his sentence. The Virginia Parole Board also sent Commonwealth’s Attorney Colin Stolle a letter requesting input.
Stolle disapproved of medical clemency, citing McClenney’s “horrible violent criminal record,” Macie Allen, a spokesperson for Stolle’s office, wrote in an email.
When he was 15, McClenney was prosecuted as an adult and convicted in an armed robbery he committed with a friend. They used a BB gun and netted $95 and cigarettes. He was out on bond, charged in another armed robbery, when he was shot in the 7-Eleven holdup.
Lisa McClenney lost her sister to the coronavirus pandemic and couldn’t be there to say goodbye. She thought she would lose her son without seeing him, either.
“We can’t do this,” she recalls telling him. “You can’t go nowhere without seeing me.”
John Coggeshall, a Hampton Roads-based lawyer, said he got a conference call from a prison physician, who told him McClenney had less than 90 days to live.
When a prison doctor calls, “You stand up and take notice,” Coggeshall said. “That’s objective, not subjective.”
“You just can’t ignore something like that.”
Coggeshall specializes in pardon petitions. In 2018, he got three clients pardoned by the governor, including Travion Blount, who received six life sentences plus 118 years for a robbery as a teenager.
Coggeshall had never done a medical pardon petition before, and the requirements are stringent, he said.
In their petition, Coggeshall and Senior Assistant Public Defender Melissa Bray wrote that McClenney spoke to kids locked up at the Virginia Beach Detention Center before his sentencing: “He said if he could just reach one of them, in the end, he did his job.”
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In an email, Bray said his crime was a “terrible” one that affected innocent people, and no one knew that more than McClenney.
“He told me that he knew he would die in prison and he was okay with that because he believed that is what he deserved,” Bray wrote.
“Though it looks different for us all, I believe no one is beyond forgiveness or redemption.”
An ambulance brought McClenney home, his mom said. Before they took him to a local hospital, his mother and father were able to lay down beside him.
When she first saw her son, Lisa McClenney told him: “You’re home, you’re home.”
“I said, ‘It’s mommy, it’s mommy. Look, you’re home.’”
Margaret Matray, 757-222-5216, margaret.matray@pilotonline.com