Police trying to determine if officers responded properly to shooting call; bodies found after officers left
The investigation into the three people who were shot and killed inside a Northeast Baltimore house that was set on fire took a new twist this afternoon:
Baltimore police officers responded early Tuesday to a citizen’s complaint of shots fired inside a house on Nicholas Avenue, but left after getting no response to their repeated knocks on the door or finding other evidence of a shooting, a department spokesman said.
Less than 90 minutes later, someone set the Northeast Baltimore house on fire, and firefighters found the bodies of two men and a woman who was critically injured. Each victim, police said, had been shot, and the woman died at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
City police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the department is examining how the patrol officers responded and whether they acted appropriately by not forcing their way inside the house in the Herring Run neighborhood.
Police acknowledge there is a possibility that the killer was still inside the house when the officer arrived, and at least one of the victims was still alive. The anonymous call for gunshots came in at 4:33 a.m., the officer arrived at 4:36 a.m. and left at 4:59 a.m., Guglielmi said.
Firefighters pulled up at 6:37 a.m., meaning there was a two hour delay between the time of the first call for help and when authorities rendered assistance. Police said they recovered physical evidence and that an accelerant was used to start the fire, but no suspects has been identified.
The victims identifications were not immediately released, but police said the dead are the 58-year-old homeowner, his 36-year-old daughter and her 27-year-old companion.
Guglielmi said the officers “made multiple attempts” to attract attention by banging on the front door and windows of the brick, end-of-group rowhouse in the 4300 block of Nicholas Ave. He also said the officers canvassed the neighborhood and knocked on doors of neighbors in an attempt to speak to them.
The spokesman said the review will include determining whether the officers could have forced their way inside the house, citing exigent circumstances that allow police to conduct warrantless entries in emergencies or life-threatening situations.
“We’re looking at it to determine if we did everything we could,” Guglielmi said. He noted that the officers did spend more than 20 minutes at the scene.
Comments
One night in my neighborhood, we heard about 5 shots and called BCPD. My husband has a scanner, so we turned it on. Officers responded, but we heard them talking to each other and laughing about how the call was just some paranoid person thinking they heard shots. Or that it was firecrackers. Just as they were about to stop searching, one of the officers noticed a car stopped but running. In it he found a young man with his head blown off. They stopped laughing after that.
Posted by: Jodie | July 26, 2011 5:54 PM
wow,,,,what a sad story
Posted by: WILLIAM Yarbrough | July 26, 2011 6:51 PM
The Northeast is fascinating. Those are some nice neighborhoods ups there, solid good families. But the bodies are piling up. Because I the Sun homicide map gives us enough information and I can work Google Maps well, I created a map that annotates all the pharmacies in the Northeast in blue and all the murder locations in red. Click on my name for the link to the map. It looks like there is some clustering happening.
Posted by: Cham | July 26, 2011 9:42 PM
Rock and hard place on this one... I fully understand that there must be a certain desensitization for BPD officers but when we call (Northern) we get some of the same crap as Jodie mentions. Once they said they came, and never did. They challenged our assertion that they never came. So we trotted out our security camera footage as proof. Silence from them. Go figure. Point is, I think the BPD thinks citizens ARE paranoid, and stupid, and somehow below them when it comes to evaluating what is criminal action or not. Look, anyone who's lived in this town for 6 months LEARNS the difference between fireworks and gunshots - not so we can call it in, but because the two are so constant (and BPD does jack about illegal fireworks too) we need to know what's going on ourselves. So when we DO call about gunshots, we KNOW they are gunshots. So scratch a little deeper BPD - this whole thing reeks of bad, or at best bored or jaded police work. Sorry if the job is hard for you. You took it on, you know where you work and what you were up against before you started. No excuses. Please try to do good (and many do) by the citizens you serve. Spending twenty minutes on scene isn't good police work btw, and Guglielmi should know better than to try to play it off like time is quality. Uh uh.
Oh, and congrats... there goes the possibility of a whole week without a murder. Nicely done Baltimore. Always in the clinch we manage to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
Posted by: baltobikeboi | July 27, 2011 1:42 AM
A reader suggested I compare and contrast the Northeast homicide locations with liquor store sites. So I created a second map with the homicides in red paddles and liquor stores in turquoise. Click on my name on this post to view the map. With the liquor store map I don't see a correlation like I saw the clustering of the homicides around the pharmacies.
I've posted this comment a second time because Peter Hermann says he may have deleted some posts and he can't figure out how to undo the delete utilizing his blog commenting application. If it double posts I apologize.
Posted by: Cham | July 28, 2011 8:44 AM
This call came out as anonymous caller claiming that there was discharging on the block of Nicholas, now this is a tragedy what occurred. But it was anonymous caller for discharging on the block of Nicholas, there was no address, police can investigate this but if you didnt get an address what police supposed to do? kick in every single door on that block, and then have citizens and get the department sued? anonymous caller and no address, not much you can do in this situation.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 28, 2011 10:01 PM