The man who slipped into a University of Virginia greenhouse last fall and tried to clip and carry off what he likely thought was marijuana but was actually industrial hemp has pleaded guilty to drug and trespassing charges.
“We can’t force people not to commit crimes,” Judge Claude Worrell told the man in court Friday, “but we can give you tools to help you not to.”
The tool that the 31-year-old Douglas Wade Davies was given at his sentencing hearing Friday is Real Life, a residential treatment program with an array of rules and regulations. Among them is abstinence from hallucinogens, which appear to be a persistent issue for Davies and what may have led him into that greenhouse last year.
Last week, the crime and his failure to follow rules of the local drug court also led Davies to find himself shackled and jumpsuited in the small upstairs courtroom in the Albemarle County Courthouse in downtown Charlottesville.
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“I just want to tell you I’m sorry for doing the crime,” Davies told the judge. “I want to enter this program, take it seriously and fix my ways.”
Davies
UVa police allege that Davies, in the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 28, 2023, broke into UVa Biology Department greenhouse on Alderman Road.
“I observed [him],” investigating officer Jacob Gearhart wrote in a report, “with a flashlight, several knives in his possession, and several plants of marijuana, along with several jars of marijuana.”
Davies readily confessed to what he was doing, according to the officer’s report: He had mistaken the industrial hemp in the greenhouse for marijuana and was attempting to make off with it.
“He didn’t know that,” greenhouse manager Chris Claussen told The Daily Progress. “It all looks the same.”
Claussen said that a spate of tool thefts during a recent construction project led university leadership to install surveillance cameras in the area. As of last year, UVa Police Chief Tim Longo told The Daily Progress, the university had more than 3,000 such cameras along with a control room to monitor them.
This incursion gave the greenhouse manager a telephone alert.
“I saw it on camera in real time,” said Claussen. “I was woken up at about 4:30 in bed and rolled over and called campus police, and they had him in a few minutes.”
Claussen said that the Biology Department grows hemp to study such things as hemp salves, hemp fibers and hemp-based filters to remediate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, so-called forever chemicals that have been linked to health complications.
Davies joins at least two other frequent arrestees caught by UVa cameras. Chelsea Steiniger, the woman whose false rape claims imprisoned a local man for more than two years, was spotted stealing an electric scooter in October of 2022, and repeat thief Charles Lewis Hickman was spotted swiping engineering textbooks from Thornton Hall about a month later.
“There are signs all over that say there are cameras everywhere,” said Claussen.
Davies, who lists his only income as “food stamps,” reports having lived most of his life in Charlottesville.
The University of Virginia Biology Department grows industrial hemp in a greenhouse off Alderman Road in Charlottesville where it studies hemp salves, hemp fibers and hemp-based filters to remediate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, so-called forever chemicals that have been linked to health complications.
At his sentencing, prosecutor Armin Zijerdi told the judge that the commonwealth was trying to do Davies a favor by lowering his charge from the Class 3 felony of breaking and entering to the lesser crime of grand larceny, a move that allowed Davies into the drug court.
Court records show that Davies got cited four times after the greenhouse incident. In December, he was arrested for violating UVa’s standing no-trespass order against him when he was found sitting on bench by the University Chapel and screaming. In April, an officer arresting him on an outstanding warrant found him with little baggie of a crystal substance. A “personal use amount of meth” is how Davies described the item, and while the substance tested positive for methamphetamine, he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of possessing drug paraphernalia. Two additional charges of entering a building with intent to commit a felony remain pending in the city of Charlottesville.
Zijerdi asked for a five-year sentence with all time suspended and noted that Davies has been jailed since early May.
Davies’ public defender, Lauren Reese, outlined her plan to get Davies into Real Life. She placed letters in his court file showing that he has done well behind bars. One letter from the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail notes that he has committed no infractions, has been admitted into the “trustee program” and has completed two courses administered by Piedmont Virginia Community College, an introduction to construction and an electrical class.
“He’s demonstrated that he can do a residential program, but he needs something that’s more sustained,” said Reese.
Davies left the jailhouse Monday and took a bus to Richmond to begin a six- to 18-month program to get his life in order.
