Claire Marshall Watkins, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Fredericksburg Free Press
Stafford County hires new deputy county administrator from North Carolina
By FPP Staff 09/26/2026
Erris Dunston, former assistant county manager for Strong Communities in Guilford, N.C. and county manager and assistant county manager in Halifax County, N.C., is Stafford County’s new deputy county administrator.
She will step into her new role on Oct. 5 and will overseee Stafford’s capital program, parks, utilities and operations departments.
Free Lance-Star
Fredericksburg nurse is searching for living liver donor (paywalled)
By Pilar Davis 09/27/2026
April Baucom is in end-stage liver disease and needs a living liver donor to save her life.
In May, she suffered gastrointestinal bleeding the led to a diagnosis of cirrhosis-related liver failure. According to her doctors at Virginia Commonwealth University Health’s Hume-Lee transplant center, a living liver donor is her best chance at a healthier future.
A living donor must be between the ages of 18 and 60, have a body mass index below 35, and have no serious health conditions. Anyone interested in living liver donation can contact VCU Living Donor Coordinator Teresa Crenshaw at 804-828-9249 or visit the VCU Hume-Lee Transplant Center website.
Motorcycle accident leaves one dead in Spotsylvania county (paywalled)
By Keith Epps 09/26/2026
29-year-old Thomas Bradley Johnson was killed Thursday night when his motorcycle collided with another vehicle. Johnson was pronounced dead at the scene and the other driver was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
According to Sheriff’s Maj. Liz Scott said the wreck took place about 9:50 p.m. The accident occured around Stanfield Road and Matta Way as Johnson’s motorcycle struck the other vehicle making a left turn. The Sheriff’s Office’s Traffic Reconstruction Unit is investigating the accident.
Tip leads to 20 felony charges against Spotsylvania man (paywalled)
By Keith Epps 09/26/2026
22-year-old David Wesley Tyler was arrested and placed in the Rappahannock Regional Jail on Friday. He is charged with 20 counts of possessing child pornography.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip on July 6 regarding child sexual abuse material and on Aug. 24, Spotsylvania authorities reviewed a video depicting child sexual abuse on a Dropbox account attatched to Tyler’s name.
Tyler admitted to police that the account was his and that he had been accumulating files on it since middle school.
ADVANCE READS
Steve Watkins, Drew Gallagher, Phil Huber
‘Nothing Is Ever Forgotten. Nothing Is Ever Lost.’
Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
Dad was a stand-up guy who had returned home after college and the army at the end of World War II to help take care of his father through the old man’s final months of alcohol-related dementia. When our first sister died a few days after she was born, and Mom was still in the hospital, dangerously ill herself, Dad, a young father living 500 miles from his closest relatives, arranged for a winter burial in the children and infant section of a cold Florida cemetery—what they used to call Baby Land. It was just him and a minister he’d found in the Yellow Pages who read a short passage of scripture and prayed a small prayer while Dad looked down at a tiny coffin with the body of an infant daughter he would never get to hold while neighbors back in the company-owned mining town where we lived at the time looked after two-year-old me and three-year-old Wayne. Dad quit drinking not long after so he could be a better father, and eventually quit smoking, though it took him years, and an abortive attempt to switch to a pipe, and me when I was little finding him sneaking a cigarette in the barn he’d converted into a workshop. I cried and begged him to quit because they’d said on the news that John Wayne had cancer and might die, and somebody from our church had just died from cancer, and I didn’t want Dad to die, too.
Author, Author
Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
I have a friend who was a member of an all-male book club. Once, during discussion of the novel of the month, he said that he’d found it “derivative,” to which another member of the book club countered with a sneer and challenged my friend: “I’d like to see you write a f**king novel.”
My friend’s first inclination was to punch his detractor in the face, but then he remembered the third rule of Book Club: “Never punch a fellow member in the face, even if he’s a fan of Water for Elephants.” As everyone knows, the first and second rules of Book Club are “You do not talk about Book Club.”
After learning of the derision unpublished authors can face, I realized that if I ever wanted to join a book club, I should probably publish a book to blunt the criticism of my fellow bookworms. So I did.
It Is Not Enough to Just Not Know
Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
At 79, after years in the military, federal service, and consulting, I know there is a great deal I do not know. I have also spent enough time with technical studies, reports, and decisions to know that saying “I don’t know” can be a very good answer.
But it cannot be the end of the matter.
If I do not know, the next step is to find out. I will ask another question. Read the information. Talk to somebody who knows more. Check the source. Maybe I will change my mind. That is how I have always understood the words “I don’t know.”
Lately, however, I keep hearing those words when Republicans and Trump administration officials are asked difficult questions about President Trump, his policies, or his administration.
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