Around Maryland

When Bree Jones was a financial analyst in New York City, her visits home to nearby New Rochelle, N.Y., distressed her. Neighborhoods were changing fast, displacing many who had lived there for decades, Jones said. Luxury apartment buildings were popping up where homeowners and renters scraped by. She organized a group of concerned citizens to pressure the developer and the city government to keep some of the buildings’ units affordable, but it was too late.

The gunman responsible for the 2018 murders of Capital Gazette employees Gerald Fischman, Robert Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole Tuesday — three years and three months after the deadly attack. “The impact of this case is just simply immense,” Judge Michael Wachs said moments before delivering Jarrod Ramos’ sentence. “To say that the defendant exhibited a callous and complete disregard for the sanctity of human life is simply a high understatement.”

Maryland State Police will use a new mass spectrometer to quickly test drugs connected to overdoses in an effort to remove dangerous batches from the streets and prevent overdose deaths, which have been ticking upward for the second year in a row. The Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART) Mass Spectrometer will test prescription opioids, heroin, fentanyl, and drug paraphernalia collected by law enforcement and harm reduction programs to identify the composition and potency of those drug samples.

Baltimore Police officers largely upheld protesters rights during nightly demonstrations in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, a review by the agency has found. The police department issued its “Assessment of 2020 First Amendment Protected Activities” report as required as part of a federal consent decree, assessing how officers treated individuals demonstrating in response to Floyd’s death in May and June 2020. The report also looked at the department’s response to protests at Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Baltimore during the Republican National Convention in August last year.

Cecilia Fenwick has been on home detention for nearly 90 days and the fees associated with her electronic monitoring services have put a strain on her wallet. “July the 1st, I was released from Baltimore County Detention Center and ever since I’ve been paying my home detention, every piece, every few weeks,” she said during a phone interview Wednesday. Fenwick was referred to the Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT) to help her pay up to $243 for her home monitoring service every few weeks.

Less than two weeks after announcing stricter quarantine guidelines for unvaccinated students possibly exposed to COVID-19, Montgomery County Public Schools officials on Tuesday backtracked, announcing they will no longer require “close contacts” to quarantine while awaiting test results. On Friday evening of the first week of school, MCPS officials announced that any unvaccinated student considered a close contact of someone with a symptom that could be associated with COVID-19 would be required to quarantine until the symptomatic student provided a negative test.

Through the ebbs and flows of the coronavirus pandemic, the phone calls have kept coming. A small army of so-called contact tracers has worked to stem transmissions by dialing Marylanders infected with COVID-19 to ask that they isolate themselves and consider who else they may have exposed so they, too, could be rung up. More than a million calls later, the massive effort was supposed to end next month with the closing of the state’s main call center, which is run by NORC, a nonprofit affiliate of the University of Chicago.

Maryland is almost done distributing $1 million in incentives for youngsters to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Every 12- to 17-year-old in the state who’s gotten at least one shot is automatically eligible for a chance to win a $50,000 college scholarship. “We still have four more scholarships to draw next Monday, Labor Day, and we’re really urging everybody 12 to 17, ‘Go get your shot this week, so that you’re eligible for the drawing on Monday,’” Maryland Secretary of Health Dennis R. Schrader said.