WISE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – An inmate serving a 58-year sentence at the Red Onion supermax in southwest Virginia for aggravated malicious wounding is now charged with killing his cellmate from Louisa County… a man serving 30 years for sexually attacking a UVa student in Charlottesville. Jowell Travis Legendre was convicted in Charlottesville Circuit Court in 2019 in a September 2018 sexual assault of the student near 14th and Grady. He was serving the time in the high-security prison when he was found unresponsive in his cell in August of last year. He was taken to a Dickenson County hospital where he was pronounced dead.
A Wise County grand jury has now handed down an aggravated murder indictment against his 36-year old cellmate, Julian Leon Mitchell. He had said Legendre fell off a top bunk. Wise County’s Commonwealth Attorney in an investigation along with the Virginia Department of Corrections has now accused Mitchell of his murder.
Mitchell now faces a life sentence while serving time for a 2011 incident in Newport News where he left one man paralyzed from the neck down and another man in a vegatative state in an attack.
