Linda Dennis doesn't want to move.
Sadly, it might be her only choice.
She says she has received more threats since the windows of her two cars were shattered because of her refusal to sell her aging white Volvo sedan to a drug dealer in her neighborhood near Pimlico Race Course.
Dennis discovered the damage Tuesday morning, and I found her while headed to a fatal shooting two blocks away. She talked to me - feeling that going public was the only way to get attention - dealt with her insurance company, got a rental car and drove to the Pennsylvania line to her job as a home health aide.
She returned home about 11 that night.
"I pulled up, and there were all kinds of cars and trucks in front of my house," Dennis told me yesterday when I called to make sure she was OK. "Guys were standing in the street. When I tried to park, one of them came up to me and said they had a bullet with my name on it."
Dennis said she sped off to the Northwestern District police station and got an escort home. When I called yesterday, she was talking with two Baltimore police officers from the Community Services Division. Officer Keith Harrison was trying to persuade her to move, at least for a while.
"I understand that she doesn't want to go," Harrison told me. "Ms. Dennis paid for her house and she doesn't want to be chased out of her community."
Harrison is assigned to Lt. Col. Rick Hite, who works with the city's youth and heads the department's Community Services Division. I met Hite in 1996 when he was a sergeant in the Eastern District and decided one day that loiterers had taken over the corners.
I went out with him as he rounded up kids and sent them to Central Booking in the back of a wagon. That most were released a few hours later didn't matter. The Eastern District was sending a message. Hite told one: "One way or another, we will get you to understand."
Twelve years later, I don't think the message has sunk in.
Hite told me yesterday that he watched the video clip of Dennis on The Baltimore Sun's Internet site "and felt compelled to get involved."
He sent two of his officers to Dennis' rowhouse, the house in which she grew up, moved away from and returned to so that her ailing mother could die at home. Instead of shade trees and friendly neighbors, she found police surveillance cameras and drug dealers.
