The man accused of attacking a Danville City Council member in July had sought mental health support a month earlier, according to one of his oldest friends.
“He only recently came out of hospital, about a month ago,” said Cal Darcy, who said he has been friends with Shotsie Buck-Hayes since 2006, when they were both in school in England.
Darcy said he kept in touch with Buck-Hayes, 29, through calls and texts since Buck-Hayes moved to the U.S. in 2020.
The last time they spoke was about a week before the July 30 attack on Lee Vogler, 38, Darcy said.
Buck-Hayes is originally from a small community in southwestern England, where he still has friends and family, some of whom spoke to Cardinal about his character and personality.
“He wasn’t very well, but he wanted to get himself into hospital because he wanted to improve his health,” Darcy said.
Buck-Hayes’ attorney, Edward Lavado, did not respond to requests for confirmation about his client’s previous hospitalization.
Buck-Hayes grew up in South Molton — a town with a population of a little more than 6,000 in the county of Devon — as Shotsie Buck. He married Danville’s Mary Alice Hayes in 2021.
None of the people Cardinal News spoke with knew why Buck-Hayes moved to the U.S. or when or how he met Mary Alice Buck-Hayes.
Vogler was at his workplace on July 30 when a man identified as Buck-Hayes entered the office, doused him with gasoline and lit him on fire, police said.
He is being treated at the burn unit at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he was airlifted after the attack, for second- and third-degree burns that cover over half of his body, according to information on a fundraising page.
Buck-Hayes was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder and aggravated malicious wounding later that day.
A criminal complaint, filed in Danville General District Court, says that Buck-Hayes “during an interview admitted that he had dumped gasoline on Vogler” and that “his intention was to kill Vogler.”
‘We both felt like social misfits’
Two of Buck-Hayes’ friends, who both still live in England, said that Buck-Hayes had had a rough year, dealing with a rocky end to his marriage and some mental health issues.
An ex-girlfriend described Buck-Hayes as compassionate and smart, but someone who chafed at authority and was easily angered.
“We hit it off because we both felt like social misfits,” Taegann Underwood-Petch wrote in an email. She met Buck-Hayes in 2012 when they were both 16 years old.
Their relationship spanned six years, she said. They spent part of that time living together in a trailer with their dog, Scout.
Both Underwood-Petch and Buck-Hayes were from small, low-income families, she said. They had big dreams of owning land and a home.
“We felt like mainstream society wasn’t geared for people like us,” she said. “We wanted to work with our hands and live off the land.”
For a while, the couple did that, looking after farms while the farmers were away. Buck-Hayes was “in his element” waking up at dawn to milk cows and feed chickens, Underwood-Petch said.
Most of her memories of Buck-Hayes are positive, she said, describing him as caring, loyal and intelligent — even though she said that he was labeled “a difficult kid” by educational institutions and had “a knack for rubbing authority figures the wrong way.”
“I felt very welcomed into his family and him into mine,” Underwood-Petch said. “In a way we grew up together. He was always someone who felt emotions very strongly.”
Their relationship was made difficult because of financial problems — they barely had any money — and because Buck-Hayes could get angry and jealous.
“As we went through college I noticed that he would get really angry with certain people in his class,” Underwood-Petch said. “Usually boys from wealthy families who seemed to have had life handed to them. I think he found it hard to cope with jealousy. Especially when people don’t appreciate what they have.”
Buck-Hayes also lost his father around that same time, she said, which was a difficult period for him.
After his father’s death, Buck-Hayes and Underwood-Petch heard from some of his dad’s relatives, whom he had never met, offering the couple a plot in their garden, she said.
They moved their trailer to that land and began raising chickens, and Buck-Hayes got a job at a local pub. After years of hard times, things were looking up, Underwood-Petch remembers thinking.
But then Buck-Hayes quit his job, appeared depressed, and spent much of his time playing video games, which he had always loved, she said.
“He started to think I was trying to control and manipulate him. I would sometimes wonder which one of us had lost touch with reality because our versions of the truth seemed so wildly different,” she said. “In hindsight I think he was experiencing some kind of psychosis because he kept saying things that didn’t seem like the person I had fallen in love with.”
Scared that he “couldn’t manage by himself,” Underwood-Petch said she was afraid to leave Buck-Hayes. She knew that Scout was important to his mental health, but worried that he couldn’t take care of the dog with no income and no routine.
“In the end, he left and I was in the strange situation of living in his family’s garden with my dog and chickens,” she said. “His family were always extremely kind to me and said I could live there as long as I needed to.”
After the breakup, they loosely kept in touch until a final fight around 2018, when Underwood-Petch began dating someone else, and Buck-Hayes accused her of cheating, she said.
“I blocked him for a number of years after that, but I knew he moved to America and married a lady called Mary who looked lovely,” she said.
Aside from some brief messaging about nine months ago, when Buck-Hayes told Underwood-Petch “that his new relationship was breaking down because he didn’t learn from his mistakes,” they haven’t been in touch.
Accused’s marriage ‘was a roller coaster,’ according to longtime friend
Cal Darcy and Matt Williams have also known Buck-Hayes for years and had been in touch with him more recently, they said.
Darcy said he’s spoken to Buck-Hayes extensively over the past year, primarily about the breakdown of Buck-Hayes’ marriage.
“I spent hours on the phone with him” about this, Darcy said. “[The relationship] was very up and down. … It was a roller coaster.”
Mary Alice Buck-Hayes, who has not responded to requests for comment on this story, filed for divorce mid-July, according to court documents.
Darcy said that marital problems had existed for months before that, and that Buck-Hayes told him that he wanted to reconcile and save the relationship.
“They agreed to do couples therapy,” Darcy said. “He loved her to bits and he was desperate to make it work.”
For most of the past year, Buck-Hayes was “dealing with it very well,” he said.
The last time the two friends spoke was about a week before the attack. Darcy said he thought Buck-Hayes was doing as well as could be expected, in the midst of a divorce.
‘If he had the right support, none of this would’ve happened’
Police have said that Vogler and Buck-Hayes knew each other and that the attack stemmed from a personal matter and not from Vogler’s work with the city.
Darcy said Buck-Hayes had never expressed a political problem with Vogler.
“This has nothing to do with Lee politically,” he said.
Posts on Vogler’s Instagram and Facebook accounts confirm that he knew Buck-Hayes. A photo posted to both pages Sept. 16, 2024, depicts Vogler, his wife, Blair, and their two children, and Shotsie and Mary Alice Buck-Hayes at the Danville-Pittsylvania County Fair.
Buck-Hayes is being held at Central State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Petersburg, according to Danville Sheriff Mike Mondul.
About a month before the attack, Buck-Hayes had checked himself into a hospital in Danville with mental health concerns, Darcy said.
Darcy said he didn’t know the details surrounding the hospital visit or how long Buck-Hayes was in the facility.
Matt Williams is a former band-mate of Buck-Hayes, who he said is a talented bass player. They played together in a band called Rise of the Forgotten. Williams said Buck-Hayes is also the godfather of his children.
Williams said that the last time they spoke was about a month before the attack. “It’s really difficult because I’m over here and he’s over there, but if I could be with him, I would,” he said.
Darcy, Williams and Underwood-Petch all said that Buck-Hayes didn’t have a good support system in the U.S. All of his family lives in England, Darcy said.
“I feel like if he had the right support, none of this would’ve happened,” he said. “There was only so much I could do on the phone.”
While Darcy and Williams called Buck-Hayes a loyal friend who’d have your back and a “genuinely nice person that will do anything for you,” neither suggested that he didn’t commit the assault.
“He could have just punched him in the face, but at the end of the day, he snapped,” Darcy said.
He said he hoped a judge would see that Buck-Hayes “was not of sound mind.”
Buck-Hayes is scheduled to appear in court in Danville at 9:45 a.m. Aug. 19 for a bond hearing. A preliminary hearing — when a judge will determine whether there’s enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury — has been set for 11:30 a.m. Sept. 30.
An Aug. 11 update on a fundraiser page for Vogler said that he’s still in critical condition.
