Tuesday, December 20, 2005

December 20

Mohamed Abukar Barre, 26, was shot in the head on E. Belvedere Avenue. Also a 13-year-old assaulted a woman in the Eastern.

Raymont Hopewell has been charged in the murders of five senior citizens between 1999 and August 2005: Sadie Mack, 78, Carlton Crawford, 82, Constance Willis, 60, Sarah Shannon, 88 and Lydia Wingfield, 78, are all believed to be his victims. Correction to the Sun report, he was charged with three counts of murder (not five) overnight (he was charged with two Friday). Hopewell appeared before a court commissioner and was held without bail today. A bail review hearing before a District Court judge is expected to be scheduled for tomorrow.

A 45-year-old man got 15 1/2 years in federal prison for selling harerwin.

A 14-year-old admitted to the murder of Jerrod Hamlett, 23, and will serve a seven-year-sentence. The victim was killed after complaining that the boy was throwing bottles. The boy was a member of the "Cutthroat" gang, selling crack out of the Oswego Mall apartments.

More info on the Johnanthan Luna case: apparently the federal prosecutor was asked to take a poygraph over some missing cash soon before he was found dead.

In Glen Burnie, a man was charged with traffic violations in an accident that cost an offier his leg.

Dude. More than 100 pot plants were found in the woods near Wheaton. Who knew they could even tolerate this clime? (Grammar school: when a paper gets stories from the AP, all an editor has to do is write a headline. Still, this WJZ headline contains two violations of AP style. Can you spot them?)

Thank God: Intelligent Design has been thrown out of PA biology classes.

Galt, I can't find anything about the Greemount & 27th shooting, let me know if you hear anything...

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Then they showed people in the neighborhood pictures of the suspect. That led them to arrest 22-year-old"

Anonymous said...

You should fix your multiple typos before giving us grief over style guides.

Anonymous said...

Men's Health magazine awards Charm Sh*tty an F for Safety and an F for Quality of Life, among other things.

Maurice Bradbury said...

Dear "anonymous"-- I'm an unpaid volunteer (and professional writer by day) who might strike a wrong key sometime. If you report for a living for a media outlet (say, oh I dunno, WJZ) and you don't know what a compound modifier is (hint: "100-pounds" is not one), and your editors can't be bothered to check your style, you need a new job -- you're working for as bunch of hacks and you're going nowhere. Try selling cars.
Zing!

Maurice Bradbury said...

I'll be psyched if you can sell "over" one car. Loser.

Anonymous said...

Ummm... if a person kills 5 people since 1999 doesn't that make him a serial killer? News outlets seems really scared to use that term!

Anonymous said...

How about serial offender? Oh, that's right... we already have a term for that.... Baltimorean.

Anonymous said...

What do you call a Baltimorean in a suit?

The Defendant.

Anonymous said...

What do you call a guy who's sure he's sorry but forgets what for?


A Maryland parolee.

Anonymous said...

Here's the shooting:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.slaying21dec21,1,4274881.story?coll=bal-local-headlines


The blotter is a sampling of a sampling. Hence, multiply crime stats by some rather large coefficient to get a sense of the reality.

Anonymous said...

Note: the TV news bumped the shooting in order to cover the breaking "Teen Returns Lost Wallet After Two Years". Only in Baltimore is a shooting & armed robbery a hum-drum event. Maybe that's why Baltimore is persistently on the Worst list of American cities.

Anonymous said...

I used to like this site, but you guys are getting a little out of control.

galt, I have yet to hear a decent solution/joke/missive/anything out of you.

Maurice Bradbury said...

There's a simple solution to that, elliot: stop reading!

This morning on JZ, Mary and Marty are interviewing a doll collector, and on WBAL I learned that American kids are really fat (heh heh, look at that fatty trying to do sit-ups! Now that's news I can use!) I also hear from the news that Rivers Cuomo finally got laid, Gwen Stefani's got a bun in the oven, and there's a crazy cat collector lady in Mt. Airy. With so much fascinating, unchallenging information out there, it's beyond me why anyone would want to read this site in the first place... I don't even want to write it, now that you mention it.

Anonymous said...

Well your just a link farm, anyone that reads the news knows the half dozen local sites to go to.

Maurice Bradbury said...

If you don't work for JZ, you should apply for a job there-- I've heard the main skill they require is being able to cram two or more grammatical errors in one sentence.

And if "your" paying attention, you'll note that there's an exclusive quite often, usually once a day: this past week there were "over" a "half dozen" = info on the time and location of Hopewell's bail review, the Heather Mink story, the NJ story of the lax coach (unreported in any Bmore sources), the Ellerby story, Brent Ross and Afiba Roebuck.

And even if this is "just a link farm," it's a sorry comment that no single daily source can manage to pull together a report of who's getting murdered, n'est-ce pas?

Anonymous said...

Sorry, John. I was having a bad morning. I just didn't think those jokes were funny.

Hey, Men's Health did rate us #1 in food safety, despite our "obession with seafood", something I dont really believe is true. Maybe they're not the best judge of Charm Shitty.

http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=health&category=metrogrades&conitem=b9c891cfa9c26010VgnVCM100000cfe793cd____

Maurice Bradbury said...

I chortled weakly at the "suit" joke.

Ah Baltimoreans, they can get away with murder but can't dress for the funeral for shit.

Anonymous said...

Warning: this is a long post.

My apologies if my humor is kinda dry. It's just that in a city with such obvious shortcomings, if you don't figure out some way to laugh at it, ya gotta cry and then ask "Why am I still in this godforsaken conurbation?"

The thing is, Bal'more is not beyond redemption. The solutions are quite simple from a systems analysis perspective. The only problem is that all the necessary policy instruments are under the control of politicians who subordinate the job of running a government properly to the need to appeal to a vast audience of hoodlums cum relatives in order to achieve re-election. This is why depriving felons of the vote is really an important safeguard: it ensures as against a government of, by, and for the hoodlums.

As a point of reference, Baltimore has 140 times the murder rate (ie. per capita) of the municipality in which I was raised. Thirty times the violent crime rate and six times the property crime rate.

Am I some naive farmboy from Ottumwa? No. B'more has about two and a half times the violent crime and property crime rates of New York City. We have more offenders than are contained within most states.

The enforcement problem is quite tractable. It's the politics of catering to an uncivilized underclass that poses the problem. I recently attended a community meeting with the BCPD and various city personnel because a group of residents were sick and tired of vandals and dealers intimidating them openly, responded to by BCPD officers with absolute indifference. The laws are clear: the hoods should have been arrested. The police commander agreed. Then a couple of local activists jumped in, demanding that that young males loitering and trespassing upon private property for the purpose of committing crimes not be arrested in 'their neighborhood', which they share with the aggrieved complainants. Effectively, they declared crimes committed upon their neighbors 'permissible' if the alternative was prosecution, as such prosecution would likely serve as an obstacle to the offenders' attaining their career potential in the future. The punks were referred to as the 'lawyers and surgeons' of the future. They don't go to school and can't spell surgeon! They are the INMATES of the future and (some of) my fellow citizens are running interference for them. I just wanna punch these folks in the snoot. I think this is called aiding and abetting, no? The facts of the crimes are not in question, nor really is the identity. When it's kinda normal to rally 'round the party in the wrong, you have a plain ol' bad city. Bad people. Bad parents. Bad role models. Bad city.

We're basically dealing with a significant population of subjectivists who intend that really basic statewide laws governing personal conduct should be unavailable as a protection to minorities in this city. The minority I'm referring to is middleclass, hard-working, educated, and basically law-abiding. If police are going to give in to pressure to 'look the other way' in inner-city neighborhoods, then those who CAN live elsewhere SHOULD live elsewhere. That's called segregation, no? Didn't we say that was a bad idea? And how about those who despite their propensity for clean living cannot muster the economic resources to flee the 'hood? Is it right for them to have to stay and thereby suffer 'permissible' crime?

No, clearly, those who break basic laws (jaywalking enforcement is a different issue) must be punished in a civilized city. It's called justice. Without it, you have... Baltimore.

The crime apologists drape themselves in the mantle of altruism, but they do unspeakable wrong to their unsuspecting neighbors, even if it's not possible to prosecute them for obstructing justice by political means.

The answer if for the State of Maryland to declare the City of Baltimore unable/unwilling to administer the basic Criminal Code for many years and to assume direction of the local policing function in much the way that it's had to take over the Balto. City Public School System.

The immediate solution is to increase the number of post patrolmen to a level which equalizes the ratio of sworn officers to hoodlums across jurisdictions. Because of the enormous violence quotient here, it will also be necessary to provide backup officers in addition to the above, as one man units get picked off here, unlike lower-crime jurisdictions. Additionally, you would probably impose a nightime curfew on minors in order to keep them out of play on the street, and a similar curfew on felony probationers for analogous reasons. You'd also likely shift emphasis from drug transactions to the misdemeanor and felony offenses which pay for them. I'd recommend a doubling of penalty for offending under the influence or in possession.

Unknown said...

So why are you here anonymous? Why? I read this blog because I can get REAL people's outlooks on whats going on and get info relevant to important things that are happening.
Like she said, a simple solution:stop reading... oh and btw, the half dozen sites you speak about must be in your fantasy world, because not one of the sites I checked for local news had anything to say about my brother's homicide, nor another that occured in the neighborhood not long after, and I tried 4 or 5 sites besides this one. So I'm local and if this a just a link farm then just let me fucking graze the pasture of links and your can mosey yourself right on out of this pasture