Weeks after his office and home were raided by federal agents, attorney Stanley Needleman is in trouble again — this time with allegedly stealing a judicial clerk's school textbook from a Baltimore County courtroom.

Needleman, 68, has been charged with one count of theft under $100 after police say a check of court surveillance cameras showed him on May 9 flipping through the textbook, titled, "Understanding White Collar Crime," walking away with it and resuming his spot behind the defense table to represent a client.

In an interview with a detective, according to police charging documents, Needleman said he picked up the book because it "had to do with my situation," an apparent reference to raids on his North Calvert Street office and Pikesville home in mid-April by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The City Paper has reported that agents seized $600,000 in cash.

Needleman told the detective in the textbook case that he "did not have any intent whatsoever to take anybody's book," but police noted that he made no attempts to return the book, valued at $41. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The court clerk, Bradford Gorney, also did not return a phone call seeking comment. But on his Facebook page, he posted on May 10: "It's official, someone stole my school textbook from inside my courtroom with cameras … DUMB."

Read more here.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

A pair of brothers — one 35, the other eight years younger — have been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in connection with the fatal shootings early Sunday of two men in a Pikesville parking lot, The Sun's Nick Madigan reports.

The shootings took place shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday behind a row of businesses on the 1300 block of Reisterstown Road. Officers discovered Guillermo Garcia, 30, and Antonio Guzman-Rangel, 33, suffering from gunshot wounds that proved to be fatal.

The two men's deaths bring to 13 the number of homicides in Baltimore County so far this year.

A police statement said detectives learned that the suspects, Mario and Fredy Linares, had been asked to leave the nearby Paradiso Italian Grill and Bar earlier after getting into a physical altercation with the two men who ultimately were shot. The suspects left the restaurant but returned to the area at closing time, police said. When the victims left the bar shortly it closed, the suspects confronted them in the parking lot and Garcia and Guzman-Rangel were shot, according to police.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

No, rapper Rick Ross is not a suspect in a Southeast Baltimore murder. But witnesses told police that one of the men involved in the shooting of 34-year-old Payton Rivers early Tuesday has similar features.

Rivers is believed to have left his home to get food when he was approached by two males, one who was clutching a handgun and shot him, according to police.

When officers arrived, Rivers was sitting in the 3400 block of E. Baltimore St., suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest, according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. A motive was not known.

Witnesses described one suspect as a short black male with close-cropped hair, wearing a blue and black striped V-neck shirt and dark-colored shorts. The other, Guglielmi said, was described as being chubby with a "Rick Ross-style" beard, a reference to the rapper's large beard.

Anyone with information is asked to call homicide detectives at 410-396-2100.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Southeast Baltimore
        

From Laura Vozzella at The Sun's Baltimore Insider blog:

Former Gov. Bob Ehrlich and two top aides testified last week before the grand jury investigating deceptive Election Day robocalls made on behalf of his re-election campaign, a source close to the matter told me Tuesday.

Ehrlich, former communications director Paul Schurick and longtime aide Greg Massoni testified before the grand jury, which met for three days, according to a source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because grand jury proceedings are secret.

Also called in, the source said, were a few lesser-known  figures: Chris Cavey, a former chairman of the Baltimore County Republican Party; Joe Sliwka, a former campaign aide with whom Ehrlich considered buying a Chick-fil-A franchise after his failed re-election bid; and Gene Raynor, former head of the city and state elections boards.

As officials were preparing an investigation, The Sun last fall first traced the Election Night calls to a Pennsylvania-based company that said the calls had been paid for by Julius Henson's Universal Elections, which was being paid by Ehrlich campaign. Henson was later slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit by Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler over allegations that he and his company violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by not identifying who was behind the messages.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

The murder trial of Baltimore police officer Gahiji Tshamba, who unloaded his service weapon into a former Marine outside a Baltimore bar last year, began Tuesday morning with hearings to determine what evidence can be presented in court, The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports.

Lawyers for Tshamba, 37, claim their client shot Tyrone Brown a dozen times in self-defense and was following proper police procedure during the incident, which happened in the early morning hours of June 5, 2010, after a night of club hopping. But prosecutors say Tshamba was intoxicated, irrational and that he murdered an innocent man who served the country.

The two sides spent the morning arguing about what can be said to a jury or judge, dependent upon what kind of trial Tshamba elects, though they agreed on one thing: Each wants the fact-finders to take a field trip to the crime scene, outside a back entrance to Club Hippo in Mount Vernon, during the proceeding.

"You don't get the largess of the situation until you get to the crime scene," said Assistant State's Attorney Kevin Wiggins.

Wiggins said at least two officers are prepared to testify that Tshamba appeared to be under the influence of alcohol after the shooting, talking about "how hot the chicks were that were with him that night" while he was being transported to Mercy Medical Center.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system, Gahiji Tshamba, Police shootings
        

A Pennsylvania woman who was beaten and raped in the parking lot of the popular Ocean City club Seacrets in 2008 has filed a federal lawsuit alleging the club's security staff left her vulnerable to the attack.

The woman, who was 25 at the time, is seeking at least $1 million, according to court records.

The attack occurred in the early hours of May 24, 2008, when the woman went outside the megaclub to make a phone call and left her purse inside with her friends. After trying to get back inside, club staff told her she was being ejected for being too intoxicated and would not let her find her friends to get her purse, which contained her hotel room key, according to the court filings.

She was unable to reach her friends or get into the hotel, and returned to the club parking lot at 2:15 a.m. There, in an area obstructed from security staff because of a large boat and SUV that blocked their view, the woman was attacked by a man who dragged her behind a building on the premises and raped her, records show.

The lawsuit alleges that Seacrets staff were negligent in preventing her from re-entering the club, "failing to exercise reasonable care ... [by not] giving her the opportunity to retrieve her belongings or inform her friends in the club that she was being ejected."

"It was reasonably forseeable that Plaintiff, an alcohol-impaired 25-year-old woman, early on a Saturday morning on Memorial Day weekend, with no money, hotel room key, identification, or access to her friends, was at greatly increased risk of victimization of crime, including assault and rape," the lawsuit charges.

Reached by phone, the club's president did not immediately have a comment on the lawsuit.

The woman, who filed the lawsuit as a Jane Doe to protect her identity, said in the lawsuit that she has suffered "both short and long term effects from the trauma, including medical costs, lost wages as a result of the immediate recovery period, and the immense pain and suffering from the psychological impact of the beating and rape."

According to media reports and court records, police two years later matched DNA from the crime scene to a man who had been arrested in Florida. Lorenzo Ivan Garcia-Moreno, 25, has not been served with the first-degree rape warrant, according to court records.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Crime elsewhere
        

Last year at this time, city police officials were scrambling to quell violence after a stretch of three days that saw nine people slain. "There are people in the city who decided to make everyone's Memorial Day miserable," said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi at the time. The killings spanned the city, happened inside homes and out in the streets, and included domestic incidents and drug killings.

This year, the violence was relatively muted. Three people lost their lives - in one wild incident, a man was shot in broad daylight and crashed his car into a pole, injuring a pedestrian. A woman was found dead along the Gwynns Falls Trail on Sunday evening - the cause of her death unknown as of last report - and a man was fatally shot after midnight Tuesday.

As city officials would say, that's three too many. But what a difference a few days make. While Baltimore just a few weeks ago was facing a 25 percent increase in killings compared with last year, the quiet weekend compared with last year's bloody stretch now has the city three ahead of last year's pace (82 to 79, or about 4 percent). Last year, of course, the city would go on to record its lowest total in more than 20 years (which was still good enough for fourth-worst in the country).

This year, the headlines came out of the counties. In Baltimore County, two men were fatally shot in Pikesville outside an Italian restaurant near state police headquarters, and three were stabbed in Dundalk. Then in Anne Arundel, a man was fatally stabbed and, in an incident with allusions to Saturday's Northwest Baltimore killing, drove his vehicle into an ice cream shop and injured three pedestrians. 

Posted by Justin Fenton at 9:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A man who died after crashing his vehicle into a tree and hitting three people Sunday night in Glen Burnie had been stabbed prior to the accident, police said today.

Lamonte Tracey Sherman, 39, of the 300 block of Stephens Circle in Aberdeen, was driving from Americana Circle onto Ritchie Highway about 10 p.m. when he apparently lost control of his car, a green 2006 Dodge Magnum station wagon, Anne Arundel County police said.

Police earlier had said the vehicle jumped the curb and struck a tree, then hit two people in the parking lot of Ann's Dari Crème, who received only minor injuriies. Lt. John McAndrew, a police spokesman, said Monday afternoon that the vehicle struck a table outside the eatery at which a 15-year-old girl was sitting with her family before continuing on to strike the tree.

Read more here.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Anne Arundel County
        

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Two men were killed early Sunday morning outside a restaurant on Reisterstown Road in Pikesville, police said, The Sun's Yeganeh June Torbati reports.

At 1:32 a.m., police received a report of a double shooting outside an Italian restaurant on the 1300 block of Reisterstown Road in Pikesville. At least one of the men died at the scene, police said, and they have no suspects in the case.

The restaurant is located at a busy shopping strip called The Alley Shops, where the stores cater to the area's large Orthodox Jewish community and sell jewelry, liquor, used goods and Russian books, as well as hair styling and tax consulting services. It's also a block away from the Maryland State Police headquarters.

On Sunday afternoon, shop managers in the area said they had been surprised to hear of the killings because the area is usually safe. They said they believed the shooting occurred in the shared parking lot behind their stores.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

Despite what numerous drivers running errands on Saturday afternoon seemed to believe, a handicapped parking permit is not a family pass for choice parking.

At the Glen Burnie Wal-Mart, Cpl. Eric Trumbauer snagged two such drivers at once. One woman, teary-eyed and apologetic, said she used her husband’s handicapped placard because she was only running in to get dog food. The other, 31-year-old Trina Mendez, was less remorseful.

“There’s nowhere to [expletive] park,” Mendez said, her painted toenails resting in the window as Trumbauer wrote a $140 citation.

Lavona Arnold could only shake her head at the situation. Arnold is 70,and, as she puts it, has “two bad knees and two bad feet.” She leaned on a shopping cart, her cane hooked inside, and walked by the cars shaking her head.

“I had to park all the way down there,” she said. “You think that’s not disgusting? By the time I walk from there up to here, I’m ready to turn around and go back. They think they can get away with it. [They say,] ‘My grandmother has a handicap. I’m going to use it. They won’t catch me.’”

Anne Arundel County police have been cracking down on such violations as part of an initiative called Operation HIDE, or Handicap ID Enforcement. Cpl. Nicholas DiPietro, a 15-year veteran and the traffic enforcement coordinator for the county’s Northern Police District, has heard every excuse in the book.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: Anne Arundel County
        

Last week, an article about preliminary 2010 crime data released by the FBI contained two errors concerning Baltimore's rankings. Though newspaper corrections are typically terse, I wanted to fully acknowledge and explain my mistakes, which came to light after seeing an article on The Atlantic's web site* about the rankings. 

My article said that Baltimore had the fifth-highest murder rate, but it in fact had the fourth, surpassing Detroit by a slim margin. My own calculations showed this, but I failed to notice. Baltimore had a murder rate of 34.85, while Detroit's was 34.46. There's a disclaimer in here, though it doesn't excuse the mistake: The FBI used population figures that are different than the recently-released Census data. The FBI put Detroit's population at 899,447, while the 2010 Census had it much lower at 713,717. Baltimore's population was listed as 639,929, while the 2010 Census had it as 620,921. Using those new population figures, Baltimore goes back to No. 5 with a murder rate of 35.91, and Detroit's jumps to 43.43. But I'm not sure when or if those population differences will be reflected. So as far as this week's data goes, I erred.

I also wrote that Baltimore had the seventh-highest violent crime rate, when it actually had the eighth-highest. There were 233 cities to consider, and I had compiled a list of likely candidates from prior year lists and looked through the data for new additions. I left out Little Rock, Arkansas, which catapulted to the top 10, placing it between Oakland, Calif. and Baltimore. The Census vs. FBI population question doesn't affect Baltimore's place behind Little Rock.

The FBI, of course, cautions against ranking cities, because of a variety of factors that make them difficult to compare. Not among those warnings is weary reporters who misuse the data.

*While we're pointing out corrections, though, the Atlantic article also claims that Baltimore's crime mostly occurs in the "Front Street" neighborhood, "a world away from the new office towers of companies like financial giant T Rowe Price on Pratt Street." There is no Front Street neighborhood, and the street itself spans only a few blocks along The Fallsway between downtown and East Baltimore - hardly the worst area in the city. WBAL in 2009 also referred to the "Front Street neighborhood" - which was inexplicably placed in South Baltimore - when referring to a dubious ranking of most dangerous neighborhoods.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

Want to demonstrate at the Inner Harbor? Make sure you're firmly in McKeldin Square. That's a patch of land near Pratt and Light streets, the one with the fountain. Want to hand out leaflets? Make sure they're of the non-commericial kind, and that your on the prominade but away from the water, and not near the aquarium.

The rules for what you can say and how you can say it at the Inner Harbor's premier tourist attraction are complex, and confusing, and vary from place to place. The area in front of the aquarium, for example, is considered private property, as a Baltimore school teacher discovered last week while handing out leaflets supporting vegetarianism.

Security guards and police ordered him to leave. What he discovered is a patchwork of rules governing speech and an eight-year-old lawsuit filed by the ACLU over the issue, which is still being discussed in settlement talks.

Here's a picture taken by the teacher's wife of two friends getting citizen contact forms after being ordered off the harbor by an officer identified only by his his name -- Johnson. Police tell me they're reviewing his conduct -- which can be seen in a brief video here -- but the issue over speaking out at the city's waterfront is awaiting settlement of the lawsuit.

Read the full story here.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Downtown
        

The Sun's Nick Madigan writes:

Although Shaft S. Hunter evidently took very seriously his job as a Maryland state trooper, he always hailed his supervising officer with the same impish greeting.

"Hey, Sarge, what's crackalackin'?" Hunter would say, according to the supervisor, Sgt. Dwayne Lightsey, now retired. Photo at left is from today's funera, by The Sun's Kenneth K. Lam.

"He was full of energy," Lightsey said. "Too much energy."

The recollection was one of a litany of remembrances — many of them humorous, others bitterly sad — at Hunter's funeral service Friday, a week after he was killed in an accident on Interstate 95 in Howard County. The 39-year-old trooper's six children — the youngest 4 years old, the eldest 19 — sat with relatives in the front pews of the New Antioch Baptist Church in Randallstown as the memories rolled by.

"Do you believe I get paid for this?" Hunter's youngest brother, Shaun, recalled the trooper saying during a ride-along in his patrol car some years ago. "I'd do this for free. Don't tell anyone!"

See Nick Madigan's full story.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Howard County
        

It was a little before 10 Tuesday night, and Shawnta Little had just given her son his five-minute warning.

A few minutes later, she heard a beating on the door that would lead to nearly 48 hours in Johns Hopkins Children's Center, where after continuous prayer and medical tests, Little would make the final decision of her 12-year-old son's life: letting his body succumb to the gun shots that had left him brain dead.

"We just kept praying, and they did every test they could do to be absolutely sure," Little said, a day after she authorized doctor's to take her son off life support. "And the fact that they donated his organs, I still feel like I'm going to go up there and they're going to say, 'Oh, he woke up.'"

Sean Johnson was pronounced dead at 5:05 p.m. Thursday, two days after he and three of his friends were shot night while watching a basketball game on the front porch of a home in Northeast Baltimore. Police, who have made no arrests, said a man with a gun turned a corner and opened fire on people who were sitting on a porch in the 1700 block of Cliftview Ave., near Harford Road.

This account is from reporters Erica L. Green and Yeganeh June Torbati, in an exclusive interview with Sean's mother [Read full story here]. Here is a scene from the boy's school as the principal tells the boy's classmates he has died:

By mid-morning, the screams of Sean's seventh-grade classmates at Montebello Elementary/Middle School had subsided and streams of tears had dried. And as Principal Camille Bell assembled school pictures for Sean's obituary and memorial posters, the anger set in.

Bell said that while she appreciates the community outrage, she would like to see follow through.

Assault "People tend to want to make a lot of noise when something happens, hold vigils, have marches, have meetings, and then that's it," she said.

"As a community leader, I should be going to these kinds of meetings every other week. The schools can't do it by themselves, the police can't do it by themselves. We need to collectively send the message that this is not OK."

Bell used Sean's death to jolt her eighth graders, whose recent behavior had troubled her. In a rousing speech about "choices," Bell said she brought her teenagers to tears, describing how unrecognizable he was when she visited him in the hospital.

"It was somebody choice to fight that took our friend," Bell said. "They needed to know that in two weeks, I let them go, and they will be judged by the choices they make. I don't want to read about them in the paper."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Northeast Baltimore
        

From The Sun's Mike Dresser [full story here]:

The Baltimore woman whose driving errors led to a crash that left bicyclist Nathan Krasnopoler in a coma with possibly permanent brain injuries has resolved the traffic charges against her by paying $220 — about half the amount she would have been fined if Baltimore police had not erred in writing the tickets.

Jeannette Marie Walke, 83, pleaded guilty May 11 to negligent driving and failure to yield right of way to a bicyclist in a designated lane. She prepaid the ticket and did not appear in court. Such charges can be resolved by sending in a standard fine by mail.

Krasnopoler, a 20-year-old Johns Hopkins University student, collided with Walke's car Feb. 26 when she turned in front of him on University Parkway near the Homewood campus. According to his family, he retains brain stem function but is not expected to regain consciousness. The Krasnopolers have filed a $10 million lawsuit against Walke.

Johns Hopkins University Walke would have been fined $400 had not the police officer who wrote the tickets blundered. Police have admitted the mistake; Walke has not commented on the case.

The negligent-driving fine was assessed at $140 rather than the $280 called for under state law for cases involving a crash. On the failure-to-yield charge, she was fined $80 rather than the $120 she would have been assessed for an offense that contributed to an accident.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system, North Baltimore
        

The 12-year-old boy who was shot Tuesday night while watching a basketball game on the front porchof a home in Northeast Baltimore has died of his injuries, a city councilman announced at a rally on the corner where the shooting occurred.

Councilman Carl Stokes said Sean Johnson died at Johns Hopkins Hospial about 9:30 this morning. Sean, a student at Montebello Elementary/Middle School, was one of four people wounded in the gunfire.

Police said a man with a gun turned a corner and opened fire on people sitting on a porch in the 1700 block of Cliftview Ave., near Harford Road. The three other teens were slightly wounded; police had said Sean was not expected to survive.

Authorities and the school principal descibed the youths as model students who did not have criminal records; one was headed off to college. Police said Sean had been shot in the chest, but relatives said he also had been shot twice in the head.

Stokes organized this morning’s rally at the shooting scene and was joined by neighbors, activists and members of the clergy. “We have to geet back to basics,” Stokes said in a release annoucing the event. “Police officers that patrol our communities have to get out of their cars and engage the residents. Not just when there is an emergency, but every day.”

Erica Green spent time with with boy's principal as she told classmates the sad news:

By mid-morning, the screams of Montebello Elementary students had subsided and streams of tears had dried. And as Principal Camille Bell assembled school pictures for Sean's obituary and memorial posters, the anger set in.

"I am furious," Bell said. "Because this didn't have to happen."

Sean's seventh grade classmates, who believed he would pull through,"were devastated," said Bell. "It was awful," she said, of greeting students with the news of Sean's death early this morning. "I had to stop because they were screaming so bad, they couldn't even hear me."

But, Bell made sure that her outfoing eighth graders, whose behavior had been challenging in the last year, heard her loud and clear. In a rousing speech about "choices," Bell said she brought her teenagers to tears, describing the 12-year-old's condition when she visited him in the hospital.

Though police said he was shot in the chest, Bell and Sean's family had confirmed that he was shot four times, including twice in the head. He was removed from life support Thursday night.

"It was time for him to go, because our Sean was gone," Bell said. "It was somebody's choice to fight that took our friend."

"They needed to know that in two weeks, I let them go. They will be judged by the choices they make. I don't want to read about them in the paper."

Bell said that while she appreciates the community outrage, she would like to see follow through.
"People tend to want to make a lot of noise when something happens, hold vigils, have marches, have meetings, and then that's it."

"As a community leader, I should be going to these kinds of meetings every other week."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Northeast Baltimore
        

Designer drugs designed to look like benign "bath salts" are the newest narcotic, and they're available legally in shops and over the Internete. Still, federal authorities are cracking down, going after people for improperly packaging and labeling the material.

Feds earlier this week raided a storage facility in of all places New Market and seized to barrells of white powder that is marketed as bath salts and gives a high similar to cocaine. The Sun's Jessica Anderston takes us inside a bust in Howard County that led to a broader investigation. Picture at left is a stock image from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

And health officials warn that these new synthetic drugs are dangerous. Eight midshipmen got expelled earlier this year after being found with synthetic marijuana. Here Jessica write about visiiting a "head shop" in Towson:

Geoff Gentry, who has owned Elevation Underground smoke shop in Towson since 2007, said customers began asking for bath salts late last year, and he still gets calls, including one that came as he was speaking to a reporter Tuesday afternoon.

"People are so afraid of losing their jobs because of drug tests," he said, so they look for alternatives that are not detected. "[Distributors] are capitalizing on the whole random drug test thing," he said, adding that "the populace of people after this stuff is astounding."

And when there's a demand, there's a supplier. "I go to trade shows, and the stuff is practically thrown at me," he said.

But Gentry said he's never been interested in selling bath salts or spice. "To me, it's really a moral question. I just sleep better at night knowing I'm not encouraging this synthetic drug."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Crime elsewhere, Howard County
        

A man found fatally shot in a vacant lot in West Baltimore early Wednesday was identified as a 39 33-year-old who worked as a chef at a nursing home.

Donte James Larkins (seen at right in a picture from his Facebook page) was found early Wednesday morning in the 1500 block of N. Monroe St. Larkins, whose last known address was in the 1500 block of Clifton Ave., was pronounced dead at the scene.

A police spokesman said two men were observed running from the scene, but a motive was unknown. According to his Facebook page, Larkins was a chef at a Baltimore County nursing home. Company officials could not immediately confirm that information.

Just hours prior to his death, he wrote on his wall, "Its going to be hard to be with out them.. May [sic] tears of lonelyness [sic]." Friends were shocked that those were his last words. "This was his last post and now he's gone????this is crazy," one woman wrote. 

Police also identified a man who was fatally stabbed last week – also in the Sandtown Winchester neighborhood of West Baltimore – as 50-year-old Jalil Malik al-Salim. Al-Salim, whose last known address was in the 4600 block of Talman Rd. in Randallstown, was found in a yard in the 1600 block of N. Fulton Ave. suffering from stab wounds.

Police said both cases remain open, and neither victim had a current criminal record.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: West Baltimore
        

A 25-year old Elkton woman pleaded guilty Thursday in Baltimore's U.S. District Court to conspiring to launder more than $400,000 in heroin proceeds, trading the drug funds for clean cash at Las Vegas casinos and other people's winning state lottery tickets, The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports.

Joy Edison, who was originally indicted in August on drug charges alongside Steven Blackwell and Tahirah Carter, has also agreed to forfeit at least a half dozen Baltimore properties she bought using drug money. Sentencing is set for August 12.

Read more here.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system, East Baltimore
        

Anne Arundel County prosecutors will seek life in prison without parole for Perry Roark, a reputed founder and leader of the violent prison gang Dead Man Inc., who was recently charged with first-degree murder in the 1994 death of another prisoner, The Sun's Andrea Siegel reports.

Roark, 42, a muscular man with a long ponytail, was notified Thursday in Anne Arundel County Circuit court during a hearing to set his trial date, of the possibility that he will never be freed. A trial was scheduled to start March 26, 2012, and is expected to take two weeks.

“We look forward to a fair and speedy trial and the vindication of our client,” said Assistant Public Defender Michael Morrissette.

Roark was to have been released from 25 years in prison several months ago, worrying law enforcement officials, who blocked his freedom with the murder charges. DMI has spread outside Maryland prisons in the Baltimore area as well as outside the state. Dissension among the mostly white membership led to permitting members to exit in April 2009 without penalty.

Before his expected release from prison several months ago, Roark was indicted in the beating death of inmate George Hartman, who was officials say was fatally beaten in the now-closed Maryland House of Correction.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Anne Arundel County, Gangs, Prisons
        

City police are asking for help identifying a vehicle involved in a downtown murder that occurred earlier this month. On May 11, at about 2:30 a.m., 31-year-old Willie Elliott was found shot to death inside his beige 1978 Buick. The shooting took place in the 100 block of N. Eutaw St. near Lexington Market, and was partially captured on surveillance cameras. Police said in an e-mail statement that it appeared Elliott was shot after being robbed, and his vehicle crashed into a gate near the light rail.

Homicide detectives are looking for a vehicle believed to have been driven by the suspects - a blue 2010 or 2011 four-door Chevrolet Aveo. Anyone with information is asked to call homicide detectives at 410-396-2100.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Downtown
        

The Maryland State Police have announced a scholarship fund to help the children of Trooper Shaft Hunter, who died this past weekend in a car accident in Howard County. Here is a statement from police:

THE HUNTER CHILDREN’S SCHOLARSHIP FUND

Donations can be made at any M&T Bank in Maryland.  Or, they may be mailed to: M&T Bank, 207 Bowie Road, Laurel, MD  20707. All donations will be used to provide for the education of TFC Hunter’s six children. His children range in age from 4-19. 

The Hunter family and the members of the Maryland State Police are grateful for the support of citizens across the state that has been shown during this difficult time. The kindness of so many has been deeply appreciated.

Hunter's funeral is tomorow, and there is a viewing tonight. Here are details, and a warning about traffic for what is expected to be a long motorcade:  
 

Maryland State Police, Baltimore County Police, and State Highway Administration personnel are coordinating traffic operations plans, but motorists should be aware of potentially heavy traffic and traffic delays associated with the viewing, funeral, and funeral procession for Maryland State Police TFC Shaft Hunter. 

VIEWING: Beginning Thursday afternoon and lasting until 9:00 p.m., motorists should be aware of heavier than normal vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the area of the Vaughn Green Funeral Home, in the 8700-block of Liberty Road at Brenbrook Drive in Randallstown. Pedestrians will be crossing Brenbrook Drive and Liberty Road.  Baltimore County Police and Maryland State Police will be on-scene to assist.

FUNERAL: On Friday beginning at 8:00 a.m., motorists should be aware of heavier than normal vehicular and pedestrian traffic on Old Court Road from Liberty Road to the New Antioch Baptist Church in the 5600-block of Old Court Road.  At about 9:00 a.m. on Friday, police will close northbound Old Court Road from Windsor Mill Road to Liberty Road. The northbound roadway is expected to remain closed until 2:00 p.m.  Southbound Old Court Road will remain open.

The funeral of TFC Hunter will begin at 11:00 a.m. and is expected to conclude at about 1:00 p.m., although a longer service is possible. It will take about 30 minutes for those attending to return to their vehicles and the procession to be ready to begin. 

PROCESSION: The funeral procession is expected to begin leaving the 5600-block of Old Court Road between 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. The procession will head northbound on Old Court Road to Liberty Road.  It will proceed east on Liberty Road to I-695. Upon entering I-695 west, the procession will head toward I-83.

The procession will take I-83 north and turn east on Padonia Road.  The procession will end at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens.  Police will be closing intersections and ramps momentarily as the procession moves along the route to the cemetery.

The interment at Dulaney Valley is expected to end sometime between 3:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.  Motorists in the Timonium area should expect heavier than normal traffic through rush hour Friday.  

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore County, Howard County
        

You can feel the pain in Camille Bell's words. She's the principal at Montebello Elementary/Middle School, and this is her sad ritual:

"Every morning, I hope and pray that I don't see their pictures, that I don't hear any homicides, that I hear nothing about [the] Northeast community, because I know it's going to affect the school community in some way. We always pray that every day will be a good day, and nobody was prepared for this."

On Wednesday, she awoke to news that one of her students, 12-year-old Sean Johnson, had been struck in the chest by a bullet. He was with three friends sitting on a porch on Cliftview Avenue in Northeast Baltimore, watching a basketball game on TV.

His three friends also were wounded, but police say Johnson is not expected to survive. Bell described him as a good student and none of the four who were injured had gotten into trouble. One had a scholarship to college. Read the compelling story of the violent night by The Sun's Erica L. Green and Justin Fenton.

More violence erupted last night:

Details are sketchy (updated information here), but this is what Baltimore police have put out on Twitter from overnight:

An dult male was shot in the head in 1600 block of Ward Court, in Eastern. Reported in life threatening condition. And an adult male was shot in the arm in the 1900 block of Soverworth St. in Southwest.

More details coming shortly.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: East Baltimore, Northeast Baltimore, Southwest Baltimore
        

Baltimore police now say that four people were shot on Cliftview Avenue Tuesday night, upping the initial total from three. A 12-year-old boy is among the victims; police say he was shot in the chest and is not expected to survive.

The shootings occurred about 9:53 p.m. in the 1700 block of Cliftview, near Lake Clifton Park. The 12-year-old boy was found lying in the street. Two more victims were found inside a house on the block, ages 15 and 19.  The fourth victim, 18, was found in another house on nearby East 25th Street.

All were taken to area hospitals. No arrests have been made. Police gave these details on the victims;

12 year-old: Shot in the chest
15 year-old: Shot in the buttocks
18 year-old: Shot in the abdomen
19 year-old: Shot in the buttocks 

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Breaking news, Northeast Baltimore
        

From Anne Arundel County Police:

On May 22, 2011, at approximately 9:33 p.m., officers from the Eastern District responded to the Shell gas station located in the 300 block of Hospital Drive in Glen Burnie for a report of a robbery. 

A male suspect entered the business, displayed a shotgun and demanded the money from the drawer. The clerk complied with the demands and turned over an undisclosed amount of money to the suspect, who then fled the store on foot.

The suspect was described as a white male in his early to mid 20’s, approximately 5’5”-5’7”, 150-170 pounds and clean shaven, wearing a black bandana on his head, black sunglasses, blue jeans, black gloves, a black, zip-up sweatshirt with a hood an unknown graphics on the front.

Anyone with information on the incident or suspect is urged to contact Detective Wills of the Robbery Unit at 410-222-3432(3566) or call 410-222-8610.

You can also call, email, or text your tip to Metro Crime Stoppers Hotline Available 24-Hours A Day Toll Free at 1-866-7LOCKUP or Text “MCS plus your message” to CRIMES (274637).

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Anne Arundel County
        

Four people were shot, three in one incident, Tuesday night in Northeast Baltimore, and sources say two of the victims were juveniles. At least one was shot in the head. Another man was fatally shot early Wednesday in West Baltimore.

[Read Justin Fenton's story about crime in Northeast Baltimore]. More details of the latest shootings can be found here.

The shootings kept detectives busy from one end of the city to the other. The first shooting occurred about 9 p.m. in the 1700 block of Montpelier St., just off Harford Road, when a man was shot in the arm and leg.

About an hour later, three people were shot in the 2500 block of Cliftview Ave., just a few blocks away near Lake Clifton Park, including two apparent juveniles. There was no immediate word on their conditions this morning, but homicide detectives were investigating because police said one wa shot in the head.

The Sun's Jessica Anderson reported from the scene that neighbors heard the shots and looked around for their own children before seeing the victims taken away in ambulances. "It's all too common," said one 27-year-old resident of nearby 25th Street who declined to give his name. "We just had this police shooting on Harford Road."

A second man, 53, who also said he was a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, said he has a 17-year-old and 18-year-old at home. "First you look around for your kids" when you hear shots fired. He emphasized that not all youths in the area were troubled. "A lot of the kids are going to college around here," he said. "We need to find some jobs for them."

Hours later, The Sun's Yeganeh June Torbati reported that another man was shot shortly before 3 a.m. in the 1500 block of North Monroe St. in West Baltimore. A police officer found the victim in a vacant lot and he was pronounced dead on the scene.

Track the city's homicides with the The Sun's interactive map. And check back to learn more about these shootings.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: East Baltimore, Northeast Baltimore
        

Howard County police are seeking a man who walked into a Susquehanna Bank branch in Columbia on Tuesday and demanded money. Police said the robbery occurred about 3:15 p.m. at the branch, in the 8800 block of Columbia 100 Parkway.

"A teller gave the suspect an undislcosed amount of cash, and the suspect fled in an unknown direction of travel," police said in a statment. "At the time of the robbery, one customer and several employees were present. No one was injured."

Police are releasing surveillance footage of the suspect and are offering up to $2,500 for information. The suspect is described as a white male, medium build, wearing a black hat, sunglasses, black hooded sweatshirt with a white zipper and white drawstrings and dark shorts.

Anyone with information should call police at 410-313-STOP. Callers may remain anonymous.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Howard County
        

Police have identified the victim of a fatal stabbing Sunday night in Southwest Baltimore as a 17-year-old city high school student, the second student killed in Baltimore in less than a week.

Dashawn Brown was a junior at Carver Vocational-Technical High School, school officials confirmed. He was in a construction program and was a good student, according to his principal, Kirk Sykes.

“He was well-known and well-liked by his classmates and the many friends he had,” Sykes said in an email statement. “He had the best sense of humor and was very skilled in masonry … and he had dreams of opening a construction business. He will be missed by the Carver school community.”

Police say officers responding to a reported aggravated assault found the teenager suffering from a stab wound to his chest about 10:35 p.m. in the 3100 block of Edmondson Ave. in the Franklintown Road neighborhood, just north of Western Cemetery. He was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he was pronounced dead at 11:15 p.m., police said.

A week ago, 19-year-old Marcus Nickens Jr., who officials said was a junior at Southside Academy in Cherry Hill, was fatally shot in the middle of the afternoon on May 19 in Brooklyn. Nickens was the quarterback of the school’s football team.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Southwest Baltimore
        

[UPDATE, Wednesday 11:40 AM: I asked one of the country's leading criminologists, Rick Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, to evaluate my analysis. He got back to me today and here's his response: "Your method of testing the theory that football reduces crime is perfectly fine.  You were right not to rely on the single result involving the bye week.  The other week-to-week comparisons are valid.  Nice!" So there you go.]

So the Ravens' Ray Lewis says crime will increase in the event of an NFL lockout. "Do the research," he told ESPN. "Watch how much evil, which we call crime, watch how much crime picks up when we take away the game."

Can we quantify this theory? Well, we can sure as heck try.

In a highly unscientific analysis, I took data from the city's Open Baltimore web site that allows us to look at crimes recorded by day, and maybe Lewis is on to something: As it turns out, the Ravens' bye week was the Sunday during the NFL season that saw the highest number of crimes. The following week, when the team resumed play against the Dolphins, was all quiet, relatively speaking.

Week 7 (Oct. 24 vs. Buffalo Bills) - 128 crimes recorded by police

Week 8 (Oct. 31  - Ravens' bye week) - 158 crimes

Week 9 (Nov. 7 - vs. Miami Dolphins) - 102 crimes

That's a 23 percent increase during the bye week, followed by a 35 percent decrease once playing resumed. Only two other NFL Sundays saw more than 130 total crimes recorded (Week 3, 6, and 17), and most were in the 102-125 range.

Did I mention this is unscientific?

Beyond the bye week test, other attempts to measure this issue seem to cast doubt on whether there's a correlation. A comparison of the first few weeks of the season to the weeks that preceded kickoff Sunday - and similarly, the playoff weeks compared with the weeks that followed the team's exit - seems to dump some cold water on the analysis:

Aug 15, 22, 29 and Sept. 6 (the Sundays comprising the pre-season), and Sept. 12, 19, 26, and Oct. 3 (the first four Sundays of the NFL season), saw the exact same number of crimes: an average of 130.5 incidents recorded by police. The final weekend of the season and the weekends of the Ravens' two playoff games actually saw more crime than the three weekends after they were knocked out - an average of 222 crimes while they were in contention, and 195 after they were sent packing.

There's one more scenario to consider. There's been two prior work stoppages, in the 1980s. While we don't have detailed data for those years, a month-by-month look at homicides shows that there was an increase in homicides during the months of the 1982 strike, with killings increasing from 33 to 44. During the 1987 strike, there wasn't any noticeable difference, though Baltimore also didn't have a football team by that time.

What's that, you say? This analysis fails to take into account weather, school schedules, police deployments, the fact that the team played some of its games on Mondays or Thursdays, and a whole host of other mitigating factors?

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

An attorney from Rodgers Forge pleaded guilty today to child pornography charges and will be sentenced to 24 to 37 months in federal prison, the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office has announced.

I had written about Joseph Patrick Redd in April after neighbors wondered why it took so long between the time the feds raided his house in March 2009 to the filing of criminal charges in April of this year. People wondered if authorities had left a potentially dangerous man in a neighborhood.

The answer was that Redd had been charged with downloading images of child pornography on the Internet, and not interacting with children. His case was deemed a low priority, compared to child predators, and it took a while for his computer and other evidence to be analyzed.

Of course, neighbors couldn't help but wonder why the big show of force and then nothing for more than two years. Here's a statment from the U.S. Attorney's Office:

Patrick Joseph Redd, age 32, of Baltimore, Maryland, an attorney, pleaded guilty today to possession of child pornography.

The guilty plea was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland  Rod J. Rosenstein; Special Agent in Charge Richard A. McFeely of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Colonel Terrence Sheridan, Superintendent of the Maryland State Police.

Acording to the plea agreement, the FBI searched Redd’s residence in Baltimore and seized his computer.  A subsequent forensic examination of the computer recovered 11 images documenting the sexual abuse of children, including images depicting children younger than 12 years old.  Redd used commonly used search terms to locate and download child pornography from the internet.

As part of his plea agreement, Redd must register as a sex offender in the place where he resides, where he is an employee, and where he is a student, under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA).

As part of the plea agreement, Redd and the government have agreed that if the Court accepts the plea agreement, Redd will be sentenced to between 24 and 37 months in prison followed by supervised release for life.  U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett has scheduled sentencing for September 20, 2011 at 3:00 p.m.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice.  Led by United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov. Details about Maryland’s program are available at www.justice.gov/usao/md/Safe-Childhood/index.html.

United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein commended the FBI and the Maryland State Police for their work in the investigation.  Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant U.S. Attorneys Paul E. Budlow and Bonnie S. Greenberg, who are prosecuting the case.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore County, Courts and the justice system
        

Anne Arundel County police quickly arrested a suspected bank robber Monday morning after a brief chase in Glen Burnie.

Police said the man armed with a handgun threatened a teller at the Carrollton Bank in the 400 block of Crain Highway shortly before 10 a.m.

The female teller told police that she gave the man money and that he fled. Officers then located the suspect driving a green pick-up truck northbound on Ritchie Highway.

He bailed from the car and was caugh after a foot chase near Stranden and Norland roads in Baltimore City.

Randall Paul Shreve, 43, of the 1400 block of Northshire Road in Baltimore, was charged with armed robbery, felony theft and five counts of second-degree assault.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Anne Arundel County
        

The Baltimore Child Abuse Center needs your vote for a shot at winning up to $500,000 in grant money.

The center is the only Maryland non-profit competing in the final round of Chase Bank’s Community Giving contest on Facebook. The money will help the center offer free sexual abuse prevention education to kindergarten students throughout the region, said executive director Adam Rosenberg.

At a news conference Monday morning, Police Commissioner cast his vote on an iPad, noting that people already spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook on trivial tasks and can make a difference by visiting the Baltimore Child Abuse Center and voting.

“People ask all the time, what can I do” to help fight crime, Bealefeld said. “I don’t know a better use of your time than to cast a vote on something that will improves the lives of children in our city and region.”

Voting ends May 25.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Top brass
        

A 47-year-old attorney and magician who runs a children’s entertainment company in Baltimore County was arrested Monday and charged with flying to Florida to have sex with a 14-year-old boy, who turned out to be an undercover detective, according to police.

Howard Scott Kalin, who lives in the 1700 block of Anne Ave. in Essex, was being held without bail by the Lake County, Fla. Sheriff’s Office. Police said he runs “Funhouse Entertainment,” which has an address on York Road in Lutherville.

Members of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office cyber crime division said in a statement that Kalin contacted them in January through an Internet chat line, using the name “Ben Aldridge.” The detectives posed both as a 14-year-old boy and as the boy’s caregiver, the police statement said.

“Mr. Kalin also told undercover detectives that he would bring a basketball to the child and planned on having sex with the boy during his visit,” according to the police statement. On Monday, police said Kalin travelled to Florida and was arrested at a undisclosed meeting place.

According to an arrest affidavit, Kalin showed up holding a basketball and a movie. The court document also says the suspect talked with undercover police about close encounters with other children, but it does not indicate whether they were connected with his entertainment business.

Kalin was being processed Monday night at a jail in Lake County. A booking officer said he was being charged with one count of traveling to meet a minor for sexual activity, two counts of using a computer for prohibited purposes and one count of attempted lewd or lascivious battery.

In advertisements on the Internet, Kalin describes himself as a criminal defense attorney and he lists his home address as his office. No one answered the phone at his home Monday night. On the “Funhouse Entertainment” Internet site, Kalin describes himself as an “accomplished entertainer,” a lawyer and the owner of the magic house.

“We provide full entertainment and event-planning services from New York, New York, to Richmond, Virginia, and nationwide!” the Funhouse site says, noting it caters to “every type of family-oriented entertainment for every type of event!”

The Florida court affidavit, Kalin is associated with two other businesses in the Baltimore area, which have reported combined annual sales of $220,000. Police also said that Kalin travels frequently along the East Coast.

Information from The Baltimore Sun’s media partner, WJZ-TV, contributed to this article.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore County, Breaking news, Courts and the justice system, Crime elsewhere
        

Despite a nearly across-the-board decline in crime, Baltimore maintained the fifth-highest murder rate in the country last year, according to preliminary data released Monday by the FBI.

Nationwide, crime dropped for the fourth straight year, continuing to defy predictions that crime would rise during a recession. Violent crime declined 5.5 percent last year compared with 2009, while property crimes dropped 2.8 percent.

In Baltimore, violent crime declined 3.6 percent, and the city ranked seventh in violent crime per 100,000 residents. Property crime, meanwhile, dropped 3 percent.

The FBI cautions against ranking cities because of a variety factors, such as density, that make cities difficult to compare.

Baltimore’s persistently high murder rate, along with overall gun violence, has been on the decline for the past three years, and last year fell at a greater rate than the national average. But the city has remained one of the deadliest in the country as others have experienced similar or more pronounced drops.

Baltimore, which was also fifth in murder rate in 2009, last year trailed only New Orleans, Flint, Mich., St. Louis and Detroit, the latter of which also saw a steep decline in murders but couldn’t shake its top-five ranking.

"We still have a lot of work to do, but are making progress in reducing violence," said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

According to the FBI statistics: 

-Murders in Baltimore dropped from 238 to 223, giving the city its lowest murder rate since the late 1980s even after being adjusted for population declines.

-Rapes increased 67 percent, from 158 in 2009 to 265 in 2010. The difference is largely attributed to a change in how police classify rapes, spurred by a report in The Sun revealing the city had for years led the country in the percentage of rape claims deemed “unfounded” by detectives. An audit found that over 18 months, 50 percent of reports had been misclassified.

-Robberies declined from 3,707 in 2009 to 3,336 in 2010, a drop of 10 percent. Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III had said the department would focus on reducing robberies in 2010.

For overall violent crime, Baltimore appeared to trail only Flint, Detroit, St. Louis, New Haven, Conn., Memphis, and Oakland, Calif.

Two cities that reported high rates of violence last year, Baton Rouge, La. and Birmingham, Ala., did not appear in this week’s data. The FBI data also used population figures that are different from recently released 2010 Census estimates.

The statistics are based on information from more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies but does not include any other Maryland cities.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
        

Posted at the Sun's Ravens Insider blog:

Ravens inside linebacker Ray Lewis believes crime would increase if there is no NFL season.

"Do this research if we don't have a season -- watch how much evil, which we call crime, watch how much crime picks up if you take away our game," Lewis told ESPN.

Asked why he believes there would be a rise in crime if the NFL lockout erases the coming season, Lewis indicated that fans wouldn't have football as an alternative.

"There's nothing else to do," he told ESPN.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
        

From Tricia Bishop and Scott Calvert:

An on-duty Maryland State Trooper who might have been pursuing a speeding motorcycle was killed early Saturday in a crash on Interstate 95 in Howard County, according to police, who said the cruiser slammed into the back of a tractor trailer.

Police identified the trooper as Shaft S. Hunter, 39, an 11-year veteran and the father of six. The incident occurred about 2:40 a.m. on the highway shoulder south of Route 32. The trooper was pronounced dead on the scene.

A witness told police that a marked cruiser had been pursuing a fast-moving motorcycle shortly before Hunter’s car plowed into the truck. While Hunter had not radioed to his barrack that he was pursuing the motorcycle, the police statement said “that is not unusual when a trooper is in the initial moments of a traffic stop.”

Police said Hunter had been wearing his seatbelt.

The driver of the tractor trailer, Albert Sandino, 46 of Covina, Calif., told police he was headed from Aberdeen to Virginia with a load of household bleach when he pulled over to check for directions to his destination. Sandino was not injured.

The crash occurred near a rest area entrance ramp. Southbound lanes of I-95 at Route 32 were closed for several hours.

For more details:

Col. Terrence Sheridan, the superintendent of the Maryland State Police, called Hunter “an outstanding trooper who was known for his dedication to duty.”

“He died while working to keep our highways safe,” Sheridan said in a statement. “He will be greatly missed by his family and his fellow troopers at the Waterloo Barrack and throughout the Maryland State Police.”

Gov. Martin O’Malley issued a statement saying the tragedy “reminds us of the dangers associated with law enforcement and the risks they take on a daily basis to keep our state safe. My thoughts and prayers, and those of all Marylanders, are with the Hunter family on this difficult day.”

Hunter leaves six children ages 4 to 19. Funeral arrangements were incomplete late Saturday morning.

A native of Bridgeport, Conn., Hunter majored in criminal justice at St. Augustine College in Raleigh, N.C. He then joined the U.S. Marine Corps, serving from 1994 to 2000. He was honorably discharged with the rank of first lieutenant.

The state police recruited him out of the Marine Corps. He was elected president of the 114th Trooper Candidate Class and spoke at his academy class graduation in June 2000.

In 2004, Hunter made a traffic stop on I-95 that led to the discovery of $500,000 worth of heroin. After Hunter pulled over a speeding Mitsubishi, he sought and received the driver’s permission to search the vehicle. Hunter noticed loose screws around the bottom of the dashboard, according to a Baltimore Sun story. He removed panels and discovered two packages later found to contain three-quarters of a kilogram of heroin.

The Colombian driver, Alberto Puente, was sentenced to five years in prison.

Hunter is the 43rd Maryland trooper to die in the line of duty since 1921, and the sixth since 2000. Here are summaries of the most recent fatalities:

June 11, 2010: Trooper Wesley Brown, 24, was working a second job providing security at a restaurant in Prince George's County when a customer he had earlier escorted off the premises returned and shot him.

Sept. 28, 2008: A state police MedEvac helicopter crashed as it attempted to approach Andrews Air Force Base with two victims of a car accident aboard. The crash killed pilot Stephen H. Bunker, a retired state police corporal, and Trooper Mickey C. Lippy, a paramedic, as well as emergency medical technician Tonya Mallard and patient Ashley J. Younger. The other patient, Jordan Wells, was severely injured.

May 9, 2004: Trooper Anthony Jones, 50, was assisting at an accident scene on U.S. 50 near Bowie when he was struck and killed by a van whose driver was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.

Oct. 30, 2000: Trooper Edward M. Toatley, 37, was fatally shot in Northeast Washington while trying to negotiate an undercover drug buy.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Breaking news, Howard County
        

This just in from Maryland State Police:

An on-duty Maryland state trooper was killed early this morning in a traffic crash on southbound I-95 in Howard County. 

The crash occurred about 2:40 a.m. on southbound I-95, south of Rt. 32, near the entrance ramp to the rest area.  The trooper was pronounced dead at the scene.  Maryland State Police officials continue to notify family members of the fallen trooper. 

Maryland State Police Superintendent Colonel Terrence B. Sheridan will provide the trooper’s name and information from the preliminary investigation at a media briefing later this morning.  The briefing will be held at 10:00 a.m. today at the Maryland State Police Waterloo Barrack, 7777 Washington Blvd., Jessup, Md. Take I-95 to Rt. 175 east.  Rt. 175 east to Rt. 1.  Make a left on Rt. 1. Barrack is located on the right. 

Due to the crash investigation, all lanes of southbound I-95 have been closed at Rt. 32.  State Highway Administration personnel are on the scene and have established detours around the area.  The interstate is expected to be closed until about 8:00 a.m.  Northbound I-95 is open and traffic is unaffected.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Howard County
        

The Sun's Nick Madigan today tells the story William Thomas, a football player who was shot and confined to a wheelchair in 2004 and graduates with an engineering degree from Morgan State this month.

Here's an excerpt: 

By any measure, the events of May 7, 2004, were far from just another random, easily dismissed act of violence. Sparked by a dispute, apparently, between two teenagers — neither of them Thomas — the shooting erupted as a charity basketball game was letting out. Four students were wounded, Thomas the most grievously. One of the two shooters was given a 100-year prison sentence, with lesser terms for two other men.

For Thomas, the goal was to come to terms not only with his paralysis but with those who caused it. "For me, personally, the decision to keep going was immediate," he said. "The forgiveness took a while longer."

Thomas focused as much as he could on getting through college, although he berated himself for taking longer to do so than is considered normal. He was three weeks' shy of his senior prom when he was shot, and he entered college in the fall of 2005, his entry delayed a year by his medical care.

Since then, he has become a vocal advocate for nonviolence, and speaks at schools, colleges and other venues to what he calls "problem children and juvenile delinquents" about the perils of being a miscreant. He illustrates his presentations with a documentary about his experience that has been shown on the Discovery Health Channel.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

Assistant State's Attorney Michelle Martin — who recently tried three city police officers on kidnapping and misconduct charges alongside her boss, Gregg Bernstein — has been named the new training director for the Baltimore prosecutor's office, The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports.

"Under Ms. Martin's leadership and direction, we will now begin to develop a training program that will go far to improving the quality of the important work we do every day as State's Attorneys," Bernstein said in a statement issued Friday morning.

Bernstein, who took office in January, promised professional training for the entire staff during his campaign, in part to improve conviction rates within the office. He's repeatedly said that his predecessor, Patricia Jessamy, too frequently allowed violent repeat offenders to return to the streets.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

[This post has been updated]

A 19-year-old South Baltimore high school student was fatally shot Thursday afternoon in Brooklyn, the second city homicide over a 12-hour period and fourth shooting since Wednesday night.

Marcus Nickens Jr., a senior at the Southside Academy in Cherry Hill who quarterbacked the football team, was shot multiple times just after 1 p.m. at 10th Street and Stoll Place, in the area of the Brooklyn Homes housing project, and died a short time later.

Police did not immediately confirm the victim’s name, but remembrances were being posted on social networking sites. The picture at right is from Nickens' Facebook page. A source said the school’s principal informed students over the intercom system.

City schools are in High School Assessment testing this week, and seniors have half-days. The school had planned to have an awards ceremony tomorrow morning, but instead will have an assembly with grief counselors on hand, the source said.

Details about the shooting were not immediately available.

Police also identified two recent victims:

-Police identified the man killed early Thursday in Northwest Baltimore as Raymond Antonio Young Jr., 29, of the 3900 block of Penhurst Ave. Officers responded about 1:40 a.m. to the 3200 block of Spaulding Avenue, where they found Young on the sidewalk suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Young, who did not appear to have a criminal record, later died of his injuries at Maryland Shock Trauma center

-A man fatally shot over the weekend in the 4500 block of Marble Hall Rd as 22-year-old Dawaun Christopher Anderson, of Edgewood. He was being sought on a warrant at the time of his death for a minor drug possession charge, records show.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)
Categories: Breaking news, South Baltimore
        

A lengthy blotter in the Baltimore Guide for the Southeast District this week. For more, click here.

Eastern Avenue, 4000 block, May 5, 10:10 p.m. A woman told police she and her boyfriend had gotten into an argument because she had asked a man she did not know for a cigarette. The boyfriend attacked her, punching and slapping at her. The woman refused medical attention, and the boyfriend was arrested

Thames Street, 1700 block, May 9, 2:55 a.m. A man told police he had been out on a sailboat with some friends, and that he had been drinking with them. As he was trying to catch a cab home, he was jumped from behind by several men who took his backpack, sweater, phone and $300 cash he happened to be carrying

S. Robinson Street, 200 block, May 10. 6:13 p.m. An elderly woman answered her door and found a suspect described as a black woman wearing all white and riding a black bicycle. The woman told her she was collecting money to help pay the medical expenses of a child who had been bitten in the face by a dog. She asked the elderly woman to wash a container for her. While the elderly woman did so, the suspect robbed her of jewelry and cash, then fled.

S. Eden Street, 400 block, May 9, 10 p.m. A woman told police she had concealed her gun in a floor lamp, and was surprised to discover someone had taken it and the five rounds it was loaded with.

Eastern Avenue, 6400 block, May 9, 1:46 p.m. Someone stole a donation jar filled with change intended to help homeless animals.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Best of the Blotter, Southeast Baltimore
        

Two men have been arrested and charged in a failed firebombing at a South Baltimore home where a 2-month-old boy was among the seven occupants, police said.

Officers responded to the 500 block of Baltic Ave. in Brooklyn at about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, where the victims said they heard knocking at their back door and observed two suspects armed with a knife and a club. They called 911, and the suspects fled. 

A short time later, they said the suspects returned and threw a Molotov cockail at the house, which struck a rear first-floor window but failed to ignite the accelerant. Police were led to a vacant home in the 500 block of Arsan Ave., where they took the suspects into custody.

Charged were Christopher Ashbrook, 22, and William Foxwell, 40. They face charges of first-degree arson, malicious burning, possession of a destructive device, and reckless endangerment. Ashbrook, who faced attempted arson charges that were dropped last year, was being held without bond, while Foxwell was being held on $1 million bail

Police said seven people, including a 2-year-old boy and a 2-month-old boy, were inside the home at the time of the incident. It was not immediately clear what sparked the dispute.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Categories: South Baltimore
        

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This post has been updated.

Nearing the end of a 15-year sentence for attempted murder, prison officials had approved Stanley Dunham for a work program that had him assist in making deliveries around the region.

But on Wednesday afternoon, officials say the 33-year-old walked away from his supervisor at a Southwest Baltimore shopping center and got into an argument. He was shot twice, and was last reported in critical condition.

Rick Binetti, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said inmates selected for work detail programs are typically nearing their release date and have earned their way into the program through good behavior. He was not restrained with handcuffs or leg shackles, per protocols, Binetti said.

A law enforcement source said Dunham walked away when his supervisor went into a fast food restaurant in the 2400 block of Frederick Ave. In his few moments of freedom, police say he apparently got into an argument with another individual inside a Shoe City store.

Prison officials said the Division of Correction immediately notified police of the walk-off, and said police in turn notified them about the shooting. They said no one was able to positively identify the victim, who had been rushed into surgery, as the inmate until Thursday morning.

Binetti said Dunham had been involved in the program since December 2010, making deliveries with a Division of Correction employee.

Homicide detectives were investigating the case because of the severity of the man’s injuries and were reviewing camera footage, according to Detective Kevin Brown, a police spokesman.

The prison system’s internal investigative unit was working with Baltimore Police, and officials said the exact circumstances of the walk-off and shooting were unknown.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)
Categories: Southwest Baltimore
        

A man was shot at least once during a confrontation on Wednesday afternoon at the Westside Shopping Center in Southwest Baltimore. The shooting, in the 2400 block of Frederick Ave., is being investigated by homicide detectives.

The victim was in critical condition this morning. Another man was shot in the 700 block of West Lanvale St. shortly after 9 p.m., and an adult female was shot shortly after midnight in the 3800 block of Reisterstown Road.

A man shot overnight at Park Heights and Spaulding avenues in Northwest Baltimore died from his injuries. No other details have been made available, but we'll update these as the day progresses. Map the city's homicides on our crime map.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Northwest Baltimore, Southwest Baltimore, West Baltimore
        

In the wake of the videotaped beating of a transgendered woman in a Rosedale McDonald's over bathroom rights, Gov. Martin O'Malley is pledging to provide "even greater protections." This comes just a few days after Baltimore County's chief prosecutor charged a woman in the attack with a hate crime.

The Sun's Julie Bykowicz reports:

Lawmakers who fought unsuccessfully this year for legislation to prohibit employment and housing discrimination against transgender people welcomed the support of the Democratic governor. State Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr., who plans to sponsor another transgender protection bill next in a future legislative session, said it "could be critical to the success of the legislation."

Meanwhile, a Baltimore Sun editorial today stresses the importance of enhanced hate crime laws:

But it is worth reaffirming the importance of hate crime statutes and the legal basis for them. Maryland law prescribes greater penalties for crimes motivated by the victim's race, color, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, gender, disability, national origin or (in a recent addition to state law) because that person is homeless. It does so not because members of some groups deserve more protection than others but because crimes perpetrated as a result of such biases pose a danger to society that goes far beyond the individual victim.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

Former Prince George's County Executive Jack Johnson pleaded guilty today to federal charges related to a widespread corruption case. The most sensational allegation was the executive caught on FBI tape telling his wife to flush a $100,000 check down the toilet.

The plea came this morning in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, and included several others connected to the scheme that roiled Prince George's County and exposed corruption at the highest levels, even reaching into the county's police force.

Here is a statement from the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office:

Greenbelt, Maryland - Former Prince George’s County Executive Jack B. Johnson, age 62, of Mitchellville, Maryland, pleaded guilty today to an extortion conspiracy relating to the performance of his official duties; and tampering with a witness and evidence.  The guilty plea was taken by United States Senior District Judge Peter J. Messitte.

After the hearing, the court unsealed records of three related cases.  Former Director of the Prince George’s County Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) James Edward Johnson, age 66, of Temple Hills, Maryland, pleaded guilty on January 28, 2011 to conspiracy to commit extortion. James Johnson and Jack Johnson are not related. Dr. Mirza Hussain Baig, age 67, of Burtonsville, Maryland, pleaded guilty on April 11, 2011 to conspiracy to commit extortion in connection with paying bribes to Jack Johnson and James Johnson.

Patrick Q. Ricker, age 52, of Bowie, Maryland, pleaded guilty on December 30, 2009 to conspiring to commit honest services fraud and to make false statements to the Federal Election Commission; and to tax evasion. These three guilty pleas were previously entered under seal.

The guilty pleas were announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland  Rod J. Rosenstein; Special Agent in Charge Richard A. McFeely of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Special Agent in Charge Rebecca Sparkman of the Internal Revenue Service - Criminal Investigation, Washington, D.C. Field Office.

“Electing and appointing men and women of good character is important,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein.  “But the key to honest government is to create a culture of integrity by establishing checks and balances that promote accountability.  People who seek government benefits or approvals deserve to be evaluated on the merits, without being extorted or losing out to competitors who pay bribes.” 

“This case demonstrates the FBI’s continued commitment to rooting out corruption at all levels of government,” said Special Agent in Charge Richard A. McFeely of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “While Jack Johnson’s guilty plea today shines a bright light on the crimes he and his associates committed, it is not the end of the FBI’s investigation into corruption in Prince George’s County. The FBI will devote all available resources to bring corrupt public officials and their criminal associates to justice.”

“IRS Criminal Investigation will use our financial expertise to expose any public official who thinks that the normal course of doing business involves bribes and kickbacks,” stated Rebecca A. Sparkman, IRS Special Agent in Charge.  “The public has the right to know that those who work for them are doing so honestly.”

Jack Johnson was Prince George’s County Executive from 2002 to December 2010.  Prior to 2002, Jack Johnson was the county’s State’s Attorney. In September 2009, Jack Johnson appointed James Johnson to serve as the Director of DHCD, which administered the HOME Investment Partnerships program to provide federal grants to states and localities to fund the construction, purchase and/or rehabilitation of affordable housing for rent or home-ownership.

As Housing Director, James Johnson had authority to recommend which developers would receive HOME funds for development projects in the County and to grant the developers exceptions from regulatory requirements.

Patrick Ricker is a developer in Prince George’s County, a licensed real estate broker in Maryland and the president of Ricker Brothers, Inc. Ricker and his co-conspirators had an interest in Greenbelt Metropark, which sought to design, develop and build a mixed-use project near the Greenbelt Metro Station, called Greenbelt Station.

Ricker and his co-conspirators also had an interest in Day Homes, which was incorporated to construct single family homes in Maryland, and was involved in several development projects in the County.

Mirza Baig is a physician and the president of Laurel Lakes Primary Care, LLC located in Laurel, Maryland.  Further, Baig owned Baig Ventures, which was a commercial and residential developer in the County since at least 1992.

According to Jack Johnson’s guilty plea, from 2003 through at least November 12, 2010, Jack Johnson was part of a conspiracy in which Baig, Ricker and other business persons offered things of value, including money, trip expenses, meals, drinks, hotel rooms, airline tickets, rounds of golf, employment, mortgage payments, and monetary and in-kind campaign contributions to Jack and James Johnson and other state and local government officials. 

Baig and James Johnson pleaded guilty to being part of the conspiracy from 2006 through 2010, and Ricker pleaded guilty to being part of the conspiracy from about 1997 through at least September 11, 2008.

In exchange for the bribes, Jack Johnson, James Johnson, and other County officials performed and agreed to perform favorable official actions for Baig, Ricker and other developers, business owners and their companies.

The official acts included obtaining a waiver of a HOME Program regulation, securing millions of dollars in HOME funds; assisting in the acquisition of surplus property and land from the County for development by certain developers, including Baig and Ricker; providing the conspirators with non-public County information; obtaining necessary state and local approvals and permits for certain developments and businesses in the County, including Greenbelt Station, one of Ricker’s projects; obtaining employment with the County; obtaining management rights for County bond funds; obtaining County funding for certain developments and businesses in the County; assisting with state and County legislation regarding liquor store hours; influencing certain County officials to approve and/or facilitate County business; and, securing County commitments to lease property from certain developers at developments in the County.

According to Jack Johnson’s plea agreement, during a six month period in 2005, Baig provided Jack Johnson with six payments of $1,500 in cash, in exchange for Johnson’s assistance concerning several development projects. In addition, Jack Johnson admitted that Baig paid him $50,000 in return for his assistance in obtaining County employment for one of Baig’s associates as a physician at Prince George’s County Hospital and provided another $100,000 check for assistance in getting HOME funds for one of Baig’s projects.

According to Ricker’s plea agreement, state and local officials concealed items they received from Ricker and his co-conspirators by failing to report them or by misrepresenting their nature and value. Further, Ricker and his co-conspirators concealed campaign contributions to the state and local officials that were above state and federal legal limits by using conduits and in-kind contributions.

Specifically, Ricker admitted that he recruited “straw donors,” including family members and employees, to make state and federal campaign contributions with funds provided by or reimbursed by Ricker and his co-conspirators.  Ricker also provided in-kind contributions to conceal the actual amount of his campaign contributions, such as campaign signs, food, alcohol and the administrative services of their employees and family members.

According to their plea agreements, Baig paid Jack and James Johnson between $400,000 and $1 million in bribes in connection with the scheme. Additionally, Jack Johnson admits that just prior to his arrest on November 12, 2010, he and a co-conspirator exchanged a series of telephone calls.  During one of those calls, as federal agents were knocking on the door of Johnson’s home to execute a search warrant, Johnson told the co-conspirator to destroy the $100,000 check provided to Johnson by Baig and to hide cash that he had hidden in their home.

Specifically, Jack Johnson admitted that he told the co-conspirator to flush the check down the toilet and hide the cash in her underwear.  Federal agents entered the home and recovered approximately $79,600 from the co-conspirator.

Ricker further admits that in an attempt to evade income tax owed to the U.S. government for tax years 2004 to 2007, he under-reported his taxable income by a total of more than $1.1 million.   Jack Johnson faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for the extortion conspiracy.  James Johnson and Mirza Baig face a maximum sentence of five years in prison for the conspiracy to commit extortion, and Patrick Ricker faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for the honest services fraud and false statements conspiracy.

Jack Johnson also faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for witness and evidence tampering. Patrick Ricker also faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for tax evasion.  Judge Messitte set sentencing for Jack Johnson on September 15, 2011 at 9:30 a.m. Mirza Baig is scheduled for sentencing on July 14, 2011 at 9:30 a.m.  No sentencing dates have been scheduled to date for  James Johnson and Patrick Ricker.

The case pending against Leslie Johnson is unaffected by Jack Johnson’s guilty plea. United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein praised the FBI and IRS-CI for their work in the investigation.  Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant United States Attorneys James A. Crowell IV, A. David Copperthite and Sujit Raman, who are prosecuting these cases.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Confronting crime
        

Statement from Baltimore Police:

Please find attached the composite rendering of the individual sought for questioning as it relates to a series of Confidence Scams targeting the elderly community in and around the Federal Hill area on 28th of April 2011.

Victims receive a phone call from a “Social Security Representative” who states that they have been overpaid on their Social Security checks and must make a minimum payment of restitution immediately or they will be cutoff from their benefits.

The above unknown person then shows up at the victim’s home to take said payment. The above person also is known to impersonate a BGE Bill Collector using the same type of scam. We are asking anyone who may have seen this person or are the victim of this scam please call the Baltimore City Police - Check & Fraud Unit at (410) 396-2400.
 
Description:  Male-White, 50-years old, 6-ft tall, thick build, pronounced belly.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: South Baltimore
        

The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports:

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, the Baltimore actress who played a ruthless hitwoman on HBO's "The Wire," pleaded not guilty Tuesday morning to drug conspiracy charges and requested a trial by jury, tentatively set for Aug. 9.

Pearson, who appeared in Baltimore Circuit Court dressed in an oversized black polo shirt and baggy jeans, declined to comment Tuesday, saying she would talk "as soon as the case is over with."

She's "letting the lawyers take care of the legal issues and she's doing what she needs to do professionally," her attorney, Benjamin Sutley, said after the arraignment.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

Felicia Pearson, who played the brutal killer "Snoop" in The Wire, is to be arraigned this morning in Baltimore Circuit Court on drug charges. She was arrested earlier this year in a local and federal drug sweep called "Operation Unusual Suspects."

At an earlier court hearing, a prosecutor alleged that Pearson used money from the acclaimed HBO series to help fund a drug organization. She later made bail, last month she was released from electronic home monitoring to travel to Philadelphia to film a movie.

Now she's back in court. The Sun's Tricia Bishop will be at the hearing to report back. Above is a picture of Pearson's arrest, taken by The Sun's Kim Hairston.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

The 18-year-old woman charged in an attack on a transgender woman at a Rosedale McDonald's that went viral last month will face an additional hate crime charge after being indicted Monday by a Baltimore County grand jury.

Teonna Brown, of the 2000 block of Kelbourne Rd., now faces one count of first-degree assault, three counts of second-degree assault, plus the newly-filed hate crime charge. She remains held without bond since her April 25 arrest. Brown's attorney, Timothy Knepp, declined to discuss the case in detail, but said "anything that happened, happened in self-defense."

"She's a well-mannered, thoughtful young lady, and I firmly believe that when this case comes to trial, she'll be found not guilty," Knepp said. He said hate crime charges "certainly do not apply in this case."

A hate crime charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, which could be added to 25 years in the assault charge. Chrissy Lee Polis has said she was attacked in an apparent dispute over her using a women’s restroom.

Prosecutors “came to the only possible conclusion in deciding to try the assault on Chrissy Lee Polis as a hate crime,” said Lynne Bowman, the interim executive director of Equality Maryland. “Lack of understanding or fear about someone who is transgender is never an excuse for violence and when it occurs, it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Sandy Rawls, who founded Trans-United, a Baltimore-based group that fights transgender discrimination, praised the work of police and prosecutors in the case but said the charge is not reason to celebrate.

“It’s a tragedy for everybody involved,” Rawls said. “It’s a tragedy for the community, it’s a tragedy for Chrissy and it’s a tragedy for those two young ladies” charged in the beating.

“They’re going to find out the wrong way” that you can’t attack those you don’t understand, Rawls said.

Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger declined to comment on the case because it is pending, but said no one else will face charges.

Police and prosecutors say Brown was the woman shown on a video, along with a 14-year-old girl who is charged as a juvenile, beating Chrissy Polis inside the McDonald's as store employees looked on and laughed. Polis is shown being struck repeatedly in the head and is dragged across the restaurant by her hair, and at the end of the video appears to have a seizure. In an interview with The Sun, Polis said she believed she was attacked because she was using the woman's restroom. "It was definitely a hate crime," told The Sun on April 24.

The video was first posted to YouTube and then went viral after being uploaded to another site and linked from the Drudge Report, garnering hundreds of thousands of views. 

The indictment charges Brown with assaulting Polis, as well as the McDonald's manager, Darrick Jones, and a Good Samaritan, Vicki Thoms, who tried to intervene.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (43)
Categories: Baltimore County, Breaking news
        

A 34-year-old bail bondsman was arrested last week after a city police officer observed him wearing a “police” t-shirt and searched his car and found a loaded handgun inside, officials said.

Jarnel Dyson Wright, of the 600 block of Cator Ave., was wearing the shirt and a silver “bail enforcement officer” badge when he was stopped in the 3400 block of Greenmount Ave. by a city police officer. He admitted he was not a police officer but a bounty hunter for a bail bonds company.

The officer asked to search his vehicle and found a loaded .38 caliber revolver in the center console, which police say he is prohibited from carrying because of a 1994 theft conviction. In his pockets, the officer found handcuffs, a BB gun, and a folding knife. After Wright was placed under arrest, police said he ripped off his “Police” shirt because he said he did not want other prisoners to see it.

“People place a lot of trust in police officers, and we have to be extra vigilant to make sure that people with other professions don’t blur the lines and cross over,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.

Wright appears as a bail bondsman in hundreds of court cases, including several filed Monday, according to records. He is facing handgun charges and is out on $35,000 bond. Though Guglielmi described the case as an issue of "police impersonation," Wright was not charged with impersonating a police officer.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
        

Baltimore police say they're ready for the national spotlight on Saturday. Here's a video of the department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, outlining their plans:

Posted by Peter Hermann at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Top brass
        

From Saturday's Sun:

Baltimore prosecutors have cut a deal with a woman charged in the stabbing death of a Johns Hopkins researcher, agreeing to drop murder charges in exchange for testimony against her lover in a case that became a rallying point during last year's heated state's attorney's race.

Lavelva Merritt, 23, pleaded guilty to robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery, saying that her co-defendant stabbed Stephen Pitcairn last summer and that she punched the victim as he fell to the ground, stealing his cellphone while he lay there.

If she sticks to that story in the case against John Wagner, who's scheduled for trial next month, Merritt will be sentenced to 30 years in prison, with half of the time suspended, for a total of about 15 years followed by three years' probation.

Prosecutors did not announce the deal, and apparently wanted it shielded from the public. "We would not want the [taped statement], the written plea agreement, in the court file where any member of the press or anybody can just come in and get it and take it out," Merritt's attorney, Welch, told the judge. 

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

An autopsy has identified the man whose body was found floating in the Inner Harbor last week as Pikesville resident Wayne Guy Paige, 25, who was reported missing in Baltimore County on May 7. There was no word on a cause of death, or whether police believe foul play was involved.

Paige had last been seen at his girlfriend's residence, following an argument. According to a police report, Paige had a history of depression.

The picture seen at right is from Paige's Facebook profile, where he wrote that he was a graduate of Harbor City High School.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Baltimore County, Downtown
        

Baltimore police are investigating two shootings that occurred Sunday -- one on the eastside, the other on the westside.

One man was reported shot in the foot about 7 p.m. on Westwood Avenue. Another man was shot multiple times about 7:40 p.m. on North Montford Avenue. Those two shootings follows a violent Friday and Saturday, in which eight people were shot, including one fatally.

That occurred early Saturday on Marble Hall Road in North Baltimore. The victim has not yet been identified. City police plan to provide updates on the violence, and their plans for staffing Saturday's Preakness, early this afternoon.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: East Baltimore, North Baltimore, West Baltimore
        

State prison officials are reducing the size of a proposed youth jail in East Baltimore, a move that could delay by a year construction of the $70 million detention center originally designed to hold up 230 young offenders, The Sun's Liz F. Kay and Yeganeh June Torbati reported today.

The announcement comes after advocate groups opposed to the facility — who say money would be better spent on other programs — commissioned a study that shows the number of teen arrests is projected to decline over the next three decades.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit dedicated to juvenile justice research based in Oakland, Calif., released a report on Thursday concluding that just 117 beds will be needed over the next 30 years under current sentencing guidelines and policies.

Maryland had planned to start building the detention center last fall but agreed to wait for the council's findings.

"The report clearly shows there are other options that are just more fiscally responsible and also do not compromise public safety in the state of Maryland," said the Rev. Heber Brown III, pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in North Baltimore and a community leader.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
        

From City Hall reporter Julie Scharper, first posted at the Maryland Politics blog:

About a dozen city employees have been arrested on open warrants under a new initiative from Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a spokesman said Thursday.

The Baltimore City Police warrant task force arrested the employees after a check of city databases revealed that they had open warrants for serious offenses, spokesman Ryan O'Doherty said.

The mayor's office recently began checking a database of the city's 15,000 employees against a list of people with outstanding warrants, O'Doherty said. It appears to be the first time in recent history that such a check has been made, he said.

The checks, which are part of an effort to create a more "open and honest government" are ongoing and will be repeated in the future, O'Doherty said.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

Lawyers for two Baltimore police officers convicted of misconduct in a case personally tried by State’s Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein have filed motions for a new trial, citing “astonishingly inappropriate” remarks by prosecutors and improper jury instructions.

In court filings, attorneys for Detectives Milton Smith and Tyrone Francis cited a comment by Bernstein made in response to the defense contention that the officers had never previously been accused of wrongdoing: “We’re not saying … that all of a sudden their behavior just changes. We’re saying that this time they got caught,” Bernstein told jurors.

Francis’ attorneys, Michael J. Belsky and Megan E. Oleszewski, said there was not a “single piece of evidence” to support the idea that the officers had previously kidnapped people, making it “egregious, unwarranted, prejudicial, and just wrong,” according to court records.

Kenneth W. Ravenell and Milin Chun, attorneys for Smith, said in a separate filing that the remark “is shameful in itself but more so when considering that he is the leader of an office of young impressionable attorneys who look to him for guidance and leadership.”

Through a spokesman, Bernstein declined to comment on the allegations.

The attorneys also say Judge Timothy J. Doory gave the wrong instructions when describing how the jury should decide on misconduct charges.

Smith and Francis were accused of stranding two West Baltimore teens far from their homes in May 2009, which prosecutors said was done to teach them a lesson. While a jury acquitted them of kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault and conspiracy charges, they were convicted on two counts of misconduct each.

A third officer, Gregory Hellen, was cleared of all charges by Doory after opting for a bench trial.

Bernstein’s decision to personally try the case led to criticism in some police circles because he was endorsed in last fall’s election as a change of pace from the perceived anti-police stance of his predecessor. Bernstein said he believed the evidence supported convictions and wanted to show he would hold officers accountable.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

A new municipal courthouse would be built on downtown Baltimore's east side as part of a roughly $600 million plan to modernize and expand the city's Circuit Court campus, if public officials can find the money to carry out the project.

The renovation of the city's two existing courthouses — the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse and Courthouse East — would also be part of the project, which is expected to take six to eight years to complete, The Sun's Edward Gunts reported today.

Plans for the three-part project were presented Wednesday to members of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, a group affiliated with Baltimore's Circuit Court system.

The full report is posted on the Maryland Stadium Authority's website at http://www.mdstad.com/content/view/94/127/

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

Over the past 30 years, two items had been stolen from the Babe Ruth and Sports Legends museums, and both were recovered.

Officials at the Camden Yards museum are hoping for similar luck after a ring was swiped last week from a display case, part of a collection of items honoring legendary amateur coach and Orioles scout Walter Youse.

"We've provided all the information the police have asked for, and we're hopeful that it will turn up something here. Ultimately, the most important thing is the recovery of the ring," said Michael Gibbons, executive director of the museum.

[Photo courtesy Sports Legends Museum]

The stolen item is a championship ring for the 1996 All-American Amateur Baseball Association, presented to Youse by the local team's sponsor, according to curator Shawn M. Henne. Gibbons said it was on loan from family of Youse, who died in 2002. Officials have not been able to contact family, and are concerned that a week has gone by with seemingly no breaks in the investigation.

It was last seen on May 4 during a tour, and was reported missing when a custodian noticed it was not in its case on the afternoon of May 5.

Gibbons noted that two prior thefts from the Babe Ruth Museum led to the recovery of the items. In 1995, a baseball signed by some of the game's all-time greats - called the "Matchless Ball" because of its uniqueness - was stolen from its secure perch at the Babe Ruth Museum and later recovered under equally baffling circumstances when an anonymous tipster directed officials to a brown paper bag containing the ball. The ball was valued at between 500,000 and $1.5 million at the time.

A decade earlier, a trophy commemorating the Orioles' 1894 National League championship season and the 1944 International League champion was swiped and later recovered, Gibbons said.

In the theft of the Youse ring, Gibbons said the item was contained in a heavy glass case that was not easily accessible. Museum officials have since conducted a security review and were satisfied that other items are "totally secure." But he said the notion that someone would take a priceless item from the museum was distressing.

"It just gets you so upset," Gibbons said.

Anyone with information can call the Southern District police station at 410-396-2499.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Downtown, South Baltimore
        

A male body was found Wednesday afternoon in the Inner Harbor, near the Spirit of Baltimore cruise ship, officials said.

Someone called 911 after the body was observed floating near the Light Street pavilion at about 5 p.m., fire department spokesman Kevin Cartwright said. It was unclear how long the body had been in the water, but Cartwrihgt said it appeared to be in a state of decomposition. The race and age were unclear.

He said the body was in possession of the Police Department will be sent to the state medical examiner's office for an autopsy to determine an identity.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Downtown
        

The 66-year-old wife of a prominent Annapolis church leader has been identified as the woman whose body was found partially submerged under the Jones Falls Expressway in North Baltimore last week.

Police were called Friday morning to the 1800 block of Union Ave., just west of the highway in the Woodberry neighborhood, in the Jones Falls, where they found the body of Emma Eileen Baltimore, of Pasadena. There were no obvious signs of trauma to her body, and police were continuing to investigate.

Baltimore was the wife of senior bishop Wilbert L. Baltimore, of the King's Apostle Holiness Church of God, which according to a 2000 article includes 20 churches in seven states. He was also a longtime administrator in the Anne Arundel County school system.

Anne Arundel County police spokesman Justin Mulcahy said Baltimore had been reported missing May 4 after her vehicle was located about two miles away from where her body was eventually found, in the 4900 block of Falls Road. Her relatives told police that she suffered from mental problems and had spent time in a Baltimore-area facility multiple times in the past year, city police spokesman Donny Moses said.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Anne Arundel County, North Baltimore
        

From Washington correspondent John Fritze at The Sun's Maryland Politics blog:

Three Baltimore County police officers will meet with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday after winning an annual law enforcement award, Rep. John Sarbanes said Wednesday.

Michael B. Forish, Michael Gerard Lynch and Zachary J. Small, were among 30 officers, deputies and agents from nine states who won an award from the National Association of Police Organizations this year. The three pulled a disabled man out of a burning building in Pikesville just before it collapsed, according to Sarbanes.

In a statement, the Baltimore County Democrat said when the three officers arrived at the fire they found the disabled man stuck in his wheelchair on the staircase. He called the three “heroes who risked their lives to save another.” The incident took place on Halloween.

The TOP COPS Awards are based on an independent review of hundreds of nominations and are intended to pay tribune to law enforcement officers "for actions above and beyond the call of duty during the preceding year."

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

A 43-year-old Glen Burnie man was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for child sex trafficking, after a missing 12-year-old called relatives from an Anne Arundel County motel room and said she had been "recruited" into prostitution.

Derwin Samuel Smith's sentence also includes 20 years of supervised release, according to federal prosecutors:

According to his plea agreement, on June 7, 2010, members of the Maryland Human Trafficking task Force recovered a 12 year old girl who had been reported missing and was believed to be involved in prostitution, from a motel room in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  The child had called a relative from the motel room and investigation revealed that the room was registered to Smith. The child told the officers that Smith had said that he would be back later that evening to have sex with her. 

The child was taken to police headquarters and further identified Smith as the person who had picked her up on the street in Washington, DC, paid for sexual services performed in the backseat of his car and recruited her to work for him as a prostitute.  Smith had then driven the girl to Atlantic, City New Jersey where at Smith’s direction, men paid to have sex with her over the weekend.  The child gave Smith all of the money.

While the child was at police headquarters, officers waited at the motel until Smith arrived.  Smith was arrested and police recovered the key to the motel room where the girl was recovered.  Smith later admitted picking up the victim in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening, taking her to Atlantic City, New Jersey over the weekend, and purchasing the motel room for her on Monday morning.

The case was investigated by the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force formed in 2007 to discover and rescue victims of human trafficking while identifying and prosecuting offenders.  Members include federal, state and local law enforcement, as well as victim service providers and local community members.  For more information about the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force, please www.justice.gov/usao/md/Human-Trafficking/index.html.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice.  Led by United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.   Details about Maryland’s program are available at www.justice.gov/usao/md/Safe-Childhood/index.html. 

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Anne Arundel County
        

State police say an elderly man reported missing May 9 was found dead inside a partially submerged vehicle in a northern Harford County creek.

Police said Edward Jackson, 72, of the 5000 block of Brightleaf Court in Rossville, was found Tuesday morning just before 9:30 a.m. inside a 2003 Mercedes that was submerged in Broad Creek, off Route 165 and Pylesville Road in Whiteford.

Jackson had been last seen leaving a Veterans Affairs Hospital at about 5:30 a.m. on May 9, prompting a "Silver Alert," the senior equivalent of Amber Alerts that go out when children are missing.

State police said they are investigating along with Baltimore County police.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore County, Harford County
        

[This post has been updated]

One man was killed in a downtown Baltimore shooting early Wednesday, and three others were injured in an earlier drive-by shooting in the Westport neighborhood, police said.

The downtown shooting occurred about 2:30 a.m. in the 100 block of N. Eutaw St., near Lexington Market. Officers responding to the scene found a 1978 Buick on the sidewalk near a Metro stop in the 400 block of W. Lexington St., with a man in the driver's seat suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, said Detective Donny Moses, a police spokesman.

Investigators believe the man was shot on Eutaw Street — where shell casings were recovered — then traveled north until coming to a rest against a fence. The man's identity had not been confirmed as of Wednesday afternoon, Moses said.

In the earlier incident, reported about 10:40 p.m. Tuesday, police were called to the 2300 block of Sidney Ave., in Baltimore's Westport neighborhood, where they found a 21-year-old man, a 19-year-old man and a 20-year-old man suffering from gunshot wounds.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Downtown, South Baltimore
        

"In this disorder, there is order."

That's Peter Moskos, a sociologist and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who worked for 14 months between 1999 and 2001 as a police officer patrolling the Eastern District. In this post from his blog, which shares the same name as his 2008 book "Cop in the Hood," he takes us on a photo tour of a crack house - now torn down - that he had used to conduct surveillance.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: East Baltimore
        

Police say a man armed with a knife broke into a Charles Village house, woke a woman from her sleep and took her debit card. He disappeared for a few minutes, then came back and returned her card.

Police got a picture of him using the card at a bank machine (at left) before he came back to the house, which he got into about 2:30 a.m. Saturday through an unlocked first floor window.

According to a police statement:

Once the suspect was inside, he proceeded to a bedroom which was occupied by a female victim who was sleeping in her bed. The suspect woke same and displayed a small folding knife with a silver blade. The suspect repeatedly asked for cash. The victim indicated to the suspect she didn't have any cash and instead provided the suspect with a debit card.

The suspect left and returned approximately five to ten (5-10) minutes later and gave the debit card back. Anyone with any information concerning this incident is asked to call the Northern District Detective Unit at 410-367-3105.
 
Suspect Description: Male, Black, Thin build, Approximately 5'09''-5'11'' in height, wearing a gray hooded sweat shirt, armed with a small folding knife with a silver blade.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: North Baltimore
        

It took an act of God, some wayward city snow plows and a few diligent neighbors to get Tiffany Square back on track.

Since the West Baltimore memorial was created in 1991 to honor the memory of a 6-year-old killed by an errant bullet, time had given way to neglect, and the drug dealers had returned. Then, plows clearing last year’s double-dose of heavy snowfall inadvertently crumbled the colorful but fading retaining walls.

For Mable Gordon (above, holding photo) and other residents, enough was enough. After months of hounding city agencies, they got the help they needed to repair the memorial spot, and on Tuesday, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was on hand for a “re-dedication” celebration. 

“This means a lot to my family – it lets us know that what happened to my daughter wasn’t in vain,” said Tiffany Smith’s father, Troy. “What happened to her brought a community together.”

The memorial is a triangular patch of ground at the confluence of three streets just off North Avenue in the Northwest Community Action neighborhood. It was originally a flower garden, then was surrounded by retaining walls covered in tiles with sayings such as “God is Love.”

Envisioned as a public meeting place, neighbors retreated as crime persisted. Vacant buildings abound in every direction, from shuttered businesses to once-elegant homes that now sag behind boarded windows and out-of-control weeds.

“The drug dealers chased them out,” says community activist Bernard Pittman.

But residents at Tuesday’s event say they are more hopeful than ever. In the fall, Pittman said a long-awaited multi-million-dollar development project is set to begin one block away on North Avenue, which neighbors hope will be the catalyst that spurs more re-development.

“All of this around here,” Pittman motioned with one hand, holding news clippings and photos in the other, “we’re gonna develop all of it.”

Debra Hurst is the landlord of an enormous former school building that was transformed into apartment units several years ago, and she said feels the momentum.

“We’re definitely in the early stages of a transition,” Hurst said. “The community really cares, and they really want the community to thrive.”

Her building was overrun with drug dealing and gangs when she purchased it, and she said those issues persist in large part because of the high vacancy rate.

“We need to be vigilant about keeping [drug] activity out of the building and, in turn, I need to try to get good people into the building,” she said. “What’s stopping us in a lot of regard is the vacant housing. When people come by, they don’t want to live in a community with a lot of vacant properties. So, it’s a struggle.”

Tiffany Square sat damaged for a year after the plows destroyed the memorial walls, with elderly resident Georgia Payne doing her best to keep it free of trash. Gordon said her Citizens for Community Improvement group decided more needed to be done.

She first called 311 and “got the runaround,” then went to the Department of Transportation, then got sent to the city law office. “I didn’t understand that,” Gordon said of the latter referral.
When Rawlings-Blake visited the neighborhood for a community walk earlier this year, that’s when the ball started rolling. Residents praised Robert Branch, a Department of Transportation employee who they said helped them get new concrete blocks and bricks erected for a new retaining wall, as well as fresh dirt where one day flowers might grow again.

Gordon says she’s hoping to find local artists or students to decorate the bland gray bricks. Until then, a few red, white and blue wrapping-paper bows hang from the trees.

In addressing about 40 residents on Tuesday, Rawlings-Blake listed a number of crime-related initiatives, such as a bill passed in Annapolis to tighten sentences for gun offenders, and her effort to hire 300 new officers. Ultimately, she said, what happens in the neighborhood around Tiffany Square will be dictated by the strength of its residents.

“It’s important that all of us never forget what happened here,” Rawlings-Blake said. “She was an innocent victim of random gun violence, while we know we can’t bring her back, we can pray and continue to remember her … and we will continue to redouble our efforts to make sure nothing like this happens to another of our young people in Baltimore.”

Tiffany would be 27 years old this year. “She could be a doctor, a lawyer, someone saving our neighborhoods,” said City Councilman William “Pete” Welch, whose daughter is the same age. “But she’s not here. … It’s just heartbreaking.”

The shooters who traded gunfire that day, meanwhile, both served out their sentences. One of them recently returned to the community, Pittman told residents, vowing to improve his life and expressing remorse for the shootings. The other has been in and out of prison, most recently locked up after Anne Arundel County police say he used a box cutter to steal a cellphone and an MP3 player from an Annapolis store.

For Troy Smith, now 46, moving out of the neighborhood was a necessary step. Though he now lives in the Pikesville area, he said he often visits the neighborhood and doesn’t believe the residents who rallied around his family 20 years ago ever gave up.

The problems around Tiffany Square are present “in every city,” Smith says. “You just have to take it one step at a time, and eventually it will happen.”

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: West Baltimore
        

Gov. Martin O'Malley is this morning signing a new gun provisioin into law. It creates tougher sentences for felons already convicted of gun crimes caught again with illegal guns. The city has for years tried to get tougher gun legislation through Annapolis, and this bill is one of several proposed this year.

It's been a fustrating ordeal. City officials tried a broader approach this year, worried that some lawmakers were reluctant to enact state-wide legislation for what appeared to a city problem. The mayor's office trotted out prosecutors from the city and the suburbs to show the proposed laws had broad support.

Still, the city's police commissioner complained of once again being blocked in Annapolis. Even appeals by a Baltimore police officer shot in the line of duty didn't help. Here is a previous story summing up the city's efforts, followed by a statement from the mayor's office issued today:

Today, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake attended Governor Martin O’Malley’s bill signing ceremony at the State House in Annapolis. One of the bills signed by the Governor was HB 241 / SB 174, which will create tougher sentencing options for felons in possession of firearms who have previous convictions for a violent crime or drug felony.

This year, after years of defeat for Baltimore City, the Rawlings-Blake Administration fought successfully to pass tougher sentencing options for felons in possession firearms who have previous convictions for a violent crime or drug felony by creating a tougher sentencing range of 5 years minimum to 15 years maximum and by closing a loophole that exempted rifles and shotguns. HB 241 / SB 174 - Criminal Law-Restrictions Against Use and Possession of Firearms will provide police and prosecutors a much-needed tool in their efforts to combat gun violence in Baltimore.

“I would like to thank the O’Malley-Brown administration, the Baltimore City Delegation, and our supporters in the Maryland General Assembly for partnering with my administration to help Baltimore continue to make progress,” said Mayor Rawlings-Blake. “I want to also thank everyone who joined the fight through my SaferCity social media campaign. Because you lent your voice in support of common-sense gun legislation, we were able to be successful this year.”

“Mayor Rawlings-Blake understands that our most solemn obligation as public servants is to protect the public safety,” said Governor O'Malley. “Her tireless advocacy for tougher penalties helped put this bill over the top, and the neighborhoods and families of Baltimore will be safer because of it.”

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Top brass
        

This, Maryland Transportation Authority police officers say, was the offer: If the union would ask state lawmakers to withdraw bills that would grant them collective bargaining rights, the agency would give take-home cars to officers.

That was 2006. The bills were withdrawn and the authority approved a take-home car program, according to the legal documents in what has since become a courtroom dispute. But in 2007, with a new administration, officers say the agency reneged on the deal.

On Tuesday, the state's highest court will take up the question of whether a valid agreement ever existed.

The state, in legal documents, refers to the one-page memorandum as a "purported agreement that is facially void." It is not a contract, and would run counter to public policies and procurement laws, according to arguments by the attorney general's office.

The police disagree, and their legal briefs say the transportation authority drew up a proposal to phase in take-home cars for the officers estimated to cost $3.8 million annually for three years.

-Andrea F. Siegel

Posted by Justin Fenton at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The Sun's Don Markus reports:

Ravens linebacker Sergio Kindle is expected to plead guilty Tuesday to a drunk driving charge during a hearing in Howard County District Court.

Kindle, who missed what would have been his rookie season in 2010 after fracturing his skull when he fell down the steps at a friend's Texas home prior to training camp, was arrested shortly after 4 a.m. on Dec. 26 when police said they noticed Kindle's Cadillac driving erratically on Route 1 in Laurel.

According to charging documents, Kindle was clocked at 70 mph in a 55 mph zone, swerving between lanes and coming too close to cars in front of him. After his car was stopped at the entrance of Route 32, officers said they noticed that his eyes were glassy and his speech was slurred. Kindle said that he had "a couple of drinks" at a club in Washington, according to the documents.

Read more on Kindle and the charges.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Howard County
        

The Washington Post reports on a news program produced by prison inmates in Hagerstown:

Porter is a convicted rapist. Williams is an armed robber. Their audience, not measured by Nielsen, is 2,000 or so murderers, rapists, robbers, forgers, car thieves and muggers at a Hagerstown prison. Their goals are not unlike Diane Sawyer’s: Tell viewers things they don’t know. Given the setting, most of their news is local.

“We have some very, very interesting facts coming up,” Williams says, his voice echoing off the cinderblock walls in a storage space doubling as a newsroom.

The newscast at the Maryland Correctional Training Center, or MCTC, is one of several such programs in the state’s prisons, and experts say they know of few other efforts like it in the United States. The newscasts put a modern spin on a jailhouse journalism tradition that dates to the 19th century, when Jesse James’s gang was known, among other things, as a group of influential and incarcerated newspapermen.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Prisons
        

[Photo credit - Amy Davis, The Sun]

James Mosher Baseball, Maryland's oldest continuously operating league for African-American children, started in 1960 to keep kids occupied in the summer. But after decades of play, its fields need help and the group is looking to to refurbish them so it can continue to provide alternatives in an area described by the city police commissioner as a "hotbed" for gang activity, reports The Sun's Liz F. Kay.

The group has raised two-thirds of the $120,000 needed for the project, which would add irrigation, renovate the two diamonds and replace the bleachers, as well as aerate and treat the outfield areas.

"We wanted to be able to provide players with a field where it can be as true to baseball as possible," said Reginald Exum, James Mosher's special projects coordinator.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. said the neighborhood has been "like a hotbed of gang activity" for the past few years. "Unfortunately some young men over there are bent on destroying each other," Bealefeld said.

But Mosher baseball "is probably the biggest effort in trying to provide an alternative for young boys and even some young girls on those teams in that community," he said. "It's huge what they do."

Bealefeld praised the volunteers who provide "real mentoring" to players. "The James Mosher guys are just heroes," the commissioner said.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Neighborhoods, West Baltimore
        

Baltimore police have a man in custody who they say hit two Johns Hopkins students and then sped off. The crash occurred about 2:15 this morning at St. Paul and 33rd streets, near the campus, the Sun's Jessica Anderson reports.

Police said one male student was in criticial condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center. The other, a female, was less severely injured. The university, in a letter sent to students and parents, said a Johns Hopkins security officer and two Baltimore police officers working with the school chased down the suspect, who was driving a white 2010 Chevrolet Impala.

In February, another Hopkins student, 20-yar-old Nathan Krasnopoler, was struck by a car on University Parkway and suffered catestrophic injuries from which he is not expected to recover. The 83-year-old driver was charged with negligent driving and failture to yield the right of way in connection with hitting the bicyclist. The case prompted criticism because the police were slow to file charges.

Here is the statement from Hopkins:

Subject: Message from Dean Boswell: Students hurt in hit-and-run accident

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:

Early this morning, two of our undergraduates were struck by a hit-and-run driver as they were crossing 33rd Street near Charles Commons. I am relieved to report that it is our understanding that their injuries are not life-threatening.

I have seen and spoken directly with sophomore Benjamin Zucker and with the parents of freshman Rachel Cohen. Both students, fortunately, were conscious and spoke to responders at the accident scene. Though both are being treated at area hospitals, it appears from what we are told at this time that neither is likely to undergo a long hospitalization.

The Johns Hopkins security shift commander on duty happened to witness the accident and by radio immediately called  for assistance for the students and broadcast a description of the fleeing car. With two off-duty Baltimore police officers working for the university, he pursued and stopped the vehicle a few blocks away. The sole occupant has been arrested; the filing of charges awaits completion of the police investigation.

My thanks go to Johns Hopkins Lt. Kenneth Parks, the two off-duty police officers and all the other responding Johns Hopkins and Baltimore officers for their quick, effective work. Deepest thanks also to the Hopkins Emergency Response Unit students who provided immediate on-scene treatment, to the Baltimore Fire Department ambulance crews who arrived within minutes, and to the teams at Maryland Shock Trauma and Sinai Hospital who have cared for our students. Thanks also to the students who have provided eyewitness accounts to investigators.

At the university's request, Baltimore police have agreed to institute a traffic checkpoint in the area of the accident tonight and next weekend. We appreciate their responsiveness and their concern for our students.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Benjamin and Rachel and with their families and friends during their recovery.

Sincerely,

Susan K. Boswell
Dean of Student Life

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: North Baltimore
        

The Sun's Nick Madigan reports:

In the mind of Cleaven L. Williams Jr., the stabbing death of his wife on a Baltimore street was a tragedy that took place outside his control. The event, he said in court Friday, rendered him a victim, too, although whether of circumstance or fate he did not make clear.

In sentencing the 35-year-old defendant to life in prison, Baltimore Circuit Judge Timothy J. Doory admonished him to “accept 100 percent responsibility” for killing Veronica Graves Williams on Nov. 17, 2008, something he avoided doing during his trial in February and in his long statement to the court on Friday.

Above, Carlin Robinson, a cousin of the victim, joins friends and relatives outside the courthouse, in a photo by The Sun's Lloyd Fox.

Read past coverage of Williams, including how the judicial system failed the victim.

Read a letter the suspect sent to The Sun.

The judge, in declining to impose a no-parole sentence, called him an intelligent man who might still make something of his life once he is released, which could occur in about 25 years. Doory also gave Williams an additional three-year term, which he will serve consecutively, on a dangerous-weapon charge.

The murder of Veronica Williams, with whom Cleaven Williams had three children and was expecting a fourth, was a stunningly public act, witnessed by several people on a North Avenue sidewalk. The stabbing ended only when a police officer who happened to be nearby fired his gun twice at the knife-wielding suspect.

“He actually calls himself a victim,” prosecutor Kevin Wiggins told the court. “It’s his wife’s fault. She made him do it.”

The Williamses’ marriage had gone woefully awry in the weeks before Veronica Williams died. She had taken out a protective order against her husband after an argument became physical, and a warrant was issued charging him with assault. When he tried to surrender — just a few days before the killing — a police commander who knew him let him go because of a procedural problem with the paperwork. The defendant then wrote a letter to his wife in which he threatened to kill her, and ultimately did just that, prosecutors said, stabbing her multiple times. The knife is at left.

Williams, who had established a business as a building contractor and was president of the Greater Greenmount Community Association, never explicitly denied killing his wife, but said he had no recollection of stabbing her. Neither did he address his guilt in a letter to this reporter after his conviction, and instead ascribed literary and historical allusions to his wife’s passing.

“I would like to take my folly, my tragedy, and use it to help someone else,” he wrote on March 8 from the Baltimore Detention Center. “I mean there has to be some good that comes out of this tragedy. I’m seeing Uriah and King David, Helen of Troy, Othello and Samson and Delilah all wrapped up into my real- life tragedy.”

Williams wrote that he had “suffered in silence” for more than two years since his arrest and “endured nothing but ridicule and character assassinations.” He said most of the allegations about his relationship with his wife were “lies and misrepresentations,” and that the whole picture did not emerge during the trial.

In court on Friday, Williams, his hands shackled to his waist, said that “no one in this courtroom can tell you that I did not love my children, or that I did not love my wife.” Referring only indirectly to the killing and his conviction, repeatedly calling it “this situation” and “this tragedy,” Williams said he wished that he “could take that day back” and that going to prison “was not part of my plan.”

He did apologize to his children, who were not in court, “for taking someone from them they can never get back,” but warned relatives of his wife sitting in the courtroom that “no one has the right to answer their questions but me.” Then, as though speaking to his late wife, he said, “Buttercup, I love you forever. Lord knows I didn’t plan this.”

Relatives of the dead woman were unsparing. “My precious niece was hunted down like an animal and brutally murdered on the streets of Baltimore while trying to run for her life,” said Janis (cq) Mathis, the eldest of the victim’s aunts, who lives in North Carolina. She called the defendant a “predator and a coward” who “does not deserve to walk in society again.”

Carla Robinson, the victim’s first cousin, who is taking care of the Williams children, then read aloud letters from all four. Each condemned their father for killing their mother, whom they described in terms of yearning and great loss.

“She was the best mother I could ever have,” wrote one of the children, eight years old. “We were like magnets that stick together… When I grow up, I’m going to be a super little girl, just like mommy.”

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Courts and the justice system, East Baltimore
        

The ex-boyfriend of a 32-year-old woman who was shot and killed last month in Reservoir Hill has been charged in her death, and Baltimore police said he used a gun taken from his new girlfriend, according to court documents.

Authorities also described how Keenya Jordan was shot outside her house on Lennox Street and left lying face down next to her pocketbook on a sidewalk in front of a garage. Police said the shooter then returned, and in front of witnesses, shot Jordan twice more into her head.

Daniel Sullivan, 30, of the 700 block of Vine St., was charged on Friday with first-degree murder, assault and several handgun violations, and was ordered held without bail at the city detention center. Police said the suspect had threatened to kill Jordan and himself after she turned down his offer of marriage.

Police had suspected the killing had “possible domestic ties” shortly after Jordan was found dead about 1:15 a.m. on April 6. She had moved to Reservoir Hill from Gwynn Oak in November, and had for the past 11 years worked for the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives as a case manager for adults with developmental disabilities.

“She was a wonderful, untiring advocate for our clients,” Herbert Hoelter, her boss, said in an interview last month. Her mother, Sidney Washington, said Jordan cooked Thanksgiving dinners for her clients and had arranged trips for them to Las Vegas and Disney World.

Police said Sullivan had been convicted of abusing Jordan in the past and spent time in prison. Two weeks before the killing, police charging documents state that the suspect told Jordan, “If I can’t have you, I’m going to kill you and then kill myself.”

The court documents say the gun apparently went missing from under the woman’s bed during an argument in March, about a month before Jordan was shot.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: North Baltimore
        

Last month's brutal attack on a transgendered woman in a Rosedale McDonald's captured national attention after a video surfaced on the Internet.

People were outraged not only by the assault, but that a restaurant employee filmed it and then warned the attackers to leave before the police came. A bystander, Vicky Thoms, interceded and helped stop the assault. Thoms met the victim, Chrissy Polis, for the first time on Friday at Thoms' house.

Police have charged an 18-year-old woman and a juvenile with assault, and Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger is contemplating additional charges that could include hate crimes. He told reporter Nick Madigan on Friday that he has not made a decision.

Above is a 911 call made from the restaurant, apparently after the victim suffered what she described as a seizure. The caller refers to Polis as a "he" and only as an afterthought does she say, "It's crazy because they beat him up." The dispatcher, thinking she was dealing with a medical emergency, appears surprised. "Oh, this was an assault," she says. Authorities are withholding another 911 call, saying it "is part of the investigatory file and is evidence that may be used in the criminal court case."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

The Sun's Liz Kay reports that the body of a woman was found Friday morning partially submerged in water under the Jones Falls Expressway. Police were called about 10:10 a.m. to the 1800 block of Union Ave, where they found the body.

Based on their preliminary investigation, police said there were no obvious signs of foul play, but homicide detectives were notified. The body was found on Hampden-Woodberry line, just west of the expressway.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: North Baltimore
        

Baltimore police have released this video of an armed robbery at an East Baltimore grocery store last month. It occurred about 3:45 p.m. on April 13 when two men about 30 years old ran into the store and held up an employee and a customer.

The police report says the owner chased the gunmen from the store in the 3100 block of East Baltimore St. north on Elwood Street and through several alleys. The men escaped. The video, pulled from a store surveillance camera, shows the men with the gun and taking cash.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: East Baltimore
        

The Baltimore Police Department on Thursday recognized about 50 recruits who are among the first classes to take part in a mandatory training program to help officers recognize and handle mental health crises.

"This puts the city on the map nationally as a place taking very seriously its commitment to address mental health in the best possible way," said Jane Plapinger, president and CEO of Baltimore Mental Health Systems.

The Behavioral Emergency Services Team, or B.E.S.T. training, trains officers to de-escalate mental crises, minimize arrests, decrease officer injury and direct patients to the city's mental health crisis programs for services.

The Police Department began training officers in 2009, and later made it mandatory for all new recruits. A class of about 40 officers received certificates Thursday afternoon from Col. John Skinner, the chief of patrol.

"This is the last step in the evolution of becoming a Baltimore City police officer," Skinner said. "We need you, we need you working hard, and working smart."

Posted by Justin Fenton at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

From the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office:

A federal grand jury has indicted Theodore Steven Michaels, a/k/a Teddy Michaels, age 20, of Potomac, Maryland, on charges related to the production and transfer of fraudulent identification documents, in connection with the sale of fraudulent driver’s licenses that Michaels allegedly produced while he was a student at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). The indictment was returned on May 2, 2011.  Michaels had an initial appearance on May 4, 2011, at U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland and was released.

The indictment was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland  Rod J. Rosenstein; David B. Mitchell, Director of Public Safety and Chief of the University of Maryland Police Department; and Special Agent in Charge David Beach of the United States Secret Service – Washington Field Office.

According to the 16 count indictment, from October to December, 2009, while Michaels and a co-conspirator were students at UMCP, they produced and sold fraudulent Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania driver’s licenses to individuals under the age of 21.  The driver’s licenses falsely represented that these individuals were 21 years or older.  Michaels allegedly informed acquaintances from his Montgomery County high school who were attending UMCP and other universities that he was selling false driver’s licenses featuring holograms that appeared to be genuine, and magnetic strips encoded with data that could be read by “swipe” card readers.

The indictment alleges that Michaels received $100 to $170 for each license sold and that he offered a free license to anyone who referred five other applicants to him.  Michaels allegedly asked the applicants to provide photographs of themselves and to specify, the names, addresses, dates of birth and other identifying information they wanted on their false driver’s licenses.  According to the indictment, Michaels and his co-conspirator then produced the fraudulent licenses in their dormitory room using an identification card printer and encoder, a thermal printer used to create false holograms of state seals, and other tools.

Finally, the indictment seeks forfeiture of $12,500, the alleged proceeds of the illegal activity, and the document-making implements.

Michaels faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for the conspiracy; and 15 years in prison on each of seven counts for the production, and seven counts for the transfer, of fraudulent identification documents; and 15 years in prison for possessing document-making implements.

An indictment is not a finding of guilt.  An individual charged by indictment is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty at some later criminal proceedings. 

United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein praised the University of Maryland Police Department and U.S. Secret Service for their work in the investigation.  Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant United States Attorney Robert K. Hur, who is prosecuting the case.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
        

A sampling of crimes in Southeast Baltimore from the Guide's weekly blotter of crimes in South and Southeast Baltimore, which you can read in full here:

Thames Street, 1000 block, April 23, 11 p.m. A man told police that a woman had approached him as he was leaving a party and said, “Can I walk with you? I’m afraid I might get beat up.” They left the party together, and someone struck the man on the head, and the woman directed the suspect to take the man’s wallet and cell phone. They fled with this property.

Pratt Street, 1800 block, April 28, 12:45 a.m. A man told police he had parked his car when a man approached him, threatened him with a gun and said, “Give me your bags,” then robbed him of cameras, property belonging to his business, his cell phone and keys.

E. Baltimore Avenue, 2300 block, April 26, 1:25 p.m. A man told police he had been out walking when three teenaged boys pulled a knife and robbed him of his bicycle. All three were arrested.

E. Lombard Street, 4000 block, April 25, 2:02 a.m. A man told police he was inside a club and someone had hit him in the head with a glass bottle.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Best of the Blotter, South Baltimore, Southeast Baltimore
        

A Baltimore Circuit Court Judge sentenced a 26-year-old man to 45 years in prison for killing two 17-year-olds in a West Baltimore park in 2008. Timonty Crockett shot Darrius Harrison and Djuan Anderson in Easterwood Park.

At the time of the slaying, prosecutors said Crockett was on probation on a drug distribution charge from 2007. He received an additional nine years in prison for violating the terms of his release. Also, Crockett had been released from a federal prison in Illinois just two weeks before the killings. He had been serving time on a gun charge.

Both victims were shot in the head in the 3 a.m. attack. Judgge Lawrence P. Fletcher-Hill imposed consecutive life sentences for each killing but he suspended all but 45 years. No motive has been revealed in the shootings, but a jury found that the killings had been planned.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: West Baltimore
        

A 35-year-old man was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for robbing a bank last year in Southeast Baltimore. Authorities said Brian Louis Clark stole $1,416 from a Wachovia Bank branch in the 4800 block of Eastern Ave.

Prosecutors said Clark handed a teller a note that said, "I have a gun, count out the money in your drawer." The teller stepped back from the window, and authorities said Clark "became agitated," grabbed another employer and demanded that she order the teller to give him money.

After getting money, police said Clark forced one of the workers to "walk out of the bank with him." He took her about a block before freeing her on South Ponca Street.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Southeast Baltimore
        

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City police say a 27-year-old man stabbed in the neck during a stick-up in Northeast Baltimore last week has died from his injuries, while detectives were investigating a similar incident that occurred Tuesday night about a mile away in which two men were stabbed in the chest.

On April 27, police say Darian Kess walked out of his apartment, in the 1200 block of Linworth Ave. in the New Northwood neighborhood, to pick up a flier to order food and was followed back inside by three men carrying handguns. They ordered Kess and two others onto the floor and took money, cell phones and other property, said Detective Donny Moses, a police spokesman.

As the men were fleeing, one of them stabbed Kess in the neck. He was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on May 2 at about 3 p.m.

The killing continues an uptick in fatal stabbings. Sixteen people have been fatally stabbed so far this year in Baltimore; at the same time last year, six had been fatally stabbed and 23 were killed in such a manner in all of 2010, records show.

Before you conclude that stabbings have become the method of choice for street criminals, consider that non-fatal shootings are up 21 percent and homicides by gun are up 11percent.

In a similar incident, police said two men were stabbed in their chests during an apparent robbery Tuesday night in the 1300 block of Walters Ave., in the Woodbourne Heights community. The victims — one 23 years old, the other 25 — were being treated at an area hospital.

Police said there were three suspects, but no arrests had been made in the case. It was not clear if the cases were connected.

Police also identified the man found fatally stabbed in Upper Fells Point last week as Gilberto Gonzalez, 22. Gonzalez, who police say had no fixed address, was found April 29 in the 1700 block of E. Lombard St. The case remains open.

Related: Crime spike in Northeast Baltimore alarms residents, officials.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Northeast Baltimore
        

The death of Phylicia Barnes, whose body was recovered from the Susquehanna River last month after she disappeared in December, has been ruled a homicide. Barnes, who was 16 when she disappeared, had been the focus of one of the largest missing persons investigations in the city in years.

Maryland State Police declined to release a cause of death, saying it would jeopardize their investigation. Here is their statement:

As Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department homicide detectives continue their investigation into the death of Phylicia Barnes, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner has released her body to her family for burial. 

The autopsy conducted by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner determined the manner of death to be homicide.  A cause of death was also determined, but police investigators are not releasing that information because it is an important part of the ongoing investigation.  To release a cause of death at this time could jeopardize the investigation by revealing information known only to the person or persons responsible for her death.  The cause of death will be made public at an appropriate time in the future. 

The investigation is active and ongoing.  No one has been charged in connection with the death of Phylicia Barnes.  Maryland State Police homicide investigators continue to work out of the Baltimore Police Homicide Unit, alongside detectives there who have been working the Barnes case since her disappearance on December 28, 2010.  FBI special agents are also continuing to assist this task force with the investigation

Police continue to urge anyone with information regarding the murder of Phylicia Barnes to contact them immediately.  Persons with information may call the TIPS Line that has been established since Barnes disappeared at 1-855-223-0033.  Or, they can call the Maryland State Police duty officer at 410-653-4200.  Calls may be kept confidential.  

Posted by Peter Hermann at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Breaking news
        

Students at Digital Harbor High School want to make a change in Baltimore.

Melissa McDonald's freshman English class spent months researching the causes of violence and discussing solutions, and on Wednesday morning held a peace summit called "Let Us Make a Change" attended by guests that included schools CEO Andres Alonso, State's Attorney Gregg Bernstein, and their peers.

"Our solutions may not be the best, but we know from our experiences that they will help," said student Doneshia Duppins.

Among their proposals: anger management, tutoring, summer sports leagues and - a trip to Six Flags. Hey, it's worth a shot. They filmed "public service announcements" to make their case.

"You can expand who you are by expanding what you know," one student said in a video pitch for expanded tutoring programs.

At one point in the assembly, Philip J. Leaf, of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, asked those in the auditorium to stand up if they had lost a relative or friend to violence. More than a quarter of the students stood up.

"Hurt people, hurt people," Leaf said.

Alonso said the most difficult part of leading the city school system is dealing with violence and its effect on students and their families.

"I feel strongly that the answer ultimately starts with the people in this room," he said. "You are the future of the city, and you need to own your actions every day."

The students said they are willing to take on that role. Fourteen-year-old Taliyah Lewis, who wants to study business administration, wrote in her paper that the problems couldn't be solved by "people coming to schools and telling kids to go the right road. To help kids stay out of gangs, us as a whole can encourage all kids to go the right road. Then, maybe they will have the confidence to stay on track."

"We can have peace in the world, but first we have to change the mindset," added classmate Seyquan Davis.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Schools, South Baltimore
        

The family of Phylicia Barnes, the teenager who went missing from Northwest Baltimore in December and whose body was recently found in the Susquehanna River, has been set.  At left is Phylicia's brother Bryan Barnes, in a picture by The Sun's Amy Davis (complete coverage here).

The family released this statement:

HOMEGOING AND FINAL TRIBUTE FOR PHYLICIA SIMONE BARNES (1994 – 2010)

The immediate family (Sallis/Mustafa) of the late Phylicia Simone Barnes has released plans for her private funeral services. The service will take place on Saturday, May 7, 2011, at 1:00 pm, at the Springfield Baptist Church of 3001 Old Salem Road in Conyers, Georgia.

Phylicia’s family wishes to thank her school family, law enforcement and the thousands of people that have expressed sympathies following her untimely demise.

Phylicia Barnes’ name rose to national prominence for a very ominous reason after she vanished on December 28, 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland. News media, local and federal police, and volunteers joined the family in the search for Phylicia. Approximately 115 days later, her remains were discovered and positively identified.

The family of Phylicia Simone Barnes wishes to thank everyone that contributed to her search and ultimate recovery. They would also ask that we continue to pray and search for the scores of other citizens who continue to be classified as “missing”.

The family has asked that the public respect their request for a private homegoing service.  At their request, media cameras will not be permitted in the sanctuary.  The services can be accessed online via internet streaming at www.sbclive.org beginning at 1:00 pm.    

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Northwest Baltimore
        

Harford County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to the 1800 block of Pulaski Highway – Edgewood Laundromat, at approximately 3 a.m on Monday April 18th for a report of an armed robbery.

The victim, a 38-year-old female from Edgewood, MD, reported that a woman approached the door of the Laundromat. When the victim opened the door, two masked male suspects rushed into the facility, knocked the victim to the ground. 

The suspects are described:

• Black Male wearing black hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes.
• Black Male wearing camouflage hooded jacket, blue jeans and black shoes.
• Black Female wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, brown shorts and white tennis shoes.

The suspects fled on foot in an unknown direction. Watch a video of the robbery here. Anyone with information is urged to contact police:

Harford County Sheriff's Department

Text message: Metro Crime Stoppers: Text “CRIMES" (274637); Begin the message "MCS," then add the information.

Phone: Harford Crime Solvers: Call 1-888-540-8477

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Harford County
        

Decrying their actions as “cowboy tactics,” a Baltimore Circuit Court judge on Tuesday acquitted the last of three officers who had been charged with kidnapping and misconduct for picking up two West Baltimore teens and stranding them far from their homes.

Officer Gregory Hellen, whose name was rarely invoked in two weeks of testimony, was spared from a misconduct conviction only because the case had essentially been mischarged, Judge Timothy J. Doory told him.

“You should be ashamed of your participation in what was done that night,” Doory said in handing down his decision.

The verdict came a day after a jury convicted two other officers charged in the case, Milton Smith III and Tyrone Francis, on two counts each of misconduct in office while clearing them of kidnapping, false imprisonment and assault. Though tried together, Hellen opted to have his fate decided by Doory.

Defense attorney David B. Irwin said his client, who declined to comment with a $100 million civil lawsuit filed by the victims still looming, was relieved by the judge’s decision. “We're obviously very happy that a good, young detective was exonerated of the charges,” Irwin said.

The officers were each accused of picking up two West Baltimore teens on May 4, 2009, driving one to East Baltimore and leaving the other in a Howard County park without shoes or socks. Defense attorneys for Francis, who drove the car, and Smith, who was accused of placing the teens in the van and pushing them out, had argued that the teens had been wildly inconsistent and concocted their stories because they were police informants.

Doory said he believed the victims.

“There is one central fact that cannot be changed, that stands like a monument in the middle of this case: In the dark of a rainy night, a 15-year-old child was found without shoes, 11 miles from his home,” Doory said. “Nothing changes that fact.”

Irwin, however, didn’t adopt the co-defendants’ accusations against the teens, and didn’t call any witnesses. His argument was simple: that the state didn’t prove its case against Hellen.

“He is not alleged to be an actor in any conspiracy, by anyone,” Irwin said in closing arguments Tuesday.

The case was the first prosecuted by new State’s Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein. Prosecutors argued that Hellen, who rode in the passenger seat of the van, “cannot divorce himself from what happened.”

“He’s a police officer, and he sees a kid is being dropped off and he does nothing,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Michelle Martin. “His lack of assistance shows clearly he was a participant, that he encouraged this crime.”

In a speech before handing down his decision, Doory, a former prosecutor, said the essence of good police work is respect. “High-handed cowboy tactics is the exact opposite of good police work, and anybody who doesn’t believe that shouldn’t be in the business,” he said.

In acquitting Hellen of the most serious charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment and assault, Doory said even lawful police work involves all of the elements used to prove those crimes – involuntary detention, threat of force, fear. He quoted one of the victims in the case, who had been asked why he didn’t tell investigators that he had been kidnapped: “I didn’t know you could be kidnapped by the police,” the young victim had replied.

Doory called it the “simplest, most important comment of the trial,” and seemed to agree with an argument from Francis’ attorney Michael Belsky earlier in the proceedings that charging police with felonies when their police actions are not justified would “open a floodgate.”

Bernstein said he disagreed with the judge’s interpretation. “To suggest that a police officer can never kidnap someone is troubling,” Bernstein said outside the courthouse. “To us, that makes no sense.”

But Doory said Hellen could have faced a conviction on misconduct charges. He explained that a public official can be found guilty of three kinds of misconduct: malfeasance - doing an act that is wrong - misfeasance - committing an otherwise lawful act in a wrongful manner - and non-feasance - failing to do their duty.

Doory said he believed Hellen had committed non-feasance, but prosecutors – under the previous regime – specifically charged Hellen with “malfeasance,” which Doory said had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

“I am satisfied that these were cowboys tactics employed [that night],” Doory said. “The question is, does that amount to malfeasance? That's the only crime charged in the indictment, and after two weeks and listening ... I am not prepared to say beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Hellen likely still faces internal charges. Francis and Smith have vowed to appeal and are scheduled for sentencing in June.

[This post has been updated]

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

Is there no place on earth more dangerous than Baltimore?

Not even bin Laden's mansion hideout?

Stephen Colbert on Monday night's Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" cracked this joke (reported by our sister publication "B":

"Relations with Pakistan could get rough. They had to know bin Laden was there. His million-dollar compound was less than 40 miles from Pakistan's capital. That's like escaping Washington D.C. by hiding out in Baltimore. Except that Abbottabad is much less dangerous than Baltimore."

I tried to find crime rates for Attottabad, described as a British built resort town, but couldn't come up with any. Baltimore harbors some pretty dangerous people, but we don't have mass murdering terrorists in mansions.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Crime humor
        

The case of the man found dead in a basement closet along with his unharmed 5-year-old son has gotten stranger.

Reporter Don Markus reports today that Howard County police found drugs on the man, but no signs of trauma, meaning they're awaiting results of an autopsy to determine how he died. He apparently broke into the vacant family home in Jessup last week after assaulting his father.

Police searched the house on Wednesday but reported finding nothing, though family members complain officers failed to force open a closet door. A relatative checking the house on Saturday found the body and the boy, who was treated for dehyrdation.

"He was looking lost and scared, and he said that his daddy is dead," relative Barbara Wise said. "He said that his daddy and his pop-pop had an argument."

Howard County police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn said that police do not know if the man was alive when the house was searched by police last week, but "there was no sound, no smell, no indication that the little boy was in there."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Howard County
        

The Sun's police reporter Justin Fenton reports today that two city officers were convicted of misconduct, but cleared of kidnapping charges, in the first trial led by State's Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein:

After nearly two weeks of testimony, jurors took about three hours to reach the verdict. Detectives Tyrone S. Francis and Milton Smith III were convicted of two counts each of misconduct — a misdemeanor — for picking up two 15-year-olds from West Baltimore in May 2009 and leaving them stranded far from their homes.

The third officer charged in the case, Gregory Hellen, will have his fate decided by the judge overseeing the case, Circuit Judge Timothy J. Doory.

"We're very pleased with the jury's verdict, which we believe reflects a real careful consideration of the evidence and their view of the nature of misconduct," said Bernstein, who said he was limited in his comments because Hellen's case is pending.

Defense attorneys for Francis and Smith immediately said they would file a motion arguing that the jury was given improper instructions, resulting in a misconduct verdict that was "inconsistent," given that officers were acquitted of felony kidnapping, false imprisonment and assault charges.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

The final three members of the Black Guerrilla Gang have pleaded guilty in federal court, wrapping up cases against 21 members what authorities described as a violent group responsible for money laundering, drug dealing and attacks inside Maryland prisons.

Police said they used pre-paid debit card accounts to deal drugs beyond prison walls.

“This case reflects an unprecedented commitment by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services to combat crime and corruption in state correctional facilities," Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement. "An intensive investigation that included wiretaps on contraband prison cell phones resulted in evidence that BGF leaders ran the gang while incarcerated in state prisons.

"The crimes included extorting protection money from other inmates and using contraband cell phones to arrange drug deals, approve robberies and arrange attacks on cooperating witnesses," Rosenstein said. "In addition, gang members persuaded corrupt correctional officers to participate in the gang’s criminal activities by smuggling drugs, tobacco, cell phones and weapons into prisons.”

The arrests exposed corruption in prsion -- a guard was charged with helping deal drugs -- and revaled a handbook endorsed by an educator as promoting empowerment but described by authorities as a guide, or a "constitution," for gang life. The gang also had ties to an outreach group devoted to getting troubled youths off the streets.

Here is a previous story by The Sun's Justin Fenton exposing alleged activities of a corrections officers:

Items hauled out of a corrections officer's apartment before she was indicted in a gang racketeering conspiracy appear to connect her to a who's who of Baltimore criminals.

Authorities say Alicia Simmons, an employee at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, is associated with the Black Guerrilla Family, the gang accused of directing a criminal enterprise from inside prison with the help of corrections staff. In a June 22 raid on her Pikesville apartment, agents seized the BGF "constitution," gang codes written in Swahili and paperwork related to its top leadership.Simmons, 34, also was in possession of letters, inmate ID cards, debit cards and other correspondence linked to some of the city's most notorious criminals. There's a letter from Kevin Gary, the Tree Top Bloods member known for his tinted red contact lenses, and another from Isaac Smith, convicted in the firebombing of a North Baltimore community activist's home.

She also had inmate identification cards in the names of Johnny "J.R." Butler and Calvin "Turkey" Wright, recently convicted for running a violent east-side drug ring connected to at least two killings; and Ronnie Thomas, better known as "Skinny Suge," the producer of the infamous "Stop Snitching" videos.

The search warrant and accompanying affidavit peel back another layer of the complex world of prison corruption that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been investigating for years, leading to a racketeering indictment this week.

Simmons is accused in the affidavit of helping smuggle heroin and cell phones through the prison's laundry system, allowing gang members to fight one another, and attempting to sniff out informants, including spying on federal agents as they met with a high-ranking gang member. The items in her apartment suggest her criminal ties go beyond the BGF.

Special Agent Edward Marcinko, a DEA spokesman, said her potential connections to other criminal enterprises were being investigated.

The Black Guerrilla Family is described by the DEA as the largest and most powerful prison gang in the state, with a presence in every facility and a top-down paramilitary structure that encouraged extortion and violence to further its goals. Already, the case has revealed how leaders used a handbook called the "Black Book" to spread its message while placing members to work with city school children and violence intervention programs as a front for recruiting.

Few details about Simmons' role in the BGF were revealed in the indictment unsealed this week. But the search warrant affidavit for her vehicle and Pikesville apartment, in the first block of Stockmill Road, adds additional perspective while raising questions about employee discipline within the prison system.

Federal agents appear to have focused on Simmons earlier this year, when a source told agents that they had personally observed her smuggle marijuana, crack cocaine and heroin into the protective custody unit of the Maryland Correctional Institute in Jessup in 2007, according to documents compiled by DEA Task Force member William Nickoles, a city police officer.

A second source said he had received a pound of marijuana from Simmons, and knew of a BGF commander who received 20 grams of heroin from her and other officers every two to three days. That source said that in December 2009 Simmons allowed BGF members into an area where they assaulted another inmate, and that she did not report the assault until the gang members were finished. She was removed from her shift as a result of the incident and suspended five days.

Agents also learned that Simmons was being disciplined by the Division of Correction for fraternizing with a former inmate over Facebook. She received a midlevel punishment that did not result in a suspension.

Prison officials have pointed to their cooperation with the DEA in bringing the indictments and said they should put the agency's "few bad apples" on notice that they will be caught. But Simmons' activities were well-known in the prison for years, according to informants who spoke to the DEA, and she continued to work as a guard despite the infractions.

Rick Binetti, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said the agency has improved its screening processes and has been working with law enforcement agencies. He said he could not comment on Simmons' personnel records.

When agents searched the cells of three BGF leaders in 2009, the inmates were removed "under the ruse that they were summoned to the warden's office." After the searches, two of the members - Eric Brown and Ray Olivis - were removed from the general population and indicted. But the third man, Jonathan Braverman, was not.

Suspecting he was a cooperating informant, BGF members ordered a "hit on sight" on Braverman. Law enforcement officials visited Braverman - under the guise that they were attorneys - in June 2009 to advise him of the threat, and noticed Simmons "in close proximity to the interview area." By the next day, an informant was relaying to federal agents that Simmons had advised several inmates and BGF members that the DEA had visited Braverman and that he was an informant.

Agents served the search warrant on her home on June 25, and an inventory of seized items was unsealed this week. Included among the items were letters from inmates soliciting phone calls and favors, and newspaper articles about crime and the BGF case. They also found:

* An envelope from federal inmate Kevin Gary, a Tree Top Piru Bloods leader who last year received 30 years in prison after admitting to witness intimidation, ordering gang members to rob drug dealers and unsuccessfully arranging a murder. The envelope was addressed to Simmons' apartment, and contained a photograph of Gary and a letter.

* A copy of the BGF Constitution, a copy of BGF codes and Swahili words and their meanings.

* Federal inmate cards in the names of Calvin Wright, Johnny Butler, Dieon Scruggs, Lejuanna Walker, Darrick Frayling, and several others. Butler and Wright were sentenced recently to life and 35 years, respectively, in federal prison in connection with their heroin ring. They still face charges in the 2007 torture and killing of Sintia Mesa, who police say was killed over a drug debt.

Scruggs was charged in February with posing as a Federal Fugitive Task Force officer last fall; Walker was convicted in May and received 12 years in prison for his role in a Baltimore County drug ring.

* "Green Dot" prepaid debit cards, which authorities say are the currency of the prison system, in the names of various inmates including Fonda White and Jeffrey Fowlkes. White, a former prison guard, and Fowlkes, her incarcerated lover and BGF gang member, pleaded guilty to extorting thousands of dollars from prisoners and their relatives.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Courts and the justice system
        

Baltimore police have issued an warrant charging a 22-year-old woman with murder in connection with a double shooting in December 2008. Authorities identified the suspect as Josetta Hill.

"She is known to disguise her identity through the use of fraudulent identification cards," police said in a statment. "Anyone with information as to her whereabouts is urged to contact police by immediately calling 911."

The shooting occurred Dec. 29 in the 800 block of Chauncy Ave., in Reservoir Hill. Antonio Coby, 28, died at a hospital and a female victim died several days later.

They were found about 10:40 p.m. by police responding to a call for a shooting.

The officers were meat the front door by the wounded woman, who then collapsed. The man was found in the kitchen.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: West Baltimore
        

Baltimore County Police are searching for a man who robbed a Bank of America branch on Belair Road on Friday. Police said the man walked into the bank about 4:10 p.m. and passed a demand note to the teller.

Police said the teller gave the man money and he ran toward the 7900 block of Belair Road. He is described as a white male, 25-30 years old, approximately 6’ tall, 250 pounds, with brown hair. 

Anyone with information about the identity or whereabouts of the suspect is asked to call Baltimore County Police at 410-307-2020 or Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7-LOCKUP (1-866-756-2587). To text a message to Metro Crime Stoppers, send to "CRIMES" (274637), then enter the message starting with "MCS," or e-mail a tip to Metro Crime Stoppers.

Those contacting Metro Crime Stoppers can remain anonymous and might be eligible for a cash reward of up to $2,000.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore County
        

The mother of the 19-year-old woman who died after a March triple shooting in Better Waverly said she felt grateful after learning Baltimore police detectives had filed charges against a suspect.

James Cureton, 21, faces first-degree murder and other charges in the death of Tanise Ervin. He was already in jail for a January armed robbery.

“I don’t want to hate him, but he’s took like a chunk of my soul out of my chest,” said Juanita Brown, Ervin’s mother, in an interview Monday.

This will be her first Mother’s Day without her daughter, she said. Brown, who lives in a permanent housing program run by Marian House, said she plans to spend the holiday fixing up a memorial to Ervin in front of the Better Waverly carryout where she was shot.

The mother said she was glad she had answers about her daughter’s death, because she knew other families — such as the relatives of Phylicia Barnes — were still without answers.

Brown said she plans to attend Cureton’s Tuesday’s hearing on Cureton's armed robbery charges as well as upcoming court proceedings in her daughter’s death.

Posted by Liz Kay at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Five correctional officers at the city’s booking center, including a high ranking official with 16 years experience, have been indicted on charges of assault for allegedly beating a female inmate, the state prison system said on Monday.

“We cannot tolerate this type of behavior, here or in any of our correctional divisions,” said Gary Maynard, the secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. “Even in a very difficult environment, correctional staff must always act with the highest level of integrity and professionalism.”

The charges stem from an incident in January at the state-run Central Booking and Intake Center, which processes arrestees. Officials said a 26-year-old woman who faced minor disorderly conduct charges was beaten several times and in several different locations in the facility.

In a statement released Monday, prison officials said that “a number of correctional officers used unnecessary and inappropriate force against the woman multiple times.” The victim was taken to a hospital and treated and release with no serious injuries, officials said.

The statement from Maynard said staff members did not report the alleged assault. In January, eight corrections officers, including the acting warden, were suspended. The warden has since retired and was not among the officers indicted.

Those indicted on charges of first-degree assault were identified as Larry Morris, a 42-year-old acting major; Kimberly Livingston, 31; Shannon Rivies, 24; Aleesha Edmond, 22; and Torrence Taylor, 23.

Here is a statement from state prison officials:
 

Five correctional officers, including an acting major, were indicted Friday by a Baltimore grand jury for their alleged roles in the use of unjustified, excessive force on a female detainee at the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center (BCBIC) in January.

All five are charged with first degree assault. Eight correctional officers were placed on administrative leave in the wake of the incident, and the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services Internal Investigative Unit (IIU) has been working with the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office in the ensuing months on the criminal case. (The State’s Attorney’s Office will handle inquiries relating to their part in the criminal probe.)

Thanks in part to tips called into the Central Booking hotline, Maryland Division of Pretrial Detention and Services (DPDS) and IIU investigators had identified suspects within hours of the incident, suspending them from duty and notifying the State’s Attorney, which began a criminal investigation that eventually led to grand jury involvement. Three of the officers placed on administrative leave by DPSCS have not been criminally charged, but all eight are pending termination.

“We acted swiftly because we will not tolerate any unjustified use of force against detainees, period,” said Wendell France, Commissioner of Pretrial which operates BCBIC. “There are proper rules of engagement when using appropriate force dealing with detainees. We expect our officers to apply these rules in a professional manner and only when necessary.”

The indicted officers were all assigned to the booking area. They are:
Larry Morris, acting major, 42 16 years of service
Kimberly Livingston, 31 9 years of service
Shannon Rivies, 24 5 years of service
Aleesha Edmond, 22 3years of service
Terrence Taylor, 23 3 years of service

The incident in question began early on a Saturday morning (January 8), when a 26-year old woman brought into Central Booking on disorderly conduct and other charges was being processed. Investigators believe that a number of correctional officers used unnecessary and inappropriate force against the woman multiple times, and in several different locations. The woman was eventually taken to a local hospital, and was released with no serious injuries. The incident was never reported by on-duty staff----a breech in proper procedure---including the shift commander, a 16-year veteran who is one of the individuals indicted.

“We cannot and will not tolerate this type of behavior, here or in any of our correctional divisions,” said DPSCS Secretary Gary Maynard, whose Department also includes state prisons and pre-release centers in the Division of Correction and Patuxent Institution, a maximum-security treatment prison. “Even in a very difficult environment, correctional staff must always act with the highest level of integrity and professionalism.”

The Division of Pretrial Detention and Services includes Central Booking---one of the busiest booking facilities in the nation-- and the Baltimore City Detention Center. DPDS employs approximately 1,500 people. At any given time, the facilities house between three and four thousand people awaiting trial in the City of Baltimore, and a few inmates sentenced to terms in the Division of Correction.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Downtown, Prisons
        

For decades, veteran police officers viewed Baltimore's Northeast Police District – dominated by middle-class, low-crime neighborhoods -- as a "country club" assignment.

But a rise in crime in some neighborhoods is changing that sentiment. Shootings and violence have been on the rise in the district – the city's largest, spanning 17 square miles including Lauraville, Ednor Gardens and Belair Edison -- and it leads the city in murders this year. The Police Department recently designated two neighborhoods in the area as "violent crime enforcement zones" – putting them on par with some of the most troubled spots in the city.

Despite the spike in crime, the district largely remains a safe, middle-class enclave. And the violent crime around Clifton Park, an area long troubled by drug dealing, did not spring up overnight. Nevertheless, Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke, who represents the area of the district where most of the violence has occurred, said, "We all have a lot of work to do in the Northeast District. That's for certain."

Since last month, a squad of 15 officers from the Violent Crimes Impact Section has been patrolling the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello and Belair Edison communities. That's on top of more than 20 foot patrol deployments throughout the district, which police and city officials hope will stem the 21 percent rise in total crime.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Northeast Baltimore
        

Police in Howard County are investigating a bizzare case involving what appears to be linked to a tragic domestic dispute. Many details are not yet known, but here's what we reported in today's paper, in a story by Jessica Anderson:

A man's body was discovered inside a vacant Jessup home Saturday, along with a young boy — who was unharmed — Howard County police said.

Police identified the man as Najib Malik Abdullah, 26, of Jessup. Detectives believe they are a father and son who were last seen Tuesday leaving a relative's home in Jessup following a domestic incident.

Police were called just after 3 p.m. to a home in the 8700 block of Mary Lane, where a family member of the resident returned to the check on the house and found the man's body and the 5-year-old inside.

No one has been living in the home and it appears the man broke a window to gain entry, police said, but it is unclear when they entered the home.

The boy was taken to Howard County General Hospital but was in good condition, police said. A autopsy has been scheduled to determined the cause of death for the man.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Howard County
        

Police in Baltimore City and County are investigating separate shootings overnight. A report from Baltimore:

A 24-year-old man was found shot multiple times around 11:30 p.m. in the 1200 block N. Luzerne Ave. in East Baltimore, according to Det. Kevin Brown, the city police spokesman. Police found the victim, who was not identified, sitting on steps with wounds to the chest and leg. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was listed in serious condition, the spokesman said. The victim told police he heard gunshots as he was walking along Luzerne and realized he was hit. Police have no suspects or motives, Brown said.

Around 3:15 p.m., a man was shot multiple times near the corner of Rogers and Elderon avenues in Northwest Baltimore. The victim told police he was leaving an address near there when an unknown male began following him, pulled a handgun and started shooting before fleeing. The victim, whose identity was not released, was taken to an area hospital, where his condition was unknown.

BREAKING NEWS: Police are at this hour are investigating a suspicious death at a home inthe 2700 block of Matthews St. North Baltimore. An adult female was found face down at that location.

Baltimore County incidents:

Three people were stabbed and a man was shot in separate incidents Saturday night and early Sunday in Baltimore County, a police spokesman said.

The stabbings occurred around 11:30 p.m. in the 3600 block of Florida Road off Liberty Heights Avenue, after a disturbance broke out at a carnival being held at Security Square Mall. All three stabbing victims were taken to local hospitals with nonfatal wounds, the police spokesman said. The spokesman provided no information on the victims' identities, and said police had no suspects.

A man was shot around 12:30 a.m. Sunday at the Windsor Inn in the 7200 block of Windsor Mill Road, police said. The victim, also not identified, was taken to a local hospital. Police have no suspects in that incident, the spokesman said.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Baltimore County, East Baltimore