Around Maryland

Baltimore County public school leaders pledged this month to address numerous recommendations made by an outside consultant in an effort to cut costs within the state’s third largest school system. Superintendent Darryl Williams and school board chairwoman Makeda Scott delivered separate updates for the public Tuesday on plans to address the recommendations in a more than 750-page report produced by consultant Public Works LLC. Baltimore County officials hired the firm in February to review both county government and the school system in hopes of identifying cost savings.

In 2016, Nicholas Fletcher said, he was in the process of moving out of his Baltimore home when several bats migrating from his neighbor’s bat-infested house swept in through the chimney and into his basement. As Fletcher was ushering the winged creatures from his home, he was bitten on his left foot leaving a faint but potentially life-threatening red mark. With little hesitation, Fletcher decided to get treated at the nearest emergency room.

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.