Hello. I spent most of my adult life in Richmond, VA before moving to WV (one year detour to Charlotte, NC in 1998).
I'll ask my question first and then explain why I'm asking:
Has anyone been able to obtain and review high school yearbooks for 93, 94, 95 for Lawrenceville (Virginia) HS? I tried looking on Classmates.com, but the "newest" yearbook they have is from the 70s.
I have an unusual job and travel extensively by car, averaging 40k to 50k per year. From June of 87 until November of 97, Emporia was part of my territory.
I had not heard about Jason Doe until a year or so ago, which greatly surprises me. Richmond is right between NoVA and Emporia, and I was in and out of Emporia, South Hill, South Boston, Halifax, Lawrenceville, etc all the time. I was in Gloucester quite a bit, too.
Lots of people have asked "Why would the driver go 95 to 58 to 85? Why not go straight over to 85?"
One reason would be if he needed to drop Jason off somewhere between 95 and 85 on route 58. The next county over from the accident is Brunswick. As far as I know, there was only one public high school in Brunswick county at the time. Brunswick HS in Lawrenceville (or maybe just outside of Lawrenceville).
I *think* that Brunswick runs right up to 85 on 58... although a wee bit of Mecklenburg might sneak in the last few miles.
The original sketch was a good faith effort, but seems to have been not very good in terms of specific facial recognition, it is entirely possible that locals didn't see the reports or if they did, didn't recognize him - particularly since he was initially reported to be a red head. If he had recently graduated from high school, people might not have even noticed that he was gone.
The Richmond, Norfolk/Va Beach, Suffolk, and Roanoke papers were dailies back then and any of the four might have been the paper of choice for locals. The county and small city papers were usually 1x or 3x a week. I'm not sure if this would have initially made the big city papers.