High Schoolers Charged in Attack on UVa. Students
Town/Gown Issues Debated

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.
Blake Caravati, mayor of the usually sleepy college town of Charlottesville, Va., is amassing quite a collection of hate mail these days — more than a hundred e-mails, some from concerned locals, but the vast majority from, "as I like to call them, the boys who wear white sheets," Caravati says.
Police Chief Tim Longo, who came to Charlottesville from Baltimore, is getting his share, too —"a strong blast from all over the country," he says, questioning "everything from my courage to my manhood."
National Public Radio has been to town, along with a reporter from the Washington Post. George Stephanopoulos has called a few times about bringing an ABC News crew down.
These are developments regarded with almost universal dread in a small town that prizes its privacy and its sparkling reputation — and both are under serious threat now that nine African American high school students have been arrested in a series of attacks on White and Asian undergraduates at the University of Virginia.
The first reports, published under the headline "Arrests made in string of ‘race' assaults," hit the town like a thunderclap. The city was stunned by the seriousness of the charges — assault and battery, assault by mob, felony robbery, felony malicious wounding and malicious wounding by mob — and no less stunned by the identities of the suspects.
One of them was Gordon Lathan Fields, charged as an adult because he had recently turned 18. A football player at Charlottesville High School, he was named defensive player of the year in two separate polls. Fields appeared to have a college scholarship and a bright future ahead of him. Though the identities of the others alleged to have been involved are protected because they're juveniles, two of the girls are widely known to have been members of Charlottesville High School's undefeated championship girls' basketball squad.