Thieves broke into the Dinwiddie Sporting Goods store Thursday night and stole 12 handguns—the region’s fourth gun-shop heist since March. The intruders peeled back the exterior siding of the sheet-metal building at 7812 Boydton Plank Road to get inside about 10:30 p.m., tripping an alarm, Dinwiddie Sheriff’s Capt. William Knott said.

Even after 26 years, the words are frozen in David Altman’s memory. “They told me they had a guy who was gonna kill some cops,“ Altman, a retired state Alcoholic Beverage Control investigator, said yesterday. Altman was one of the cops. And the man authorities say was behind a plot to mow down him and other agents with a machine gun at the New Kent County Courthouse was John Steven Carter, now a fugitive from law-enforcement agents in Virginia and Florida.

Virginia Commonwealth University celebrates its 40th birthday. While the school has created its share of controversy recently, this is a time not for recrimination but for reflection and, yes, good cheer. VCU is a valuable member of the community. It makes Richmond a better place. The school was formed with the 1968 merger of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia. Its roots lie deep in the long ago. MCV traces its birth to 1838, when it became the medical wing of Hampden-Sydney. If ancestry figures into the equation, then VCU can claim rank among the nation’s oldest universities.

Fort Lee is getting a new, $31 million Army museum. The Army’s Ordnance Museum will open in 2011, giving Fort Lee one of the service’s largest museum complexes. The Prince George County post already is home to the Quartermaster Museum and the Army Women’s Museum. About 49,000 people visited the Ordnance Museum, now at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., in the past year, a number that easily could double at Fort Lee with its easy access to Interstates 95 and 295, the museum’s director said.

A judge yesterday certified charges against a Powhatan County man accused of gunning down his uncle in a domestic dispute. A grand jury will decide whether David Woodfin, 22, should stand trial on the charges of first-degree murder and use of a firearm in the Aug. 1 killing of Donald P. Malkemus, 49. During a preliminary hearing yesterday in Powhatan General District Court, Jandelyn Onufer, a friend of Woodfin’s, testified that shortly after she and Woodfin pulled up to the home that Woodfin shared with his grandparents, his uncle pulled up in his pickup truck.

Skyline Drive, a tiny bucolic mountain road winding 105 miles through the heart of Shenandoah National Park, now is a National Historic Landmark. The designation, reserved for places that possess exceptional value to the American people, is the highest ranking bestowed by the federal government on a historic resource. “It’s really, really a phenomenal resource,“ said Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. With Skyline Drive, “you are linking this amazing, man-made structure with a phenomenal natural landscape. Each component enhances the beauty of the other.“

Richmond gave a warm reception in 1932 to FDR As the Great Depression tightened its grip on the nation in 1932, Richmond welcomed Franklin D. Roosevelt and his promise of a New Deal for “the forgotten man.“ “A happy, confident Roosevelt, Democratic candidate for president, stopped in Richmond yesterday,“ said a front-page story in the Oct. 26, 1932, Richmond Times-Dispatch.

A Chesterfield County high school student, dressed in a suit for homecoming weekend, was shot in the chest last night in a South Richmond public-housing complex. The shooting took place within a few hundred yards of where two middle-aged brothers were found slain early this month in their apartment. Last night’s shooting victim was identified as Norris Martin, 18, an 11th-grader at Meadowbrook High School.

The state’s mental-health commissioner promised yesterday that a patient held in seclusion at Western State Hospital for the past 15 years will be moved. Commissioner James S. Reinhard and other officials outlined an array of new treatment plans incorporating the patient’s native language of Spanish that could accelerate his progress and serve as a model for mental-health care statewide.

Five students at Lloyd C. Bird High School in Chesterfield County were charged yesterday with possessing a gun on campus. The names of the students, all males, were not released because of their ages. They ranged in age from 15 to 17. Police said a school security guard observed the students gathered around a vehicle in the school’s parking lot about 7:30 a.m. yesterday. Four of the students fled and one was taken into custody as the guard approached the vehicle. Police recovered a gun from the car.