Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Killer on the run
There’s a homicide investigation after a 23-year-old man was shot dead in a trailer in the Grovemont community of Swannanoa, and police are looking for the killer, Kassandra Pride told us at 6.
Standing live at the Sheriff’s Department, Kassandra held up the mug shots of two other people police said they wanted to talk to about the whole deal. The shooting happened Thursday afternoon and there were several witness, police said.
WLOSers talked to the landlord, who said the people who lived in the trailer “may” have had “a long hisotry with drugs.” The landlord didn’t want his face on camera, so WLOSers put him in shadow, but it didn’t work – you could totally see the guy.
UNCA student dead
Campus police and Asheville police are investigating the death of a 22-year-old who was found dead in his Governor’s Village dorm room about 1:30 p.m. Friday, WLOSers said. To make it clear that this wasn’t another Va. Tech, WLOSers stressed that police said no other students are in danger.
Mismanagement of parks?
WLOSers picked up on a report issued by the city’s finance director saying that the Ashvegas parks and rec department has been moving piles of money around inappropriately. They started looking into the department after projects weren’t getting done. It’s unclear how bad the mismanagement was.
In development news, the Cliffs is making some people nervous
WLOSers did a long piece off of Pat Simon talking to a couple of Swannanoa residents about how she thinks change is good and we have to grow, and the Cliffs is all good like that, but she thinks the gargantuan development will drive up property values and property taxes, thus driving out the elderly and poor. This is called “gen-tri-fi-ca-shun,” Simon said slowly, as if he’d never heard the word before.
Simon said county officials said that’s baloney – the big development that will have a Tiger Woods golf course and a Tiger Woods house won’t drive up other people’s property values. Yeah, right.
In other development news…
Grading work has begun on the old Brookwood golf course off Mills Gap Road. It will have something like 130 single-family town homes and other stuff. We missed the name of it.
Going green with Weirbridge
In one of the saddest developments, ground was broken Friday on a 280-unit condo project called Weirbridge. It’s going to be located on one of the last undeveloped parcels of property along Hendersonville Road, right across from the Hollywood Cinemas. It used to be a cow pasture.
The developers said the development will be a model for green building. They said they’re going all the way for LEED certification, which is costly and time-consuming. But developer Chip Kassinger told WLOSers everyone will be proud in the end.
In still other news…
Work will start soon to build 45,000 square feet of additional space at the WNC Ag Center. There will be a new arts and crafts sapce and a barn addition. It’s a $5 million project that was announced during the fair, so we’re not sure why WLOSers mentioned it again… Speaking of fairs, the Haywood County Fair will open up on Tuesday. Country performer Tracy Byrd will play there Thursday… And money raised from last year’s Warren Haynes Christmas Jam will go to help build a couple of houses down in New Orleans. The Habitat for Humanity houses will be built in October, and Pat Simon will go down and tell us all about it.
In other news…
The Park Ridge pain management clinic in south Ashvegas is going to be closed for good. It shut down unexpectedly last week after Park Ridge claimed “concerns about documentation.” The doctor running the place is on paid leave until there’s a full investigation… The cause of an early Tuesday fire on Midland Avenue that ruined an 11,000-square-foot pnavmay never be determined. There’s not enough of the place left to figure it out…. People want guardrails along Ridge Cove Road, the steepest state-maintained road in North Carolina that leads up to Ghost Town in the Sky.
I thought it was funny the landlord didn’t want to be on camera, but they mentioned him by name… twice.