Monday, June 27, 2011

Why Do We Kill?

Former homicide detective Kelvin Sewell and IV reporter Stephen Janis try to answer that question in their new book which includes the inside scoop on some of the city's worst homicide cases

You Tell 'em Marta Mossburg

Marta Mossburg muses on the raison d'être of the Baltimore Development Corporation: "Is it for the sake of taxpayers or for the sake of itself and a few developers who have benefitted at the same time the city sheds thousands of jobs each year?"

Friday, June 24, 2011

Indentities and so much more...

Several Recent Homicide Victims Identified:

94. 6 person shooting death Id'd as Charles Lassane, age 55.

95. Still unidentified at the moment.

96. Edge-tomb Circle victim Id'd as 52-year-old Anthony Carr.

97. Id'd as 23-year-old Andre Womack.

27-year-old Thomas Green has been arrested for the hit and run of two Hopkins students from early May.

Police release new details, actually, 8 pages worth of new details to be exact, regarding the February 2010 shooting of unarmed informant Dennis Gregory.

Newly convicted cabbie-killer Robert Lee Murphy was sentenced to Life plus 20 for the killing of a Frederick cab driver.

An inmate facing Capital murder charges for the 2006 killing of a now defunct "House of Correction" prison guard loses his pretrial appeal.

Youth is fleeting, especially when you spend it in prison... is what 14-year-old Shemarr Gilbert will realize, after being arrested on first-degree rape charges.

PG County congressman Jack Johnson's wife will plead guilty next week to charges relating to her husbands political corruption.

In keeping with a recent disturbing trend in Maryland courts, the 1994 Manslaughter conviction of Ricky Savoy has been overturned.

A Baltimore priest has been banned from Catholic ministry in light of a recent child sexual abuse case.

In the first of what will soon become a flurry of guilty pleas, two Baltimore cops plead guilty to extortion relating to their involvement in the Baltimore Police towing scandal. 28-year-old Jermaine Rice and 41-year-old David Reeping are scheduled to be sentenced later this year.

Watch out Maryland bath salt enthusiasts! Bath salts have now been officially banned in PA, adding to the growing number of states to have officially banned the sale of the drug.

Gilmor Homes drug dealer "Mud" is sentenced to 13 years in the Federal pen.

Unsubtle

Study: lighter-skinned women get shorter prison sentences (in North Carolina anyway)

Monday, June 20, 2011

Gitit gurl!

... the local news is full of corpses today, but they can stay dead because I am giddy with happiness that finally a Baltimore musician has achieved International-level celebrity (the first since Mario, right?) ... if you haven't checked out Rye Rye yet you oughter, she's an M.I.A.-protege now with a soon-to-heavily rotate 104.3-ful single with Robyn. Here she is performing somewhere in Baltimore (& awesome official video for "Hardcore Girls", is that her grandma?) ... & a Britney Spears cover with a video that looks like it was filmed in juvie. You must love her!

Ok, back to corpses...

Friday, June 17, 2011

Henson -> Icing -> Cake

Slumlord Watch reports that alleged robo-calling mastermind Julius Henson is also owner of a weed-tree riddled aspiring crack house on Liberty Heights Ave.

That's going to hurt

The Maryland Court of Appeals has overturned the convictions of triple-child killers Policarpio Espinoza Perez and Adan Canela.

Rats!

Ehrlich's aides Julius Henson and Paul Schurick were indicted for conspiracy to violate election laws for those "relax" robocalls, and Bykowicz + Linskey have all the deets. Apparently the call list came from Henson's previous clients...

TDR bullet-points the Office of Legislative Audits' shocking discoveries in Frank Conaway's office

"'Beware the Ides of March,' Julius Caesar was warned before he was stabbed to death on March 15. But Michael Smith, an inmate in the Maryland correctional system, had no such warning on March 15, 2007," sayeth Van Smith, when members of the Bloods gang, allegedly angered by his performance as a behind-bars pot dealer, stabbed him in a prison van. Now his meticulous lawsuit exposes the City Detention Center's piss-poor non-efforts at controlling gang networks

Blog comment of the day: "dontae nichols u need to die for shootng montrell williams i hope brun in hell"

Owner of Cockeysville's Padonia Park Club, a "swim and child care center," charged in child porn case. "... detectives seized a Dell laptop computer with images of young girls that Rigger allegedly used at the Jennifer Road pool and at his home." Wait, what?

and don't miss Rat Bites Cop, replete with a photo of the perp in a baggie

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Oh, Frank

What is it going to take for the city to get rid of this doddering bozo whose incompetence cost taxpayers $7.8 MILLION in just one year?

.. two more fatal shootings bring the mid-year toll to 93.

& shiteous father->mother- & two-daughter stabbing this morning in Crofton.

and Baltimoreans' life expectancy is a smidge better than it was a decade ago, but still some sobering numbers, eg. "average life expectancy in Hollins Market is 20 years shorter than in wealthier Roland Park." (also see "Shocking Stats Dept.")

What's going on at Hopkins? A whole lotta shroomin'!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Closet-peeping HoCo video pedocop pleads

Former Laurel police officer pled guilty to receiving kid porn about a year after HoCo police discovered he'd placed a hidden camera in a minor female’s closet and possessed sadomasochistic images and videos of children under 12. And in Bowie, one John Shutt pled guilty to possessing and distributing child porn, a hobby he admits to dabbling in for the past quindecade.

... In honor of these pervs I've added Tiger, Tiger to the librury-- horrific-but-enlightening memoir of a woman's 14-year relationship with a pedophile. Also the Gift of Fear, which I now have to re-read to get over being traumatized by the memoir.

BPD Police Admin chief leaving

amidst rumors of some re-shuffling in top command....

Killing us softly

Check out this report on the city's water quality. Chloroform?! Radium and Uranium?!?!

Monday, June 13, 2011

Elijah Cummings' Nephew Fatally Shot in Random Robbery

... not here in Baltimore, but at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Tragic.

in other news, no murders since two on Thursday night, it looks like. Whoops, I take that back, a 23-year-old man fatally shot in West Baltimore at 1:54 p.m. on Sunday.

"Dollar" got 25 years for illegal possession of a firearm and admitted to the 2009 murder of Kinlaw Jones

Eighteen months in the can for Tracy Queen, who was busted bilking the city for bogus tutoring by Brew contributor Joan Jacobson. Jacobson says she's still "waiting to find out what the city school system has done to prevent this theft from happening again.”

Thirty-seven months for Alicia Simmons, a former corrections employee accused of smuggling heroin and other goodies to imprisoned BGF members

Former ministry director at Loyola University accused of sex abuse of two minors in HoCo

Baltimore cop to attend Harvard Law

"A former Montgomery County police officer who pleaded guilty to illegally using computers to help her drug-dealing fiancé is set to be sentenced"

.. and here's something to burn yr britches: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention." Right on the heels of the conclusion of the Thomas Drake case, in which we learned that the government has been spending billions to stockpile citizens' every text and email. (How incredible to go in one generation from being worried about the Reds taking over to seeing our own government adopt the Stasi style, right down to the Division of Garbage Analysis (and without even the paper trail of accountability)

No word on Select Lounge shooting

But lots more training for the BPD. Maybe they could just tell us....