Police conducted surveillance of his relatives. They searched 44 houses for him in a single day. And they staked out his mother's apartment in Owings Mills on holidays, hopeful that the long-missing witness to the only school shooting in Baltimore County's history might try to sneak home on Mother's Day or Thanksgiving.
And yet, for three years, Ronald P. Johnson Jr. was not found -- until he identified himself during a traffic stop in Baltimore in November.
Johnson, now 24, pleaded guilty yesterday to one count of obstruction of justice for failing to show up to testify at the 2004 trial in the Randallstown High School shootings case. He was sentenced to a year of home detention and was released to await the trial of the suspect whom authorities said they could not prosecute without Johnson's testimony.
"Any time a state's witness refuses to come to court, there's some kind of consequence to be dealt with," prosecutor Daniel Trimble said. "This case just had the limelight to have attention drawn to it."
It has been nearly four years since gunshots rang out across the parking lot of Randallstown High on a sunny Friday afternoon in May as a charity basketball game was letting out.
When a fistfight outside the school turned into a brawl, one man pulled a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol and fired several rounds into the crowd before handing off the weapon to a student, who kept shooting until the gun was empty. Four students were hit, including one who was paralyzed from the waist down after bullets pierced his neck, back and lung.
The two gunmen were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of 50 and 100 years, respectively.
But prosecutors said they could not proceed with their case against the last suspect -- Antonio R. Jackson, who had been accused of bringing the Glock handgun to the school that day, handing it to one of the shooters and driving the black BMW in which the suspects fled -- without the testimony of Johnson. He had been missing since November 2004, when officers fanned out across the Baltimore area but could not find him to serve a summons for the trials of Jackson and a co-defendant.
In January 2005, prosecutors dismissed all charges against Jackson, of Owings Mills. But authorities kept searching for Johnson.
Although prosecutors have offered little about the hunt for the missing witness at various court hearings over the years, Trimble offered the most detailed account of their efforts yesterday, drawing astonished looks from some of Johnson's friends and relatives who were in court.
