The events leading to the suspicious New Year’s Eve death of a Virginia Commonwealth University doctoral student occurred at a home in Fluvanna County, where authorities believe Kristan Charlene Fox ingested a lethal mix of drugs. Police have debunked initial reports that two male acquaintances of the 26-year-old woman found her a day earlier lying behind a McDonald’s restaurant at 11445 James Madison Highway off Interstate 64 near Zion Crossroads in Louisa County.

Fluvanna County Administrator G. Cabell Lawton IV was named yesterday as New Kent County’s administrator, effective Feb. 16. Ray Davis, chairman of the New Kent Board of Supervisors, said in a statement that he was impressed with the work that Lawton, 41, had done in budgeting and planning in a community that experienced residential growth similar to New Kent’s over the past decade.

A Virginia man has pleaded guilty to bribing Panamanian government officials to obtain a contract for maintenance of lighthouses and buoys.

For more than a year, Virginia’s largest women’s prison rounded up inmates who had loose-fitting clothes, short hair or otherwise masculine looks, sending them to a unit that officers derisively dubbed the “butch wing,“ prisoners and guards say. Dozens were moved in an attempt to split up relationships and curb illegal sexual activity at the 1,200-inmate Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, though some straight women were sent to the wing strictly because of their appearance, the inmates and corrections officers said.

Some private boarding schools may be worried about dwindling enrollments and putting off new construction, but not Fork Union Military Academy. This Fluvanna County college preparatory boarding school is enjoying increased enrollment and making plans to construct a three-story dorm with 250 two-man rooms contained in five wings—one for each company of the Upper School Corps of Cadets. There is also a Middle School with a dorm, a school spokesman said.