Apartments

A Jamaican woman received a life sentence Friday for murder in connection with the 2009 death of a man in a White Marsh apartment - after which officials say she and her co-conspirators dismembered the body and disposed of pieces in the Loch Raven and Liberty Road areas. Jean Brown, 43, of Jamaica, was sentenced by a U.S. District Judge. Federal investigators said she was one of the leaders of a group that obtained marijuana in Arizona and California and transported it to Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York.

A federal judge on Monday sentenced a Baltimore County man to 11 years in prison and ordered him to pay close to $200,000 in restitution to victims of a wire fraud and identity theft scheme that victimized Johns Hopkins doctors, among some 250 others, the U.S. Justice Department said. Derrick Hill, 53, of Woodlawn, previously pleaded guilty to the charges, along with co-conspirators Renee Cabell, 51, John Coffey, 43, and Tawney King, 46. Authorities said Hill and the other defendants stole identities, then cashed counterfeit checks and rented apartments in the names of victims.

The Harford County Sheriff's Office says it is looking for a man in connection with two armed robberies that occurred seven hours apart late Wednesday and early Thursday at a Subway sandwich shop and a Royal Farms store east of Bel Air. The latest of the two holdups occurred around 4 a.m. Thursday at the Royal Farms in the 1600 block of Churchville Road, the Sheriff's Office said in a news release Friday morning. Deputies responded to the convenience store, which is at the Fountain Green intersection of Routes 22 and 533, where the cashier told them they had been robbed at gunpoint.

An 18-year old Annapolis resident who last week was arrested and charged with marijuana possession on a school bus at Annapolis High School was arrested on Tuesday night at an apartment and charged with marijuana possession, according to Annapolis police. According to a Wednesday morning police report, Luis Ruiz of Annapolis was arrested after officers received a report around 9:05 p.m. on Tuesday that he was selling drugs on the 1100 block on Madison Street. Officers subsequently approached Ruiz when he left the area and ran into an apartment on the 1000 block of President Street, police said.

For the first time in three trials in the 2004 slashing deaths of three children in Northwest Baltimore, jurors on Monday heard a nine-year-old statement by one of the suspects describing his nephew emerging shirtless from a rear window of the apartment in which the victims were killed. The tape-recorded statement by Policarpio Espinoza Perez, charged in the killings with his nephew, Adan Espinoza Canela, was played in Baltimore Circuit Court for the first time since the May 2004 killings of three young relatives because he is now being tried separately.

More than 1,300 young, single soldiers, sailors and other service members drive to Fort Meade every work day because they don't live on post - can't, actually, because the barracks are full and other homes there are for families. The Army installation isn't about to get millions of dollars to build more housing, not with the defense budget falling. Instead, it's getting the Army's first privately developed garden apartments for the unmarried junior-enlisted crowd, with costs covered by the developer.

Laurel police report felonies, arrests and property crimes. City of Laurel Eighth Street, 800 block, 9:53 a.m. March 4. Tools valued at $9,000 taken from maintenance shed at Laurel Park Apartments. Baltimore Ave., 14700 block, 8:07 p.m. March 4. Three juveniles arrested for shoplifting $461 worth of merchandise at Burlington Coat Factory. Baltimore Avenue , 14500 block, 9:59 p.m. March 4. Driver arrested for driving under influence of alcohol. Baltimore Avenue, 13600 block, 10:49 p.m. March 4. Laurel woman arrested for trespassing at Shopper's Food Warehouse.

Taking a hard line on the owner's responsibility for a pet's behavior, the state Senate on Thursday unanimously passed its version of a bill intended to reverse a court decision declaring pit bulls an inherently dangerous breed. Senate passage sets up a likely conflict with the House, which has taken a significantly different approach to the issue of a dog owner's liability for bites. Both versions of the bill set the same rules for all breeds, without singling out pit bulls, but the two chambers set different standards for a dog owner to avoid liability when a pet bites someone.

In case anyone has missed the dueling budget proposals out this week from Rep. Paul Ryan on the Republican side and Sen. Patty Murray for the Democrats, don't fret. You could easily have slept through the last four months and missed nothing. They are pretty much where the two sides have been for even longer than that. And that pretty well sums up where Washington stands on the issue of federal spending, taxes and the deficit. Both parties have won approval to some degree from voters for taking these stands, and so the incentive for actually coming up with a compromise is clearly too small for either to go out on a limb — at least for the moment.

Mary E. Weaver, a former nursery school educator who later managed a Baltimore senior living apartment building, died Feb. 22 of complications from leukemia at Stella Maris Hospice. The longtime Jacksonville-area resident was 82. The daughter of farmers, Mary Elizabeth Hoover was born and raised in Ronks, Pa., in rural Lancaster County. She was a 1948 graduate of East Lamperter High School, and two years later married Kenneth N. Weaver, a geologist. The couple lived in the city's Pimlico neighborhood.