NORFOLK, Va. — On Thursday, Warren Salvodon and Alex Stokes walked into Norfolk Circuit Court hoping for a favorable judge's ruling and walked out with a key element in their fight to re-open their still-shuttered Legacy Restaurant & Lounge.
A judge ordered the Norfolk Police Department to give Legacy's owners — and their attorney Tim Anderson — back copies of the surveillance footage from Aug. 5, when police say Tyshawn Gray shot four people outside the establishment's doors.
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"That video is going to exonerate the allegations made the city made to City Council regarding conduct of employees that night. City Council made a decision without knowing all the facts," Anderson said.
Court documents show Gray had previously been kicked out of Legacy, after a fight inside. Legacy staff and security kicked him out of the establishment before he allegedly retrieved a gun from his car. Gray faces several weapons charges as well as aggravated assault on law enforcement.
"I'm tired of the city making it look like my employee was the vigilante and not the hero. They need to watch the video and see who the vigilante was, and see why my employee had to intervene, to begin with," Salvodon said.
In the courtroom, Anderson said the original security footage files were no longer on Legacy's servers after police investigators recovered it from their system. A judge's denial of the police attorneys' "Motion to Quash" allowed Legacy to recover those files.
An attorney for the Norfolk Police Department argued that releasing the footage back to the owners may have impeded the active police investigation. But the judge retorted, saying the owners should have had access to the files in question in the first place.
Anderson pled that the lack of video evidence at their disposal made it difficult to counter the allegations and reasons City Council used to revoke Legacy's conditional use permit. City leaders cited a combination of issues including the use of uniformed security as well as the actions to break up the dispute inside.
"We're going to ask the Supreme Court to look at that video, and look at what city council did, and say 'Did City Council know enough information before they shut them down?' We think they'll come back conclusively and say, 'City Council did not have enough information to shut Legacy down,'" Anderson said.
Salvodon also defended the actions of his staff to mitigate the situation the night of the shooting.
“It wasn’t a full-blown chokehold, it was a necessary hold to get this person off another who would’ve done worse," he said.