The professor let his phone roll straight to voicemail. “Sorry, I get a lot of junk calls,” said Lei Zhang, a physics professor at Winston-Salem State University. No need to apologize.
It’s standard practice these days. Besides, with everything Zhang has seen (and heard) since coming up short in a nonpartisan election for a seat on the Forsyth County Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, who could blame the man for screening his calls? Zhang, understand, didn’t just lose. Through no fault of his own, he lost to a guy named Edward Jones, a candidate with serious issues.
Which is putting it mildly. And given new discoveries that Jones is a convicted sex offender who apparently doesn’t even live in Forsyth County, I had to hear Zhang’s reaction for myself. That’s a hell of a loss to come to terms with.
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. It takes five minutes — five seconds to check someone’s qualifications,” he said rather diplomatically. Ever since Jones decided to run for a seat on a five-member board charged with looking after the local environment, it’s been one disqualifying statement and/or mind-blowing discovery after another.
Jones, apparently with a straight face, told a reporter that he was a former rapper, that he’d been shot 37 times and that he’d been in a coma for eight years. Oh, and his reason for running? “To tell the world about God,” Edwards said. That’s swell, but.
