Hagerstown police figured they were searching for a witness to a murder, a 23-year-old woman who'd moved out there from Annapolis a few months earlier.
A phone call to the Annapolis Police Department changed their minds.
"I'd look at her as a suspect," Annapolis police detective David Stokes told them. Three years earlier, the woman had tried to pull a gun on him during an arrest. "And when you find her, approach with caution. This girl is really violent."
Her name is Michelle "Michelle Hell" Hebron. She is one of five women indicted by a federal grand jury as members of the Tree Top Piru gang, a set of Bloods that authorities say sold drugs in Baltimore, threatened and hurt those who opposed them and killed at least five people in the past two years.
Hebron's suspected criminal activities typify a new kind of fearlessness that investigators say they are seeing more and more in female gang members.
She stands 5-foot-3, her hair thick with long twists, but it's the scowl on her face and the swagger in her walk that the officers who have arrested her over the years remember most.
Of the 28 gang members under indictment, Hebron faces some of the most serious accusations. Authorities believe she killed the Hagerstown man because she suspected he betrayed the Bloods - and then wrote a poem about it. Months earlier, authorities allege, she shot a Tree Top member in Baltimore because she suspected he was cooperating with police. That man survived.
"Murder is necessary, but positivity is powerful," Hebron allegedly wrote in a May 30, 2007, letter to the gang leader. "I will chew a [racial slur] up then go to McDonald's and eat a double cheeseburger like it's nothing."
At her March 27 federal arraignment on racketeering charges, Hebron pleaded not guilty. She was ordered held without bail as she awaits trial and the possibility of other serious charges. Federal prosecutors say a first-degree murder indictment could come this summer - making her eligible for the death penalty.
"She is scared," said her attorney, Jensen Barber. "She is very scared, of course."
At Hebron's arraignment and detention hearing, Barber described the case against his client as "innuendo upon innuendo."
The role of the female members of Tree Top Piru - the "Pirettes," as they called themselves - surprised some investigators. The women, Hebron in particular, seemed as dangerous as the men.
