State police respond to nearly 800 traffic crashes and disabled vehicles

Virginia State Police are looking for the driver of a gold vehicle after a hit and run crash left a motorcyclist seriously hurt in Augusta County. Investigators described the vehicle as a gold Acura. On Friday afternoon, police said a motorcycle traveling north on Stuarts Draft Highway/Route 340 was sideswiped by the vehicle near a crossover. The car stopped but kept going toward the city of Waynesboro and took a right on Lyndhurst Road. The 39-year-old Staunton motorcyclist was taken to UVA Medical Center for treatment.

On Thursday, the fair association board for the Shenandoah County Fair announced they will be canceling this year’s fair due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tom Eshelman, the general manager of the fair, said multiple cancellations from vendors lead up to their decision. “Rather than putting on a whittled down fair, we decided the public probably wouldn’t like coming to something like that,” Eshelman said. The crowd would have had to be limited to less than 1000 people due to COVID-19, so the fair’s pageant, concerts, carnival and pig scramble were all canceled. Eshelman said they were also concerned for their staff.

According to a news release from the Staunton Police Department, Bruce L. Williams Jr, 26, of Staunton was pronounced dead at the scene Thursday night. The investigation remains ongoing. Stay with WHSV News for updates.

There are some groups of people excluded from West Virginia’s mandatory mask order. Now a group online is targeting those people, trying to sell them something that proves they don’t have to wear a mask. It’s a scam. “This is completely false. It’s untrue,” said Amanda Tietze, Vice President of Operation for the Better Business Bureau serving the Canton Region and Greater West Virginia. The cards distributed by a group called the Freedom to Breathe Agency. While the group has the cards available to print out online, the Better Business Bureau is warning they could target your wallet. They say the cards are circulating for sale online. For $50, you can get 500 cards. “The Department of Justice and Americans with Disabilities Act have claimed that there are no such valid cards out there,” Tietze said. “By purchasing these cards, you’re basically just wasting your money.”

President Donald Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of his longtime political confidant Roger Stone, intervening in extraordinary fashion in a criminal case that was central to the Russia investigation and that concerned the president's own conduct. The move came just days before Stone was to begin serving a 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. The action, which Trump had foreshadowed in recent days, underscores the president’s lingering rage over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and is part of a continuing effort by the president and his administration to rewrite the narrative of a probe that has shadowed the White House from the outset. Democrats, already alarmed by the Justice Department’s earlier dismissal of the case against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, denounced the president as further undermining the rule of law.