(Updated at 11 a.m.) An alleged shooting threat briefly sent students practicing on a school field indoors tonight.
The incident happened around 7 p.m. outside of Washington-Liberty High School. A police dispatch said the man was “yelling that there was going to be a shooting at the stadium.” He was being held down by several people until officers arrived, the dispatch said.
Numerous students were on the field at the time and were reportedly rushed inside the building.
“An individual threatened the field hockey players at a practice during a marching band rehearsal,” a tipster said. “I am a W-L student and I can confirm that the students were quickly brought in.”
An email sent to band families around 7:30 p.m., shared with ARLnow, said the man was arrested.
Good evening,
This evening there was an incident at the stadium entrance with a individual claiming to have a weapon. The police were called and the students were immediately sent inside. The suspect was arrested and taken into custody, and we have resumed rehearsal at this point now that the all clear from APD has been given. We will end at 9:00 as scheduled.
If you have any questions please feel free to reach out.
Thanks,
Dr. Sedatole
Arlington County police said in a subsequent crime report on Thursday that they arrested a 35-year-old Arlington resident. He is currently being held in jail on several threat-related charges.
“The adult male suspect entered the stadium and allegedly made threats of harm to other individuals.,” the crime report said. “The male suspect was detained by bystanders and taken into custody by responding officers. No weapon was seen or located.”
The suspect “was arrested and charged with Disorderly Conduct and Threats on School Grounds (x2).,” the crime report continues. “He was held on no bond.”
The Washington-Liberty Generals narrowly defeated the Yorktown Patriots last night.
The Thursday night, cross-county game at Yorktown’s Greenbrier Stadium ended with a score of 21-18, the Gazette Leader reported. But the night’s drama did not stop there — large groups of teens leaving the game gathered at a local shopping center and a local fast food restaurant.
Police responded to at least two locations: the Lee-Harrison Shopping Center just down the street from the stadium and further up Langston Blvd at the McDonald’s.
At least three police units responded to the shopping center, where dozens if not more than 100 teens were gathered in the parking lot, prompting a call to police about rowdy behavior and cars being blocked.
“I was working at Lee Harrison Shopping Center last night and HUNDREDS of Yorktown students flooded the area,” an anonymous tipster wrote to ARLnow, claiming that they were “screaming at each other and threatening patrons.”
The crowds could be seen in traffic camera images, above, but video reviewed by ARLnow did not show any destructive behavior.
The same could not be said about a large group that gathered at the McDonald’s at 4834 Langston Blvd last night around the same time. Police responded to the fast food joint for reports of kids inside destroying things.
“At approximately 9:51 p.m. on September 14, police were dispatched to the report of disorderly conduct,” Arlington County ploce spokeswoman Ashley Savage told ARLnow. “Upon arrival, it was determined a large group of juveniles entered a business, damaged property and stole a poster. There are no suspect(s) description. The investigation is ongoing.”
Savage, responding to a follow-up question from ARLnow, noted that the damaged items were all posters — not the life-sized Ronald McDonald figure that some teens allegedly tried to steal just before the start of the school year.
On the Lee-Harrison gathering, Savage said that “police were dispatched to the report of a large group of juveniles in the parking lot allegedly acting disorderly.”
“Officers responded to the area and the group subsequently dispersed,” she added.
A Washington-Liberty High School senior was killed in a double homicide yesterday in Fairfax County.
Braden Deahl, 18, was a standout soccer player on the W-L varsity team who had committed to play at St. Mary’s College of Maryland earlier this month, according to an athletics website.
Deahl’s death was announced in an email to W-L families this afternoon.
“It is with great sadness that I inform you that one of our seniors, Braden Deahl, died on Monday,” wrote principal Tony Hall. “Braden was a beloved member of the Washington-Liberty family, and impacted the lives of many of our students and staff members. He brought much joy to all who knew him, especially his soccer teammates and fellow 12th graders. We all deeply feel his loss.”
Shortly thereafter, Fairfax County police announced that Deahl was one of two young men killed at an apartment complex near Tysons on Memorial Day.
“On May 29, 2023 at 3:37 p.m., officers responded to an apartment building in the 2200 block of Pimmit Run Lane in Falls Church for a man who had been shot. Jonas Skinner, 20, of Ashburn, was found in the laundry room of the apartment building with a gunshot wound to the upper body,” wrote FCPD. “Officers found three additional individuals in the parking lot suffering from stab wounds to their upper body. Braden Deahl, 18, of Arlington County, was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced deceased.”
The other two stabbing victims are expected to survive, though one remains in the hospital.
In a press release, below, FCPD said the killings appear to have been drug-related. A teenager has been arrested and charged with robbery resulting in death.
Detectives believe a drug related robbery led to the fatal shooting of one man and the fatal stabbing of another. Police have charged one juvenile in connection to this crime and anticipate more updates to follow.
On May 29, 2023 at 3:37 p.m., officers responded to an apartment building in the 2200 block of Pimmit Run Lane in Falls Church for a man who had been shot. Jonas Skinner, 20, of Ashburn, was found in the laundry room of the apartment building with a gunshot wound to the upper body. Fairfax County Fire and Rescue personnel declared Skinner deceased at the scene.
Officers found three additional individuals in the parking lot suffering from stab wounds to their upper body. Braden Deahl, 18, of Arlington County, was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced deceased. The other two victims were taken to a nearby hospital to be treated for injuries not believed to be life threatening. One of the juveniles remains hospitalized.
During a search of the area, K9 officers located a significant amount of marijuana nearby believed to be connected to the homicide. All individuals involved are believed to be known to each other and this is not a random act of violence.
Earlier today, a 17-year-old was charged with robbery resulting in death.
Police anticipate more announcements in this case.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will conduct an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death in the coming days.
Deahl is at least the second Arlingtonian to be murdered outside of the county’s borders so far this year. A Yorktown High School grad was killed in a D.C. hotel room in April.
The full letter from Hall to Washington-Liberty families is below.
Washington-Liberty High School senior Ava Schwarz always wondered about outer space.
But she did not always love the fields that made the heavens intelligible: science, technology, engineering and math.
That changed once she moved to Arlington and got an internship with Rosie Riveters, a nonprofit focused on promoting STEM education among kids 4-14, particularly girls.
“She took an initial spark of an opportunity and made it her own through our connections and resources,” says Rosie Riveters Executive Director Brittany Greer.
The internship opened doors to more opportunities — including a competition through NASA in which technology she and other W-L students made was launched into space. It culminated with Crystal City-based Boeing holding a STEM Signing Day on Tuesday, as a diverse array of promising students signed a letter of intent to pursue degrees in STEM in college.
“I’m just excited to work in the orbit of her future,” Greer said.
The aerospace company honored 34 Virginia high schoolers, including Schwarz, who plans to study aerospace engineering at Yale University, and Alex Anderson, a soon-to-be Arlington Career Center graduate set to attend William and Mary University to study computer science.
The day hyped up students who will study STEM the way other schools celebrate students signing to play with college sports teams.
“We heard a lot of encouragement,” Schwarz said. “It can be so intimidating so it was cool to have so many people tell you you can do it and that this is an exciting time to be in STEM.”
There was also a message that felt tailor-made for her. One young graduate — a self-described “bubbly” woman — encouraged Signing Day participants to be themselves even if it might not fit engineer stereotypes.
“She said… bring your fullest self to table — that’s how you’re going to be most effective,” Schwarz recalled.
Boeing has been a long time supporter of Rosie Riveters, which began referring students for the STEM Signing Day last year, Greer said. Boeing, for instance, makes possible its education opportunities on military bases.
Going to Boeing’s corporate headquarters in Arlington (929 Long Bridge Drive) this week with Schwarz brought Greer “full circle.”
“She hadn’t had an interest in STEM prior to Rosie,” she said. “It was a clear example of the amazingness of what a public-private partnership can look like.”
Sponsors of her program, including Boeing and Amazon, make it possible for the nonprofit to go into schools and show students what STEM careers look like and what scholarships or internships are available to get them into those careers.
“It’s not just something where they got lucky to hear about it: it’s something they’re being actively called to and their families can support the path to that opportunity,” Greer said. “There’s an incredible amount of talent in our backyards and Ava is evidence of that.”
Schwarz was grateful for the opportunity and the support of Rosie Riveters for helping her push through when she was outnumbered 10-to-one by boys in her engineering classes.
“It’s amazing to have this community backing me, reassuring me that I may be one of the only women in room, but as time goes on, the whole next generation coming up and there will be more women in the room in the future,” she said.
Schwarz going from unaware of STEM opportunities to participating — along with other students of diverse backgrounds — in Boeing’s signing day is proof of concept for Greer.
“You’ve really got this movement of these awesome companies who are based in Arlington and the surrounding area, who are invested in local talent… particularly for groups who haven’t been represented in those spaces,” Greer said. “It’s a more effective, efficient way to invest in the pipeline.”
In one year, a group of Washington-Liberty High School students built a subatomic particle detector from scratch, teaching themselves everything from a new coding language to how to solder.
Now, that hardware and software are set to get launched into space this week, though a date has yet to be set.
“I feel ecstatic,” senior Ava Schwarz tells ARLnow.
Their project, originally scheduled to launch on Friday, will help scientists who are researching particle physics understand the kind of atmospheric radiation that rockets experience on flights just under the line between “space” and “outer space,” which is 62 miles above sea level.
Currently, scientists know that there are electron-like particles called “muons” that form when x-rays and gamma rays produced by stars, including the sun, react with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. Someone even invented a detector to figure out the strength and magnitude of the muons.
What scientists want to know is where exactly these muons get formed — and that is what the students set out to discover. They proposed building detectors and launching them into space to measure the altitude where they are formed and NASA accepted the project.
The team from W-L did so as part of the inaugural NASA TechRise Student Challenge, which was designed to engage and inspire future STEM professionals. The students comprise one of the 57 winning teams to receive $1,500 to build their experiments and receive a NASA-funded spot to test them on suborbital rocket flights operated by Blue Origin or UP Aerospace, per an Arlington Public Schools press release from last year.
The W-L students essentially started from scratch.
“A year ago, I didn’t know what a muon was,” Schwarz said. “I started completely from ground zero and took a crash course in particle physics, electrical engineering — the whole works.”
Senior Pia Wilson was a teammate with, comparatively, substantial coding experience. Suddenly, she was knee-deep in professionally created code using a language she had never worked with before.
“It was definitely a lot of Googling, lot of scouring forum posts in all the coding forums and a lot of help from professionals as well,” she said. Wilson added that she never expected learning how to solder electronics while in high school.
When they needed an expert with whom to talk through a problem, they spoke with associates of their school supervisor, Jeffrey Carpenter — who got into teaching after a 20-year career in space operations — as well as the person who invented a muon detector, Massachusetts Institute of Technology research assistant Spencer Axani.
“It was a very ‘two steps forward, one step back’ process,” Schwarz said. “We were going into a high-level project without a foundational skill set, which we obtained through trial and error.”
Whenever the detector malfunctioned, she said they troubleshooted by eliminating what the problem was not.
“There were many, many afternoons that turned into evenings spent after school, just working for hours, figuratively banging our heads against the wall,” she said.
As the experiment dragged into the summer last year, they kept hitting technical setbacks, particularly with the weight of the detector. They sometimes worried they would not finish in time for launch.
The fields at Washington-Liberty High School have new temporary toilets for baseball players, softball players and spectators.
These are not run-of-the-mill port-a-johns, either. The facilities, developed by D.C.-area startup Throne, give users the royal treatment with running water for flushing and hand-washing. Users simply text a phone number to gain entry and provide a cleanliness rating via text after they use it.
Kevin Healy, the assistant director of student activities at Washington-Liberty, credited a parent for making the partnership possible and Throne for loaning them for free through the end of May.
“We were just lucky we had parents looking into it who found the set-up for us,” he said. “The company was very cool about it.”
Healy says having a toilet near the baseball and softball fields is a big improvement for players, coaches and spectators.
“Typically, we’ll get one port-a-john during the season. Outside that, we have to go to the library to use any kind of facility,” he said. “We do have a port-a-john that the county put in place, but if you have a well-attended game [and] if you’re in the middle of a game… you don’t want to miss time jogging over in a ‘crisis situation’ to go in the building.”
Softball players often wind up having to go all the way to the W-L pool to find a bathroom, he said.
Located in Brentwood, Md., Throne aims to solve a handful of problems with bathroom access in the U.S.: quantity, cost, cleanliness and accessibility.
“Our co-founding team is passionate about expanding access to bathrooms,” co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Jess Heinzelman told ARLnow.
It can be expensive for municipalities to connect to water and sewer for brick-and-mortar bathrooms, which is why there can be access issues at school fields and parks, Heinzelman said. Cleaning them can be a headache, she added, because “a few bad apples ruin publicly accessible bathrooms for everybody.”
Throne considers the easiest alternative, port-a-johns, a “last resort” because they can be hard to find, locked and unpleasant.
“We set out with goal to drastically reduce costs while also using new technologies available to help introduce accountability to bathroom use without being creepy,” she said.
It takes a few hours to install a Throne, which uses solar power and rainwater catchment to provide running water for flushing and hand-washing. Smart sensors monitor use rates and maintenance needs and the company’s technology makes it possible to restrict access for people who vandalize the units or degrade their cleanliness.
Throne has built and tested out its toilets across the D.C. area over the last 2.5 years and has developed a step-up model, as well as one accessible for people with disabilities. The startup is readying for a commercial launch this spring, meaning people will see more installed in the District, the City of Fairfax and elsewhere.
Heinzelman said it was an easy decision to let W-L use the facilities. Its accessible units are in high-demand and the company had two unused step-up units that needed a home.
“We’re really excited to have them getting used,” Heinzelman said. “The student athletes seem to be liking them.”
Some may recognize the free-standing facility from the REEF Kitchen trailers near the Whole Foods in Clarendon. This was the startup’s first-ever pilot potty, serving the staff of the ghost kitchens, who cook food for delivery-only on platforms like Grubhub, as well as delivery drivers.
“Gig drivers are one of the major groups that has trouble finding restrooms because they’re working from their car and they’re not allowed to use the bathrooms of restaurants or places that they’re picking up from,” Heinzelman said.
A teenage girl on an electric scooter was seriously injured after colliding with a driver near Washington-Liberty High School earlier this afternoon.
Shortly after 1 p.m. on Tuesday, police were dispatched to Washington Blvd and N. Quincy Street, in the Virginia Square area, for the report of a crash with injury, a police spokeswoman told ARLnow.
“The preliminary investigation indicates a juvenile on an electric scooter was travelling southbound on N. Quincy Street when she proceeded through a red light and collided with a westbound travelling vehicle,” ACPD spokeswoman Alli Shorb said in a statement.
Initial reports identified the person who was hit as a 16-year-old girl. Police, firefighters and EMS personnel were all on the scene this afternoon, treating the teen and redirecting traffic away from the intersection.
Shorb said “the juvenile sustained serious, non-life threatening injuries and was transported to an area hospital.”
Though police said a scooter was involved, a blue e-bike could be seen lying on its side near the ambulance that carried the teen to the hospital.
The driver of the involved vehicle remained on scene and was not charged with any crime, based on the preliminary investigation, Shorb said, adding that the investigation is ongoing.
In a School Talk email to families, Principal Tony Hall identified the struck teen as a W-L student. He said EMS treated the teen on scene, resulting “in an ambulance and increased police presence near the school.”
“We are in contact with the family of the student,” he said. “There is no cause for concern to the greater W-L community at this time.”
A local man is accused of drunkenly breaking into Washington-Liberty High School early this morning, damaging a door.
Nothing was reported stolen and the motivation for the alleged break-in is unclear.
More from an Arlington County Police Department crime report:
UNLAWFUL ENTRY, 2023-02100054, 1300 block of N. Stafford Street. At approximately 4:15 a.m. on February 10, police were dispatched to the report of a burglary alarm. A lookout was broadcast and responding officers located the suspect in the area and took him into custody without incident. The investigation determined the male suspect allegedly forced entry into the school, causing damage to one of the door’s glass windows. No items were reported stolen and no other items were reported damaged. [The suspect], 30, of Arlington, Va., was arrested and charged with Trespass: School/Church Property, Destruction of Property, and issued a summons for Drunk in Public. He was held on a secured bond.
Also this morning, police responded to a stabbing along Columbia Pike, near The Wellington apartment complex.
Initial reports suggest that a man was stabbed, possibly in the back, but is expected to recover from his wound. The stabbing stemmed from a dispute between two men.
The incident happened around 9 a.m. and, after some initial confusion about the location, police found the men near the intersection of 12th Street S. and S. Scott Street, according to scanner traffic.
“The preliminary investigation indicates the two males were involved in a dispute which escalated into a physical altercation, during which one suffered an apparent stab wound,” said ACPD spokeswoman Ashley Savage. “Both individuals were treated on scene for injuries considered non-life threatening. Police remain on scene investigation the incident.”
(Updated at 7:30 p.m.) Braylon Meade’s classmates would know he was already seated by whether his basketball shoes were outside the door.
“He’d get up at 5 a.m. and after a workout, go to class at 7:30. Everyone said he would smell horrible. He would leave his shoes outside the classroom because he smelled so bad,” his teammate, James McIntyre, said with a laugh.
Shoes aside, his hustle garnered the admiration of his teammates, who agreed to him being their leader, overseeing drills and shouting out encouragement and direction during games.
“All the kids respected him because of how much work he put in… he worked so hard this summer to compete and play this season’s games,” W-L Head Coach Robert Dobson said. “He became our glue.”
McIntyre, who has known Meade since the third grade, says he was energetic but quick to share the ball. While not the tallest team member, he always ran to guard the opposing team’s best player.
“He went above and beyond to make himself the best athlete that he could be,” said Mark Weiser, a W-L parent who coached Meade in travel basketball. “He was the kind of player that, if you asked him to run through a brick wall, he’d do it and not complain.”
Meade died just before the start of the season this week and before he could show players across the region and state all the work he put in over the summer and fall. The 17-year-old was killed early Friday morning in a car crash, and a teen driver involved in the crash was charged with a DUI and involuntary manslaughter. On Sunday, hundreds of people turned out at the high school for a candlelight vigil organized in his memory.
In the wake of his death, family and community members are finding ways to honor his legacy. This morning (Wednesday), a scholarship fund in his name for Arlington Public Schools alumni went live on the Arlington Community Foundation website.
“The fund will provide need-based scholarships to graduates of Arlington County’s public high schools,” according to the foundation. “Braylon’s siblings, Bryan and Kerry, and his parents firmly believe that this scholarship fund will perpetuate one of Braylon’s passions, which was to lift up those in need.”
His coach is retiring Meade’s jersey number, 22, and before every game, his teammates will carry out the special handshakes he had for every player and hug his parents.
Dobson says he has already noticed teammates stepping up to try to do what Braylon did for the team.
“Kids who never said a word are now leading the huddle and calling out drills,” he said. “Everybody is doing it as a team.”
But Meade was more than just his sport. His friends and coaches tell ARLnow he worked hard off the court, had a sense of humor and a nerdy side. His girlfriend of three years, Christine Wilson, remembers him as a loyal, communicative boyfriend and a great conversationalist.
“He was such a gentleman and always held the door for me, paid for me, drove, and we would get food somewhere and have great conversation as always,” Wilson said. “Our conversations never got boring and we never ran out of things to talk about, even after three years.”
Weiser said Meade was smart, opinionated and enjoyed lively conversations. He watched basketball closely and often had the same insight into a play as a coach would.
“He was right more often than he was wrong,” Weiser said.
Meade tackled academics and basketball with the same intensity. He took all International Baccalaureate classes and tutored teammates if they asked.
“He had the brightest future of all of us, he never did anything wrong and was always there for me,” McIntyre said. “He was the most hardworking dude I knew for sure, whether it was school, basketball, or beating me in ping pong, he would always practice a lot.”
(Updated 9:55 p.m.) Marymount University is developing plans to build a new sports facility on an embattled parcel of county property near its campus.
Currently, the property at 26th Street N. and Old Dominion Drive, in the Old Dominion neighborhood, is home to a temporary road salt storage “dome” and a parking lot used for mulch distribution. In 2019, despite opposition from some neighbors, the county demolished a roughly 90-year-old water storage tank, repurposed for road salt, which was on the brink of collapse.
The tank saga came a few years after the county proposed and later nixed plans to relocate Fire Station 8 from Langston Blvd to the Old Dominion neighborhood.
Now, Marymount University, which was recently ranked for the first time as a national university and is showing other signs of growth — including higher enrollment rates, new softball and wrestling teams and new academic majors — is trying its hand at redeveloping the site.
The school, which has its main campus across from the county property and an additional presence in Ballston, first put forward a plan for the property two years ago. It proposes to build a sports field, a children’s playground and an enhanced walking trails to Missionhurst Preserve, according to a map on the university’s website.
In addition, it would replace the existing temporary salt dome with a new, solar-powered one, along with a mulch area.
A little less than a year ago, it also put forward a proposal to build new diamond fields where the Washington-Liberty High School baseball diamond in Quincy Park and the softball diamond on school property are. Since then, it has been in talks with W-L, Arlington Public Schools and the Arlington Department of Parks and Recreation.
Marymount has advertised an informational meeting on this proposal, scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 29.
The university said in a statement to ARLnow that the session acts on a suggestion from Arlington County Manager Mark Schwartz to “build consensus among community members and inform them of our proposed plans to create a generational green space for Arlington at 26th Street N. and Old Dominion Drive that would improve and expand recreational opportunities for the County’s residents.”
It added that the forthcoming meeting also acts on a suggestion from a neighborhood association to meet with the three impacted neighborhood groups together. Marymount says it notified and invited Schwartz and the Arlington County Board to the meeting.
“We have put a great deal of thought and consideration into both projects, but these are proposals,” the university said. “We are discussing them with the neighborhood associations to receive their feedback after repeated attempts were made to communicate with the County about them.”
But Arlington County released a statement this afternoon (Monday) to clarify it has not endorsed the project.
“The County and APS received notice of Marymount’s November 29 Information Session at the same time Marymount informed the general public,” the statement reads. “The County and APS are not associated with or participating in the November 29 Information Session and do not sanction the materials or proposals presented by Marymount University.”
Per the statement, members of the Arlington County Board and the School Board have met with Marymount over the last year, at the university’s request, to hear the proposed concepts.
“At those meetings, County and APS staff asked clarifying questions but no decision was reached,” the county said. “At no time did County or APS staff indicate that these proposed facilities were feasible or acceptable.”
A new vintage clothing shop owned by a Washington-Liberty grad is looking to open in Clarendon next week.
People’s Place Blvd is opening up at 3179 Wilson Blvd, a prime spot near Clarendon Ballroom and Spider Kelly’s. The plan is to open on Saturday, Nov. 12, co-owner Fabricio Gamarra tells ARLnow. The store will specialize in buying, selling, and trading vintage clothing.
Gamarra is a 2018 graduate of Washington-Liberty High School and grew up in Arlington. He was previously the manager of the People’s Place location in Manassas but is partnering with that store’s ownership to open his own shop closer to home. It will feature his brand Forbiiidden Vintage.
He’s also the founder of the Barcroft-based pop-up flea market Euphoria, which was so popular two years ago that it went viral on TikTok and resulted in traffic jams in the neighborhood after people flocked to the market from miles around.
Gamarra soon realized the popularity of what he was doing and wanted to expand to a brick and mortar storefront. He found one in the hole-in-the-wall, office and retail space above Spider Kelly’s.
Clarendon is a great place to open his new vintage shop, he said, because of the clientele.
“The area is a popular scene for a lot of kids who are into fashion,” Gamarra said. “Obviously, there’s a lot more income [here]… than in Manassas.”
While he was previously doing plenty of business online and at other local markets, the pull of opening a brick-and-mortar location was too much.
“Having a flea market once or twice a year is cool, but I wanted to open up more opportunities… I like to have that face-to-face connection with other people,” Gamarra said.
There are relatively few vintage clothing shops in Arlington. There’s Current Boutique, which advertises itself as a consignment shop and is located about a half mile away from where People’s Place Blvd is opening. There’s also Amalgamated Costume and Design on Langston Blvd, which is both a store and a rental provider for film, TV and stage productions.
Gamarra said that with more customers turning to small businesses and the “fast fashion” trend waning, people are looking for vintage clothing shops where they can buy and trade back clothes when they are done wearing them.
“People will be able to stop by and recycle their clothing or trade it in for other clothing that they are buying,” he said. “I think buy, sell, trade [shops] are vital.”
