The State of Maryland v. Walter Grant commenced on time and on schedule at 8:30 a.m. Oct. 28 in Room 3 of the District Courthouse on East North Avenue. Grant faced charges of taking a blue Honda Civic with keys stolen during a burglary of a home in Carney in August.
The judge was there. The prosecutor was there. The defense attorney was there. Walter Grant was there. Honda owner Matthew Crouch was there.
The only person not there was Officer Ronald J. Wilson Jr., a member of an auto theft task force who had found the missing car in September and had arrested Grant in East Baltimore.
No officer, no case.
Prosecutors dropped the unauthorized-use charge against the 61-year-old suspect, a three-time convicted drug felon, and sent him home, leaving Crouch and his wife feeling scared and betrayed.
Marianne Crouch has worked for the city for 30 years, most recently as a fiscal supervisor in the wastewater division of the Department of Public Works, and now, she wrote me in an e-mail, she and her husband "no longer feel safe in the metropolitan Baltimore area since we know that we cannot rely on the officers who are paid to protect us."
But this one wasn't Officer Wilson's fault.
A series of blunders, bureaucratic tunnel vision and lack of common sense conspired to keep Wilson far from the witness stand. At 8:30 a.m., as the trial commenced, he was in his eighth-floor office on East Joppa Road at the Towson police headquarters where his unit is based, ready and available but unaware that he was needed to testify.
Putting a court summons in the hands of a police officer would seem like an easy task. Yet after years of top-level meetings to streamline and update an antiquated system, considering everything from e-mail notifications to automated phone calls, hundreds of officers in Baltimore each month miss court dates, forcing prosecutors to drop hundreds of cases.
To explain how Wilson missed his court date (and I warn you, the explanation will be excruciating) we have to begin at the beginning, the night of Aug. 18, when the Crouches went to bed and left a door to their home unlocked. Someone broke in, took Marianne Crouch's purse and used her keys to steal their Honda Civic.
At 4:33 p.m. Sept. 22, Wilson checked the plate number of a blue Honda Civic parked with its motor running in front of a house on East Federal Street. It had been reported stolen, and the officer arrested the man in the driver's seat, Walter Grant.
