Former Virginia Lacrosse Player George Huguely Found Guilty Of Second-Degree Murder

Yeardley Love's murder occurred in May 2010, when a drunken Huguely, according to police, choked Love, his girlfriend, and slammed her head against the wall. He stole her computer (Huguely was also convicted of grand larceny) and left her there.

Huguely faces from five to 40 years in prison. (The prosecutors had charged him with first-degree murder, but Virginia law requires evidence of premeditation and deliberation to convict on those grounds.) Huguely's sentencing hearing began immediately after the verdict was delivered—Love's mother and sister testified.

Shortly after Love's murder, Katie Baker wrote for us about the insular white-boy lacrosse culture and how it might have affected Huguely:

I don't need to tell any Deadspin readers that athletes behaving badly can be found anywhere you look. ( Non-athletes, too!) But I think laxers, concentrated where they are geographically and socioeconomically, can come across—or, in a sort of chicken/egg situation, be perceived as coming across-–in a certain blustering way. A lot of it is insularity: the new lacrosse freshman on campus probably knows half his team already, as well as half the women's team. (Those Gilman UVA twins no doubt knew the various Roland Park and Bryn Mawr girls on the women's team before they got to campus.) Having played Jersey highschool lax, I myself was happily part of this crowd. Contrast that to, say, some soccer recruit from Kansas who arrives without much of any social network and is immediately confronted by a pack of partying prep school kids who all grew up together in Greenwich. Kneejerk and without much substantiation he's thinking god, I HATE those guys. And then one of those guys kills his pretty lady friend and it's like man, maybe he was right.

[ USA Today]