Hampton, Virginia, was home to Anne Wyatt Ford-Cox, 56, a White woman, remembered by people close to her as someone who carried a kind word and an easy smile wherever she went. She had roots in Norfolk, studied toward nursing as a Licensed Practical Nurse, and worked at a Kroger grocery store, where everyday errands turned into brief, bright conversations.
In the life she built, the center of gravity was family—her husband, Vincent “Bubba” Cox, and her daughter, Brittany Lee Neuharth—along with the quiet pride of a father, Walter Ford, and the steady bonds of a sister and nieces who would soon be left trying to make sense of a loss that didn’t feel real.
Late on July 6, 2020, the calm of a residential street on Aspenwood Drive shattered. Around 11:30 p.m., dispatchers received calls reporting gunfire in the 100 block, and officers arrived to find that shots had been fired into a home. Ford-Cox had been struck by the gunfire; she was rushed to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries, but she did not survive. In the first hours after the shooting, police said the motive and circumstances were still under investigation and asked the public for help identifying whoever was responsible.
As more details emerged, the violence of the moment came into sharper focus: the home had been hit by a barrage, described as dozens of rounds fired into the house. Ford-Cox was asleep on a living room couch near the front of the home when a round struck her in the head, and other shots tore into additional rooms—close enough that one bullet hit the mattress where her adult daughter had been sleeping. What began as an ordinary night ended with a family waking to a nightmare, the kind that leaves behind sirens, shattered safety, and questions that won’t stop echoing.
Investigators eventually focused on a single suspect. David L. Andrews of Hampton was charged, and prosecutors later argued that the shooting was retaliation aimed at Ford-Cox’s husband after an argument reported to have happened 16 days earlier. Reporting at the time also noted that there was no evidence tying the attack to her father’s former work on the bench; Ford-Cox was described as the daughter of retired longtime Hampton Circuit Court Judge Walter J. Ford.
The case moved through the courts with the weight such a death carries, but the ending was not the one her loved ones hoped for. In January 2022, a Hampton jury found Andrews not guilty of second-degree murder and two firearms offenses related to shooting into an occupied dwelling; the jury deliberated for about three hours. Police confirmed he was the only person charged in connection with Ford-Cox’s killing. Even after the acquittal, Andrews remained in custody on a federal probation violation, while the larger question—who should be held responsible for the rounds that tore into that home—lingered over the street where it happened.
