GLOUCESTER COUNTY — A jury in Gloucester Circuit Court on Friday found four men not guilty on charges of carrying guns onto school property last summer.
The charges stemmed from the men carrying concealed handguns into a Gloucester School Board meeting on July 11, 2023, at the T.C. Walker Education Center. That led to a lengthy parking lot dispute with sheriff’s deputies about handing over the firearms.
Under state law, felony convictions would have caused the men to lose their right to carry firearms going forward.
But the jury decided in the men’s favor after just over an hour of deliberations.
“I feel relieved and humbled,” one of the defendants, Derek Matthew Coblentz, 33, of Prince Edward County, said after the verdict.
Losing his gun rights and getting stripped of his right to vote — another right lost to felony convictions — “were the two top things I was worried about,” he said.
“The jury made the right decision,” added Trevor Jacob Herrin, 29, of James City County, who was seen as the leader of the group that night, following the verdict. “It was an open and shut case.”
As a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, a conviction against Herrin on the felony count could have impacted his career, his parents said.
Also acquitted of the charges Friday were Christopher Carlo Cordasco, 27, of James City County; and Antonio Ivan Hernandez, 28, of Augusta County.
The jury convicted Herrin of a separate misdemeanor count of carrying a concealed handgun that night, given that his permit to do so had expired. Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Shaw sentenced Herrin to 30 days in jail, but stayed that pending an appeal.
“We’re disappointed,” Gloucester Commonwealth’s Attorney John T. Dusewicz said of the acquittals on the felony charges. “But we respect the jury’s decision.”
But the prosecutor didn’t apologize for prosecuting the case.
“I’m always going to fight to keep guns out of schools and to keep schools safe,” Dusewicz said. “We took it to the mat and didn’t offer a plea deal. The only deal we offered was a fair trial.”
The charges stem from an incident in which the men carried concealed handguns into a Gloucester School Board meeting on July 11, 2023.
Gloucester Sheriff’s Deputy P.W. Lutz, working security that night, testified that he noticed Herrin was carrying a knife in a holster in the back of his shirt, and that the men split up and sat in different sections of the auditorium.
Lutz kept a close eye on Herrin, testifying that he saw “a bulge where the handle of a firearm would be.” At one point, he said, Herrin moved his arms and the deputy saw the gun under his shirt.
The men came to the meeting at the T.C. Walker Education Center a month after Herrin spoke at a prior board meeting in support of then-Gloucester School Board member Darren Post. After that meeting, Herrin said he found his tires were slashed, so he came to the July meeting to express his displeasure with the board.
“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,” Herrin told board members.
The five men — the four armed men and one unarmed one — left the meeting about 6:45 p.m. Lutz said he followed them into the parking lot and asked them to wait before he went to speak with others for about 30 to 45 minutes to determine his next step.
When he returned, he told the men that the T.C. Walker Education Center was a school building but that “we’re operating on the assumption that you didn’t know,” according to body camera footage shown at the trial.
Lutz implied that the men weren’t being arrested, but that he would put their names and gun serial numbers into an incident report. Herrin at first objected, saying they could email the deputy the serial numbers later.
“We’re not disarming,” Herrin said, according to the footage. “We’re at an impasse now.”
“We have families to go home to also,” one of the men told the deputies.
Lutz then offered a compromise: The men could continue to hold their firearms while he wrote down each gun’s serial number. The men agreed to that, and also provided their driver’s licenses as identification.
But Gloucester Sheriff Darrell Warren learned of the situation while the men were still in the parking lot, telling his deputies that the men’s guns needed to be confiscated as evidence.
During this week’s trial, Dusewicz sought to introduce as evidence an ensuing 20-minute phone call between Warren and Herrin, captured on one deputy’s body camera. But Judge Shaw barred that conversation from being played for jurors this week, saying the timing of when they turned over the guns wasn’t relevant to whether they had them on school grounds.
In an interview with the Daily Press last year, Warren said he told Herrin at the time that 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 said in the interview.
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.
The men were arrested several days later.
There was no dispute at this week’s trial that the men carried concealed handguns into the board meeting that evening.
The trial instead revolved in large part on the language of the state’s law banning guns in schools.
In this case, the dispute centered on whether a pre-school program called ‘Head Start’ located in the building — but closed for the summer — barred the men from carrying guns into the school board meeting.
State law says guns are barred from any preschool, or elementary, middle or high school in the state, including the building and grounds. Guns are also banned from “the property of any child day center,” the state statute says.
But the law also says that the provisions on “child day centers” — as well as private or religious preschools — “shall apply only during the operating hours” of that facility.
Dusewicz introduced trial evidence to show that the Head Start program is indeed a “school.”
The Head Start program follows the Gloucester Public School calendar year, is advertised on the school division’s website, and has classrooms, teachers, and a state-mandated curriculum on “numbers, letters, shapes, colors, art and music.”
The fact that Head Start is a public pre-school — and not merely a child day center — means the gun ban applies, Dusewicz contended. How many other day care centers, he asked, are closed for the summer?
“The evidence is uncontested that Gloucester Head Start is a public school program,” Dusewicz told the jury. “You can’t have guns there at any time. Guns in pre-school is not a great combination.”
But the attorneys for the four men asserted that the state law’s exception for “child day centers” is clear — that firearms aren’t banned when a Head Start or other child care centers aren’t in operation.
The defense lawyers repeatedly flashed a copy of the Gloucester Head Start’s “child day center” license from the Virginia Department of Education.
“This isn’t from Jeff’s rent-a-license,” said Jeffrey Everhart, an attorney for Cordasco, as he held the Education Department license up for jurors to see. “The commonwealth can’t rise above this evidence … It’s a dagger in the heart of the commonwealth’s case.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
