Around Maryland

The family of Renardo Green, a former Annapolis employee whose 2021 death in police custody was ruled a homicide, has until Wednesday to respond to the city’s request to dismiss their $75 million lawsuit. The federal complaint, filed in December on behalf of Green’s wife and four children, lists 20 counts against the city, including gross negligence, excessive force and wrongful death. In the early morning of June 1, 2021, Green was in Annapolis Police custody, restrained face down on a stretcher, when he suffered cardiac arrest. He was placed on a ventilator before dying in the hospital three days later.

Summer may be the best time to visit the beach, but winter is my favorite time to visit Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Through the loblolly, many of them becoming spindlier by the day because of intruding saltwater, drivers can see the creeks, necks and rivers that define this landscape. They are the waters from which many men and women eked out a living, and which provided the tools to camouflage an escape to freedom.

Virginia lawmakers are making their final push to build a new FBI headquarters in their state, while Maryland officials try to persuade the federal government to put it in Maryland. The Washington Post reports that the jockeying is happening as the General Services Administration gets closer to a decision in the decade-plus-long effort. In a letter to the GSA and FBI submitted Feb. 3, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, and most of the Virginia congressional delegation made a detailed case in hopes of swaying the federal government to prefer a site in Springfield, Virginia, instead of locations in Landover and Greenbelt in Maryland.

A sweeping vision to revitalize south Baltimore’s shoreline and 19 adjacent communities has been officially endorsed by the city. Baltimore’s Planning Commission voted 7 to 0 on Thursday to adopt a master plan developed to improve 11 miles of shoreline along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in south Baltimore. The commission meeting was the culmination of a multi-year effort led by a consortium of stakeholders from the public and private sectors. Its vote means the Reimagine Middle Branch Plan now has the formal backing of Baltimore’s government, affirmation that will assist in both funding and implementation. No other public body has to vote on the plan, and no legislation must be signed into law for it to take effect.

A woman accused of plotting an attack on Baltimore’s power grid wanted to draw attention to the white supremacist ideology she embraced during years spent in prison, where she acquired a swastika tattoo and increasingly radical, racist views, her family said. Sarah Beth Clendaniel, who believed her days were numbered because of serious health conditions, is accused of conspiring with a Florida-based neo-Nazi leader, planning to shoot out several electrical substations around Baltimore and create chaos in the majority-Black city.