by Joel Rubin, APR

Founder and CEO, Rubin Communications Group

Fortunately, we don’t have a crisis every day in Hampton Roads. We often bemoan the fact that we are not major league in sports, but we also do not have many major-league emergencies either – political, criminal, natural or otherwise. Unfortunately, we do have our share of tragedy and turmoil and on occasion, clients ask Rubin Communications Group to be the go-between with the outside world.

So it was on Sunday morning June 23. The attorney for Guadalajara at Town Center in Virginia Beach contacted me for assistance. He told me someone had shot and killed a man and wounded four others outside the restaurant nine hours earlier. That’s all he knew and all, I would learn, police reported at the time. I drove to Guadalajara and met the owner, Jerry Rodriguez, who was in his office rewinding surveillance tape, looking, as police had done earlier that morning, for images of the victim or possibly the perpetrator walking in or out of his establishment sometime before it closed at 1:30 am. There was no sign of either person.

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