Rotary Centennial Riverfront Skatepark Celebrates Grand Opening
The grand opening of the Rotary Centennial Riverfront Skatepark April 14 celebrated not only the formal opening of the skate park to the city of Lynchburg, but also the journey it took to get there.
In August 2017, Lynchburg resident Lauren Dianich began to encourage her son and his skateboarder friends to contact the Lynchburg City Council and push for a reopening of the skate park, rather than just complaining about the limited hours. After several months of raising awareness, writing letters to city council members and building connections within the skateboarding community, the City of Lynchburg Department of Parks and Recreation agreed to reopen the skate park.
“(The skateboarding community) saw that they could make a difference, and they could speak their minds by taking a good approach to (the situation),” Dianich said. “People often feel like they don’t have a say or things are out of their control — this (skate park) is something in their hometown that is in their control.”
Liberty Construction Seeks to Ensure Safety of Campus Bridges
“Hey, what’s up?”
Whenever Bruce and Debbie Brownfield picked up a phone call from their son, Brandon Brownfield, those were the first words they heard.
As a tower crane technician, Brandon Brownfield spent some days in the office but spent most days working hundreds of feet off the ground. Two or three times a week, he would call his parents and chat for the 30-minute commute home after leaving his office or job site.
But on Thursday, March 15, around 5 p.m., it was Brandon Brownfield’s wife and mother of his three daughters, Chelsea Brownfield, who made a phone call to Bruce and Debbie Brownfield. Chelsea Brownfield was unable to contact her husband and was letting her parents-in-law know that the GPS tracker on his truck showed that he was very close to the pedestrian bridge collapse at Florida International University that had happened that day.
Immediately after receiving the call, Bruce and Debbie Brownfield packed some clothes and began the three-hour drive down to the site of the bridge collapse. When they were about half an hour away, a friend called to confirm that Brandon Brownfield’s truck was underneath the bridge.
The Brownfields arrived at the scene of the bridge collapse late Thursday night…
Continue reading my article published in The Liberty Champion here.
Liberty Faculty Members Head Innocence Project to Exonerate the Wrongly Convicted
Jens Soering, a German-born University of Virginia student convicted in 1990 of murdering his girlfriend’s parents, is closer to being exonerated than ever before, thanks to the forensic investigation of a Liberty University professor.
Dr. J. Thomas McClintock, Liberty’s director of forensic science and professor of biology, has been working on the forensic DNA analysis on new evidentiary samples of the Soering case since last summer. McClintock is also working with Liberty’s law school and the Criminal Justice Program to develop an Innocence Project, opening 2019 or 2020, which will seek to exonerate others believed to have been wrongly convicted.
McClintock said that the goal of the Innocence Project is to work on a variety of cases like the Soering case, where the sentence and the interpretation of the evidence is in question and exoneration is worth pursuing.
“The Innocence Project attempts to look at cases that have been unresolved … maybe some new evidence out there has been found that can be analyzed,” McClintock said. “It’s also for those who have been wrongfully convicted. Of course, you can literally ask everyone who is incarcerated, and they’ll say they’re innocent, but there really are many that are incarcerated wrongfully. ”
Derek and Nancy Haysom were murdered in their Bedford County home March 30, 1985…
Read the rest of my article in the Liberty Champion here.