Two families marked the culmination of a six-year fair housing legal battle with a Smith Mountain Lake campground with tears and restitution in the attorney general’s office Wednesday.
Damien Smith said that the experience felt like an uphill battle.
“It seemed like we would never get over the top, but we finally did. We’re really thankful for it, too,” he said. “Now, we know it’s done.”
“We did it, we saw it through,” said Angela Smith, his wife.
In early 2020, the Smiths and their friends Michael and Amanda Mills had rented lakeside campers and lots at Lazy Cove Campground at Smith Mountain Lake, near Penhook on the Franklin County side of the lake. The campground was owned by Regina Turner, who had rented the lots to families for decades.
Turner began to give them trouble once she learned that Damien Smith is Black, according to a complaint filed in 2020 with the Virginia Fair Housing Board.
“You didn’t tell me that your friend’s husband is Black,” Turner said to Mills in a phone call, according to the complaint, as reported by The Washington Post. “Had I known I wouldn’t have rented the lot to them. I saw the son, but I figured everyone makes a mistake.”
“To be hated on for the color of my skin was just ridiculous,” Damien Smith said Wednesday.
Amanda Mills added that the group had experienced harassment from Turner and ostracization from other campers as a result of Turner’s behavior. But it was the comment about the Smiths’ son that motivated the two families to file the complaint.
In 2025, a Franklin County Circuit Court jury found that Turner owed the families $750,000 in a fair housing lawsuit, after she refused to renew the families’ leases. That ruling was the largest fair housing jury award to be secured by the Virginia Attorney General’s office, according to former Attorney General Jason Miyares, as reported by the Virginia Mercury.
In April, more than a year after the jury’s decision, a judge ordered Turner to sell the campground to pay restitution to the families. By that time, she had owed the families and the state more than $1 million due to the accrual of interest and fines. She sold the campground in August for just over $1 million.
On Aug. 12, Turner was found in contempt of court for failing to comply with the terms of the lawsuit and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Among the terms: hiring an independent property manager, ensuring that the property manager and each tenant of the campground since May 2025 received a copy of the nondiscrimination policy, providing documentation that Turner had received two hours of fair housing training, and producing documentation of tenant applications, evictions and other records.
That was the first time in Virginia’s history that a defendant has been held in contempt by a court for violating an order in a fair housing case brought by an attorney general’s office, an office spokesperson said.
As of Wednesday, Turner remained in custody at the Western Virginia Regional Jail, and the Smith and Mills families had received restitution of roughly $417,000 each — the full amount, with interest, that the jury awarded in 2025.
They said they plan to use the money to care for their families and to go on a relaxing vacation with any funds left over.
“The biggest piece for us was finally seeing that property sold. That was the piece that made us happier than anything, was to know that she no longer owned that property so therefore that meant she could never do that to anyone else ever again,” Angela Smith said. “There’s been so many situations over the past six years where we felt like it was one step forward and two steps back.”
She added that she plans to use this experience to help others navigate the fair housing complaint process if they feel they have experienced discrimination.
Attorney General Jay Jones told the families Wednesday that they are an example for people across Virginia that no one has to put up with housing discrimination.
“For you all to see this through, it really does mean a lot to us but it really does speak volumes to the power of this office and the power of our partnership with folks at Fair Housing so that this doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Jones met with the families along with Liz Hayes, Virginia’s Fair Housing director; Angela Keefe-Thomas, a fair housing investigator; Helen Hardiman, deputy attorney general for the public advocacy division; and Palmer Heenan, senior assistant attorney general and section chief for the office of civil rights. Hardiman and Heenan had launched the lawsuit under former Attorney General Mark Herring in 2020, in partnership with the Virginia Fair Housing Office.
The group debriefed in a conference room in the Barbara Johns Office Building at the end of the yearslong legal battle that spanned three different attorneys general.
