This is a big, fast-moving story. Here’s a link. Updates on their way.

———————-

An interview Love gave last year at UVA.

Question: Who has most influenced your lacrosse career and how?

Love: My high school coach has definitely influenced my lacrosse career. She was an awesome coach that always pushed me to work harder. She not only prepared me to play at the college level, but she taught me important life lessons. She always put a strong focus on good sportsmanship and working together as a team.

Question: What made you decide to come to Virginia to play lacrosse?

Love: I had wanted to play lacrosse at Virginia since I was little, so coming here was like a dream come true.

—————————-

Nora, a reader, sends this link to Inside Lacrosse, which has links to a number of news sources.

—————————-

From the New York Times:

… “This is just an incredible story that has taken a life of its own because it’s so tragic,” [Charlottesville Police Chief Tim] Longo said. “Everyone who has children can relate to the families of what these young people are going through. These young people were literally on the threshold of their futures. That dramatically has changed.”

The top-ranked Virginia’s men’s lacrosse team is expected to be the top seed heading into this month’s N.C.A.A. tournament. The women’s team is in the top five and considered to be a strong contender to advance to the national semifinals.

The Virginia lacrosse community has endured its share of recent tragedy: the former Virginia men’s captain Will Barrow died of an apparent suicide in 2008 and the longtime assistant media relations director Michael Colley, who was the lacrosse team’s main contact, died of a heart attack in July.

Now the community is in shock again.

“Charlottesville is just a wonderful place,” Longo said. “Kids from all over the country come here, the best and brightest, and these are two of them, two successful athletes.

“It’s just an unbelievable situation. These are not the kinds of things we see in this community.” …

——————————————–

Via Crimson05er, another reader, these local Charlottesville links.

——————————————–

From the police news conference.

——————————————–

One initial comment from UD. The story is very new — one wants not to say much. But here’s one piece of speculation in response to the remarkable speed with which Huguely was arrested.

Love was a strong and pretty fearless woman, from what I can gather. My guess is that she fought hard, and as a result Huguely may have sustained injuries consistent with someone trying to ward him off. I also think it likely that he confessed.

———————————————-

A recent case that seems similar:

… Kevin R. Schaeffer, also a Gettysburg College student, choked [Emily Rachel] Silverstein, 19, a sophomore from Roosevelt, N.J., early Thursday morning and then stabbed her in the neck with a steak knife. He sat with her for 15 minutes before putting her in a bathtub, according to a police affidavit.

Mr. Schaeffer, 21, of Oley, Berks County, confessed to the crime, according to the affidavit. He told police he had been drinking that evening but was not intoxicated. He said he had recently stopped taking Zoloft, an anti-depressant, the affidavit said.

Police arrested Mr. Schaeffer that morning and charged him with homicide, aggravated assault, possessing instruments of crime and tampering with evidence.

… Preliminary autopsy results showed that Ms. Silverstein died from a combination of strangling and stabbing between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.

It was not clear why Ms. Silverstein was at his house. The two had recently ended a sporadic romantic relationship.

“They’d been on and off, and they had broken up again recently. He never hit her that we know of. But she broke up with him because, I don’t know, he had some issues,” Ms. Silverstein’s father, Robert Silverstein, said yesterday…

A much more detailed account. (Note: The earlier link wasn’t working. I found a better one.)

**************************************

It’s a weirdly local story for me. Huguely comes from an old Bethesda family; he went to school at Landon, the place where I rehearsed Handel’s Messiah last year.