BY CHASE PURDY
The New York Times

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

The first sign of trouble was scrawled in black marker across the office microwave, a boxy old thing with the number of the beast inscribed on its door.

"666."

At a nearby reception desk, Natalie Yager spoke with an insurance agent by telephone Thursday.

"Yes. Uh-huh. Well, there are male body parts," she said into the receiver. "I believe it was a couple of youth kids."

She paused.

"Uh-huh. It was unnecessary, completely unnecessary. OK, thank you."

In a nearby office, Celebration Church of God Pastor Sam Belisle still was making sense of why his church had been the target of overnight vandalism. But there it all was, regardless. The hallways strewn with debris ripped from church classrooms' walls, picture frames shattered, angry (and often misspelled) messages covering the walls.

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The Salem man was found unconscious Saturday and died Wednesday.

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

Kevin Chambers lived beats, rhymes and rhythms. He taught them, shared them, passed them to his children.

He made a name for himself locally in the 1990s, that young man with an ear for well-versed raps and a solid reputation for making cool mixed tapes. And when he started a family, he incorporated that love into the everyday, friends said.

The music came to an abrupt pause this week, when friends and family soaked in the reality of his sudden passing.

Chambers was pronounced dead at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital on Wednesday afternoon, friends and a relative confirmed. He was 41.


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Carol Gilbert and Moki train several times a week, sharpening the dog's senses and attention.

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

Carol Gilbert hurled a canister of human teeth out into the grass.

She turned an expectant gaze to the creature at her feet and leaned forward. Thrusting both arms away from her chest, she yelled an order.

"Go find!"

The bouncy Labrador retriever took off, her nose glued to the ground. After a moment of distraction (even highly trained dogs have sporadic attention spans) Moki found the teeth, turned to Gilbert and sat patiently.

This was a warm-up, one of the first steps in a one-hour training session. Gilbert also has cans of fingernail clippings, human hair and dead skin, all kept in a plastic carry case — a tackle box, of sorts — for the training regimen of a cadaver dog.


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BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

The scraps of news came from deep inside the forest, abrupt updates crackling over a radio at the bottom of a long and dark hiking trail.

It didn't sound good up there.

D.J. Jones' adrenaline started pumping again, and his imagination ran loops.

"It just seemed to sound worse and worse every time they told us something," Jones said. "We didn't know official stuff. We were hearing 40-foot fall, 30-foot-fall. Maybe he had some broken bones. Maybe there was internal bleeding."

That was about 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night, close to 11 hours after Jones, 21, and four fellow Liberty University students struck out on a morning hike to Devil's Marbleyard in the James River Face Wilderness Area.


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Johnny Dick and his dog rolled down a steep hill that ended on another truck and a lawn mower.

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

It was the poorly hatched plan of an errant squirrel that caused the whole mess. Go figure.

The rodent had darted into the curvy 5900 block of 12 O'Clock Knob Road just before 3 p.m. Wednesday, a move that caught Johnny Dick by surprise. Dick, who said he was driving toward Bent Mountain Road from his home nearby, swerved to miss the creature.

The jerky move sent Dick, his passenger Rabbit (a dog), and his 1978 Ford F-100 careening off the side of the road and over an embankment. The truck tumbled dozens of feet down a steep hill, then crash-landed upside down on top of a lawn mower and a Toyota pickup.


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At Hamill Christmas Tree Farm, few have held off as long as the Levines.

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

Christmas tree shopping is not an exact science, especially not this deep into December, when many families have long found and decorated their own.

For some, finding one so late in December might be indicative of a crammed schedule, or perhaps an unforeseen conflict in timing. But for the Levine family, who pulled into the Hamill Christmas Tree Farm parking lot late Saturday morning, the exercise of finding a tree at the tail-end of the season has become a family tradition.

As it happened, they were the first customers of the day.

An exuberant 6-year-old girl, Channa, opened her car door and slid out of the back seat. She grinned and clapped her hands. Behind her, spread across a hill, more than a thousand trees stood waiting in the sunlight. There were Fraser and Canaan firs, white pine, Scotch pine, and sundry spruces. A nippy breeze rushed a quarter of a mile across the farm and into the gravel lot, splashing the senses with that familiar smell. Christmas.


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Roanoke investigators continue to search for leads in two 2012 homicides that remain unsolved as the victims' families and friends await justice and hope for closure.

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

The words fluttered from her lips and to the ground. Quiet, indistinguishable from afar, a private conversation with a grave.

Hilda Perdue sees her son's burial spot almost every day during her commute to work. She knows now that when she drives by William Memorial Cemetery, if she glances to the crest of the big hill, somewhere between two tall trees is Terrance Perdue's resting place. Forever 30 years old, her son, a natural Mr. Fix-It and handyman, died in April. He was fatally shot in his home in northeast Roanoke.

The day after Christmas, Hilda Perdue slipped out of an SUV and walked toward her son. At the top of the cemetery hill, framed by gray clouds on a bleak afternoon, Perdue stood in the rain and cried.

Life is different. She said it has shifted in the past eight months, altering her routine; the ideas she thinks, the food she eats. Hilda Perdue can't bring herself to prepare her son's favorite meals.

"I haven't been able to eat sweet potato pie since," she said. "I made crock pot macaroni and cheese for the first time yesterday. It's been real hard."

She paused.

"I just wish justice would come, you know, but you have to be patient."


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BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

As a young boy in a deeply segregated South, Osborne Payne earned his spending money by shining other people's shoes.

He got back on his knees each night before bed.

"Oh, Lord, may you make something out of my life," he'd pray.

And whether it was by grace, luck or personal passion — or perhaps a mixture of all three — he did.

Payne, a son of Roanoke who went on to become an entrepreneur, philanthropist and father, died Nov. 27 of Alzheimer's disease at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia, Md.

He was 87.

The winds of good fortune sent him across the Southeast United States and halfway around the globe, where a passion for progress helped him help others.


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A Georgia truck driver and her partner emerged unhurt after their rig went off the road near Daleville.

BY CHASE PURDY
The Roanoke Times

Linda Wellborn, a 26-year veteran of the American road, doesn't know if she can climb back into the cab of a tractor-trailer.

She will, she says, but only to overcome the fear she experienced Tuesday morning, when she crashed a red Peterbilt on U.S. 11 in Botetourt County, near Daleville. The truck overturned, landed on a fence and nearly hit a utility pole.

Michael Kinzie heard the bang from his nearby farmhouse. It didn't sound like the usual clang he'd hear from a passing train.

"I came out and I said, 'Oh, good night!' " Kinzie said.

When he and his dog, Daisy, walked up to the scene, Wellborn and her passenger, Paul Turner, both of Shannon, Ga., were climbing out of the wreckage. They were unscathed.

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