Metro Briefs

VIRGINIA

RICHMOND

Cooped-up man dies soon after move

A severely mentally ill man who spent more than 15 years in seclusion at a Virginia psychiatric hospital has died, just weeks after his family won a battle to have him moved closer to them.

Cesar Chumil, 59, died Oct. 19 in a Northern Virginia mental health facility, his attorney, Alex Gulotta, said Tuesday.

Mr. Chumil’s family fought for years to have him moved from Western State Hospital in Staunton, where he had lived for more than a decade locked inside a specially built three-room suite because hospital officials said he was too unpredictably violent to live among the other patients.

He was moved to Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute on Sept. 30, where, Mr. Gulotta said, he lived in a two-room suite on a regular housing unit. His door was not locked.

“One of the things I promised him was that he wouldn’t die in that room and he didn’t, but just barely,” Mr. Gulotta said.

Mr. Chumil died of complications from colon cancer. Surgeons took part of his colon in 2007 and thought he was cancer free, but it returned earlier this year, Mr. Gulotta said.

RICHMOND

Officials: Sniper to die by injection

The mastermind of the sniper attacks that terrorized Washington-area residents in October 2002 will die by injection next month, a Virginia corrections official said Tuesday.

The state will give convicted killer John Allen Muhammad a lethal injection because he declined to choose between that and electrocution.

“So under the Code of Virginia it defaults to lethal injection,” Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said.

A prisoner has until 15 days before the execution to decide on which method, according to Virginia law.

Muhammad, 48, is scheduled to be executed Nov. 10 for killing Dean Harold Meyers in October 2002 at a gas station in Manassas.

LEXINGTON

Disgraced ex-reporter to speak on ethics

Disgraced ex-New York Times reporter Jayson Blair will be the featured speaker at a Virginia journalism ethics seminar.

Mr. Blair will speak on “Lessons Learned” on Nov. 6 at Washington and Lee University’s Journalism Ethics Institute.

He resigned from the Times in 2003 after an investigation found that he had plagiarized or fabricated major portions of articles he had written during four years with the newspaper.

For the past two years, he has worked as a certified life coach for a mental-health practice in Northern Virginia.

MARYLAND

HAGERSTOWN

Arsonist who killed 2 gets 2 life terms

An unemployed factory worker who killed his girlfriend’s two adolescent daughters by setting fire to the family’s home in a boozy bid for pity and cash donations was sentenced Tuesday to two consecutive life terms in prison.

Clarence F. Meyers, 38, tearfully apologized to the girls’ mother and family members in Washington County Circuit Court.

“I never meant for anything like this to happen,” he said.

Judge John H. McDowell rejected a defense plea for leniency after hearing Meyers tell police in a recorded confession that his main purpose for setting the fire was his hope that someone would offer him a job out of sympathy.

The judge called Meyers’ actions “idiotic and foolish, to say the least, but deliberately murderous at worst and cowardly without a doubt.”

Meyers pleaded guilty in August to two counts of felony murder for setting fire Feb. 16 to the rented house in Hancock he shared with Melissa Wolf and her daughters, Nicole R. Gross, 15, and Mary A. Gross, 12.