CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Dr. Theresa Davis, the University of Virginia professor – affectionately known to students as “Lady T,” – testified Thursday morning that she could never imagine Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. shooting five fellow students, three fatally, when she led a group of students on a field trip to Washington D.C. on Nov. 13, 2022. 

Jones pled guilty to the murders of UVA football players Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry, and the shooting of football player Michael Hollins and student Marlee Morgan. 

This week, Albemarle County Circuit Court judge Cheryl Higgins is presiding over Jones’ sentencing hearing, where he faces possible life in prison. 

“My heart aches every day for D’Sean, Lavel, Devin and the families. Chris had never presented like that,” Davis, sobbing, told the court. “It was unrecognizable to me, that level of evil in that moment.”

Davis, and another student on the trip – Alexis Stokes – took the witness stand Thursday, called by the defense. But both offered emotional testimony about the horror of the shooting and the lingering effects it has had on their lives that was more akin to prosecution’s victims statements offered Monday and Tuesday. 

Davis refuted a defense assertion that Jones had been bullied by the football players.

“That never happened,” Davis said. “That never happened.”

Stokes sobbed as she was escorted to the stand by an adult woman, and the court took note of the fact that she did not want to testify but had been subpoenaed by the defense. 

Stokes testified that she had met Jones in August 2022 after being introduced by a mutual friend, Luna Alazar. Alazar went on to have a sexual relationship with Jones, before attempting to set him up with Stokes. 

Stokes testified to Jones’ unpredictability and paranoia and the heated arguments he had at times with Alazar. 

Still, on the day of the shooting, Stokes told the court, “he seemed back to the norm.”

“I just don’t understand how we’re here today,” Stokes said. 

Both Davis and Stokes gave detailed – at times gut-wrenching – descriptions of the events leading up to, during and following Jones shooting on a bus as it pulled back onto UVA’s campus that Sunday night. 

Davis had taken two of her classes to see a play and have dinner in Washington D.C. Jones, Stokes, Alazar and a fourth woman were in a ‘Speaking Social Justice’ course. Most of the students on the trip were in her ‘African-American theater’ class. 

Davis testified that, as the bus approached the Culbreath parking deck on campus, she stood up and began to gather her things. Hollins walked up to her, near the front of the bus, and offered help. 

Davis said she heard gunshots, saw the bus driver exit the bus and the bus doors begin to close. She said she rushed to open the door so students would not be trapped. At that point she either fell or was pushed out of the bus – she could not say definitively – after hearing someone say, “Get out of my way.”

Davis described Jones’ voice and actions like a demonic “possession.”

Davis said she fell out of the bus and onto the ground “on all fours,” before seeing Jones’ red sneakers go past her. 

She recalled seeing a student exit the bus with blood on her, then saw Morgan get off and realized Morgan had been shot. 

Davis worked to get her students, including Morgan, inside the drama building, then into the theater, to keep them away from the lobby’s windows.

“I just wanted us to be safe,” Davis said. 

She rode with Morgan in an ambulance to the hospital, before returning to UVA to be with the rest of the class. 

Stokes testified that she had become close friends with Jones but had begun to distance herself from him because of his constant paranoia that people – especially Alazar – were out to get him. 

She recounted a time when she was riding in Jones’ car and he pulled out a firearm and left it sitting in his lap.

“Mentally, he was just all over the place,” Stokes told the court. “Paranoid and always thinking someone was going to hurt him.”

But Stokes described a fairly uneventful time with Jones on the field trip, noting that he talked with her and other students about the play and, during the bus ride back, talked to Lavel Davis Jr. about a video game. 

When the shooting began, Stokes said she crawled across the bus aisle and hid her head and upper body under Chandler’s seat, with her legs sticking out. She said she spent the rest of the ordeal “praying,” until she got off the bus. 

Stokes concluded her testimony by telling Judge Higgins that her life since the shooting is, “an every day struggle.”

“I wake up thinking about it,” Stokes said. “I go to sleep thinking about it.”

The defense was expected to call a psychological expert as its final witness Thursday afternoon. Closing arguments are anticipated for Friday morning, followed by Judge Higgins’ sentencing Jones.