| The field where Fort Eustis Boulevard bends toward Old York-Hampton Highway, like the lot at the corner of Fort Eustis and Route 17 or the close-cropped grass on either side of Keener Wayâs T-junction a few miles away in York County, stands as proof of the problem that York County - and plenty of other places- face. The land was set aside for shops and offices meant to anchor high-end, walkable neighborhoods. All three have sat empty for about a decade. Empty, too, though for not as long, is the shuttered J.C. Penney building in the big box store development at the Marquis Parkway, a development originally intended to be the same kind of ânew urbanismâ project thatâs been in vogue with suburban planners and developers since the early 1990s. The challenge, county officials say, is a long term trend of limited interest in high-end commercial development in the suburbs -- a sluggish market grown even slower with the pandemic.  Read more in this Sunday's Main News section Ronald Davis felt like he was being buried alive. He was barely 19, but for months during the spring and summer of 1998, he sat in local courtrooms, facing sentencing hearings for his involvement in a string of October 1997 armed robberies around Hampton Roads in which there were no injuries and Davis never even held a gun. Each sentencing felt like another shovel of dirt. In Norfolk, he received 13 years. In Suffolk, 22. In Newport News, 30. In Isle of Wight, 15. Barely 19, and sentenced to 80 years in prison. Davis felt his life, his family, his future, slip away from his grasp. That was almost 24 years ago. Davis, now 42, has spent the last quarter-century at various Virginia prisons, including Buckingham Correctional Center, where he is now. Heâs earned his GED and completed more than a dozen skills and rehabilitation courses. Read more in the Sunday Main News section Jessica Lynne grew up in Hampton listening to family stories and reading every Judy Blume and piece of James Baldwin she could get her hands on. Now, the 31-year-old realizes the importance of being a storyteller. In 2014, she founded ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of criticism written from Black perspectives around the world. Sheâs contributed to several publications including The Nation, Frieze and Art in America. Last year, she was named one of 22 Arts Writer Grant winners with The Andy Warhol Foundation and received a $30,000 grant. Sheâs in the middle of her project of studying Black women artists in the South. She recently moved from Hampton Roads to New York to begin a masterâs program at Sarah Lawrence College while continuing her Warhol work. Read more in the Sunday Break section
Sitting on your couch, remote in hand, you could select a drama about an obscenely affluent family that is riven by internal strife but revels in asserting its wealth and power, even if people die. Or you can watch âSuccession.â Unlike that HBO show, Huluâs new eight-part series âDopesickâ does not offer laughs at the outlandish behavior of its titans of industry. But the bigger distinction is that âDopesick,â while a scripted drama, is about a real-life familyâs alleged role in creating one of the biggest public health catastrophes in American history: the opioid crisis. Based largely on the 2018 book by Roanoke-based writer Beth Macy, the show seeks to dramatize how members of the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma, aided by lax regulations, pushed OxyContin onto the public starting in the 1990s. The book and series are largely based in Virginia. OxyContinâs introduction is now viewed as the start of the opioid epidemic, which has killed more than 500,000 people nationwide and addicted millions more.
Read more in the Sunday Break section
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