The latest sign came Sunday, when her family returned from a weekend trip to find the mailbox torn off its stand and garden flowers stolen from their Owings Mills rancher. But even before then, Christina Pollikof knew it was time to go. Unfamiliar teen-agers were playing on the trampoline out back and throwing apples at her dog.
It didn't matter that this was her home of three years, that she and her husband invested hundreds of hours fixing up the place. Fearing for her safety, Pollikof wouldn't look outside the window anymore. And fearing for the well-being of their 14-year-old daughter, Pollikof and her husband decided it was time to leave the neighborhood.
"It was not like this when we first moved in, but it's really gotten bad within the last year," Pollikof, 35, said Monday, as she swept the street outside her home on the Reisterstown line. "The neighborhood is going down."
Many of the residents who came in droves to this rapidly growing community in northwestern Baltimore County to escape the problems of Baltimore and other urban areas express concern that the crime has followed them.
They worry when they read newspaper police blotters that regularly report crimes including burglaries and automobile thefts.
Even more worrisome, they say, is a string of six killings since last summer, including the fatal shooting of a burglary victim in February, a drug-related shooting at Owings Mills Mall in December and two killings this month.
"If anyone had any misperceptions that the problems of the city stop at the city line, it has blown the lid off," Del. Bobby A. Zirkin, who represents the area, said of the crime. "Things that you don't hear about in the suburbs are moving out" to Owings Mills, he added. "People are concerned. It's a shock."
To be sure, not all residents complain. The leader of Tollgate's community group said his Owings Mills neighborhood suffers from nothing more than occasional graffiti and teen-agers walking down the middle of the road.
And Owings Mills remains safe for most, Baltimore County police say. The recent killings were not random acts of violence. They involved people who knew each other and often were out-of-towners, authorities say.
"It is a stable, safe neighborhood," Bill Toohey, a police spokesman, said of Owings Mills. "It has crime -- every place in America has crime."
But crime once unheard of in Owings Mills is creeping into its neat rows of townhouses, balconied apartment complexes and spacious mall.
