Courts and Crime

    The former Bedford County Public Schools bus driver and aide, named as defendants in a $20 million lawsuit filed by the father of a special education student, deny abusing the boy while he was being transported on their bus in 2009.
    In separate filings responding to the lawsuit in Lynchburg Circuit Court, both bus driver Alice Davis Holland and her aide, Mary Alice Evans, claimed that the allegations of abuse of the 11-year-old student, Timothy Earl Kilpatrick, were false.

    Bedford Main Street Inc. President Kathy McGary said the charge against that organization’s former interim executive director “is going to feel very trivial” when the truth comes out.
    Last week Daniel A. Plattus, 46, was charged with one count of credit card fraud by the Bedford Police Department. Plattus had been serving as Bedford Main Street’s only full-time employee, but resigned prior to the charge being filed by police because he thought it would be in the best interest of Bedford Main Street.

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On February 17, Bedford County Sheriff’s Investigators and Virginia State Police executed a search warrant at 3667 Mill Iron Rd. in Bedford County that resulted in the arrest of a Bedford County resident for the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine.

Kristina Pongracz will spend more than a decade in prison for the killing of her 77-year-old boyfriend, William Herchenrider, in May, 2010. Pongracz, now 30, was 28 at the time of the attack.

Herchenrider died on August 25, 2010, after briefly returning home from the hospital, under Hospice care. Pongracz had been with Herchenrider for 10 years, prior to the incident in May 2010.