Today's story on Linda Dennis, who has been fighting drug dealers on Queensberry Avenue for years in Northwest Baltimore has generated a lot of responses. Many people have offered to help her -- she seems to have disappeared from her house -- and still more are expressing anger at how hopeless this situation is.

Dennis had her windows on two cars shattered Monday night or early Tuesday and drug dealers complained that she refused to sell them one of her two cars. I found Dennis while at the scene of a shooting death around the corner near Pimlico Race Course. She was screaming into a phone at her insurance agent, complaining about the drugs and her plight.

It is difficult. She's not really a witness to a crime and can't get into witness protection, yet she is hostage to crime and drugs that have her street and her neighborhood a scary place. What I think this shows is that the minor crimes -- vandalizing a car, for example -- shouldn't be dismissed as part of city living. Authorities need to pay attention -- they matter. This wasn't kids doing pranks. If what Dennis says is true, she's being targeted, and all too often stories of people like her who end up dead have a long history of attacks just like these.

One of the first e-mails I got was from Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein, who as the state's top federal prosecutor has worked on more than his share of witness intimidation cases. He mentions a few below -- Edna McAbier whose house was firebombed and testified against each and every one of the suspects; the Dawson family who were killed when their house was firebombed after they complained to police; John P. Dowery, a key witness in a federal murder trial who left his safe hotel room so he could spend Thanksgiving with his family and was killed on a bar stool; and Carl Lackl, who witnessed a murder and was later shot and killed outside his Baltimore County house in a murder-for-hire scheme in which the gunmen tricked him into showing off a car he was about to sell.

Here is what Mr. Rosenstein had to say:

We have a superb program for protecting victims and witnesses in federal cases, but the volume of customers we can handle is relatively small and the cost is relatively high.  Plus, our program often involves relocating people, as in the McAbier case.  The challenge you describe is how to keep people safe in their own neighborhoods by removing the criminals.  We step in with federal prosecutions in extreme cases – McAbier, Dawson, Dowery and Lackl, for example – but responsibility for combating street-level drug dealers falls primarily on local police and community groups.  Your story is a reminder that the small cases often matter most to local residents – the recidivist drug dealers who spend little time in jail when they are arrested and return to the neighborhood more angry and less afraid of the criminal justice system if they find that its bite does not live up to its bark. 

Dennis is worried she will become another Dawson. Or Lackl. Or Dowrey. I'm worried something might happen to her before she even gets a chance to tell her story in a courtroom. One reader asked why we published her name. It was discussed and it is a legtimate question. When I first met her, I asked her if she minded being identified in the newspaper. She not only said she didn't, she wanted her story told. I asked again before I left and she told me it was her only hope of getting attention. Years of complaints had got her nothing but the windows smashed on her car, her house set on fire and burglarized.

As a reporter, telling her story with her name in details is the only way to make an impact. With no face and identity, the story withers away in aninimity. As a citizen, it's sad that she has to feel this is her only choice.

Here's a sampling of the responses and a map: