Suspect in Hannah Graham disappearance described as popular athlete, ‘gentle giant’
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Version 0 of 1. Back in high school, apparently, “LJ” was everyone’s friend. “Just a nice, sociable guy,” recalled one former classmate of Jesse L. Matthew Jr., 32, who is in jail today, accused in the disappearance of Hannah Graham. “The LJ that I knew was a very joyful person,” said another old pal. “He made you happy just to be around him.” That was in the early 2000s, first at Albemarle High School, then at Monticello High, both near Charlottesville, where Graham, an 18-year-old sophomore at the University of Virginia, vanished Sept. 13. Matthew “had friends in every group,” still another schoolmate remembered. “He was always good for a laugh. He got along with everybody.” Now this: “Abduction with intent to defile.” That’s what Charlottesville police allege Matthew did to Graham, a resident of Fairfax County who has been missing for more than two weeks. After those years of schoolboy popularity, Matthew, who was a scholastic wrestling and football star, graduated to a seemingly unremarkable life in Virginia, punctuated by his arrest. He was a defensive lineman for a few years at Liberty University in Lynchburg. After withdrawing, he enrolled as a psychology major at Christopher Newport University in Newport News. But he stayed there for just eight months, and he left the school’s football team after only a few weeks, for a reason that isn’t clear. He drove a Yellow Cab in Charlottesville in recent years, for a while. And lately, before being charged in Graham’s disappearance, he was a “patient technician” (read: orderly) at the University of Virginia Hospital Medical Center. A denizen of the nightlife establishments in Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, Matthew was with Graham outside a restaurant there in the early hours of Sept. 13, according to police. Investigators said they think the two met for the first time that evening, their encounter caught on video surveillance, his arm around her. Graham, a graduate of Fairfax’s West Potomac High School, hasn’t been seen since. Police said the investigation of Matthew has also provided “a significant break” in the case of Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech student who vanished in Charlottesville in 2009 and was later found slain. Without elaborating, authorities cited “a new forensic link” involving the unsolved killing of Harrington. Matthew became the public focus of the Graham investigation after he walked into police headquarters, asked for a lawyer and then left Virginia about a week after Graham went missing. He was arrested Sept. 24 near Galveston, Tex., after a manhunt, and he is being held in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. His attorney, James L. Camblos III, has declined to comment on the case. Efforts to seek comment from Matthew’s family were unsuccessful. Tim Pleasants, 29, who was on the wrestling team at Monticello High with Matthew, recalled seeing his old friend a while back. Pleasants said he was walking in Charlottesville when a Yellow Cab pulled up, with Matthew at the wheel. He said he got into Matthew’s taxi and the two chatted for about 20 minutes. Pleasants had wrestled in the 103-pound weight class. Matthew, now 6-foot-2 and 270 pounds, was big even as a youngster. Pleasants said he was someone who “took up for you” if you were a friend in trouble. “It felt good to be behind him,” Pleasants said. During their recent encounter, Matthew talked mainly about playing online poker, Pleasants said. He said they hadn’t seen each other since Monticello, and he was left with the impression that Matthew, the former athletic star, had “peaked at age, like, 17, and declined ever since.” When they parted company, Pleasants made sure to hand him a tip. A dozen other school acquaintances of Matthew, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy, remembered him fondly in interviews. “A gentle giant.” “An all-around good person.” “Really warm, likable.” “It’s just surprising to all of us.” One classmate said it was clear to her that Matthew had trouble reading and that he required special attention from teachers in high school. She said he attended classes for students with learning disabilities. But he was always playful. A fan of hip-hop music, he was light-footed on the dance floor despite his size, friends said. When the musical duo Kriss Kross became popular, he joined classmates who wore their clothes backward to classes for a day. At pep rallies before football games, Matthew, a co-captain of the Monticello team, was the lively center of attention, joking with teachers, teammates and other students. A friend recalled one rally, at Albemarle High, during which a fight broke out in the school gym. As teenagers scrambled in a panic, a female student who fell was being trampled. “I remember distinctly seeing LJ pick up the girl over his shoulder and carrying her out to safety,” the friend said. Camblos said Tuesday that his client comes from humble origins: “This is a hard-working, blue-collar family from a rural area.” In August 2000, after graduating from Monticello, Matthew enrolled at Liberty University, an evangelical Christian school 67 miles southwest of Charlottesville. And he suited up for football. One of his teammates, Terris Gregory, a wide receiver, described Matthew as “goofy” and “kind of immature.” He said Matthew, while a stellar athlete, was not “the brightest guy in the book.” He was a psychology major, according to David M. Corry, Liberty’s general counsel, who declined to say much more about Matthew. In January 2003, three months after withdrawing from Liberty, he enrolled at Christopher Newport University, again as a psychology major. And the following August, he was back on the gridiron. But he stayed with the Christopher Newport football team for less than a month, until September 2003, and left the school in October that year. “Students don’t usually leave in the second month of the semester or leave the football team within a month,” said Lori Jacobs, a university spokeswoman, who declined to comment further. The Christopher Newport campus police chief, Andrew Engemann, said his department has “some information that is pertinent” to the Charlottesville case. But he declined to elaborate, saying only that the information has been shared with investigators. In the mid-2000s, Matthew became friends with the Rev. Dave Hansen, then the assistant pastor at Calvary Chapel in Charlottesville, and the two prayed together at Sunday services. “A nice, gentle guy,” said Hansen, now the pastor of a different church. Besides preaching, Hansen is a volunteer ambulance driver. And with Matthew working as an operating-room patient technician at the U-Va. hospital since August 2012, the two have bumped into each other there. “When I found out LJ was the person of interest” in the Graham case, “I was shocked,” Hansen said. He said he thought: “LJ? You got to be kidding!” The hospital said Matthew was suspended without pay after being charged in Graham’s disappearance. He also had been a part-time volunteer football coach at the private Christian Covenant School in Charlottesville since August. But he is “no longer associated with the school in any capacity,” said headmaster George Sanker. Business owners and people who frequent Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall said they are familiar with Matthew, who was a regular presence in the nightlife scene, with his big-barreled physique, goatee and dreadlocks. Anthony Williams, a parking attendant who stands 6-foot-9, is African American like Matthew and also has dreadlocks, said strangers have approached him quizzically in recent days. “They say to me, ‘You look like that guy.’ It’s crazy that this happened on my Mall,” where Graham was last seen. “But if this guy was so well-known here, why would he do something on the Mall where people know him?” Cecilia Rodi, a co-owner of the Rapture restaurant on the Mall, said that on the night Graham vanished, Matthew stopped at her bar for a whiskey and Coke in the hours before he and Graham were allegedly seen together. Matthew was a regular patron, Rodi said, and so he blended into the crowd, attracting no attention from the staff. “Here he was amongst us,” said Rodi. “It’s creepy. It gave me goosebumps. . . . To think that we here in this community have all seen him, served him, or gotten a taxi ride from him — it’s unsettling.” Nick Anderson, Mary Pat Flaherty, Jennifer Jenkins and Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report. |