Four men are now on trial after bringing concealed handguns into a Gloucester School Board meeting last summer.
According to trial testimony Thursday, a Gloucester sheriff’s deputy saw five men walking into the meeting at the T.C. Walker Education Center on July 11, 2023.
Gloucester Sheriff’s Deputy P.W. Lutz, who was working security at the meeting, first noticed that one of the men, later identified as James City County resident Trevor J. Herrin, was carrying a knife in a holster in the back of his shirt.
The men split up and sat in different sections of the room, Lutz said.
Lutz kept a close eye on Herrin, seeing “a bulge where the handle of a firearm would be.” At one point, he said, Herrin moved his arms and the deputy was able to see the gun for “a couple of seconds.”
According to court documents, Herrin was upset about what happened at a School Board meeting a month earlier, when he came to speak on behalf of his friend, then-School Board member Darren Post.
Herrin said that when he got back to his car after the June 2023 meeting, he saw that his tire was flat. Later, he said, he realized it has been slashed with a knife.
Herrin took the podium again at the July 2023 meeting, saying he wanted an apology for the slashed tires.
“I would strongly recommend caution and reflection before engaging in anything like that, especially with someone you don’t know, with capabilities you don’t know,” he said at the time. (The Sheriff’s Office appears to dispute the tire slashing, saying there’s no video evidence Herrin’s tires being slashed at the June meeting).
4 men charged with bringing firearms to Gloucester County School Board meeting
The five men left the meeting about 6:45 p.m. after the July 2023 School Board meeting, Lutz testified.
He said he followed them into the parking lot. He asked them to remain where they were to allow him to talk with others, then came back to them about 30 minutes later.
“We’re operating on the assumption that you didn’t know,” Lutz told the men, according to body camera footage shown at Thursday’s trial.
Lutz implied that they weren’t being arrested, but that he would put their names and gun serial numbers into an incident report. Herrin acknowledged he was carrying a weapon, and Lutz asked the others if they were too, the footage shows.
“Probably,” one man responded.
It turned out that four of the five men in the group were armed. Herrin at first objected to the men providing sheriff’s deputies with their weapons’ serial numbers, saying they could email the the deputy the serial numbers later.
“We’re not disarming,” Herrin said, according to the footage. “We’re at an impasse now.”
But Lutz then offered a compromise: The men could continue to hold their firearms — with their fingers away from the handle and the trigger — while Lutz wrote down each gun’s serial number on his notebook.
“We have families to go home to, also,” one of the men told the deputies, in a comment that appeared to have a calming impact.
But when Gloucester Sheriff Darrell Warren learned of the situation while the men were still in the parking lot, he told his deputies the men needed to be charged with a crime.
According to body camera footage of a conversation between Lutz and Sheriff’s Lt. Nick Leaver at the scene, Warren also wanted them to hand over their guns.
“That’s per the sheriff,” Leaver told Lutz on the recording.
During the trial, Gloucester Commonwealth’s Attorney John Dusewicz sought to introduce as evidence the 20-minute phone call between Sheriff Warren and Herrin.
Warren told the Daily Press last year that a deputy put the sheriff on speaker phone with Herrin as the deputy’s body camera footage rolled.
Warren said he told Herrin he believed the group had violated the state law banning guns in schools. He told Herrin he would talk to prosecutors the next day, but that in the meantime they needed to hand over their guns.
“I said if I’m wrong, I’m going to apologize and personally deliver your guns back,” Warren told the Daily Press.
After lots of back and forth, Warren said, the men finally ended up relinquishing their weapons and emptying their pockets. Aside from the weapons, court documents said, the men had medical trauma kits, tourniquets, handcuffs and extra ammunition.
But on Thursday, the men’s lawyers objected to that phone call being played for jurors. Given that the men admitted to having the guns, the lawyers said, the only reason to play the footage was to “inflame the jury” against the men.
Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Shaw agreed, barring that footage from the trial. The judge said the timing of the men turning over their guns — whether they did it that day or a week later — was not relevant to whether they illegally possessed a handgun on school grounds.
The four men are charged with carrying firearms on school grounds, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Aside from the 29-year-old Herrin, the men include Derek Coblentz, 33, of Prince Edward County; Christopher Cardasco, 27, of James City County; and Antonio Hernandez, 28, of Augusta County.
The men’s lawyers maintain that the charges should be tossed. They assert that just because a building is owned by a school division — as is the T.C. Walker building — doesn’t make it a “school” under the language of the state’s gun law.
While guns are barred from schools and school functions statewide, school board meeting spaces and administration offices don’t typically fall under the general rule.
In this case, however, the T.C. Walker Education Center separately houses a Head Start program, which is a public preschool that Warren said puts it under the state’s gun ban.
The Head Start center was not open at the time of the School Board meeting in question. But Warren maintains that the entire “building and grounds” falls under that gun prohibition 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Armed men protested outside an empty Gloucester school building. Charges could still be coming.
On a Saturday night about five weeks after the July 2023 arrests, eight armed men — with camouflage and long guns — protested outside the T.C. Walker building in the name of the four men arrested.
At the time, Warren said he made the decision not to engage the armed protestors, in part because no one was in the building at the time.
The trial will resume Friday morning with jury constructions and closing arguments.
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
