Back Seat

Ursula Williams' movie date at the Inner Harbor turned into a horror show that left her in the hospital on her birthday with a bullet wound in the knee.On her way to see "The Night of the Living Dead" Sunday night, Williams was hit in the knee by a stray bullet that apparently ricocheted off the pavement. She says she met the gunman minutes later in the back seat of a car that was taking her to the hospital.But police gave a less dramatic account of the shooting that made no mention of a face-to-face encounter between victim and gunman.

Andrew Ray Sturgil and Stephanie Ann Dorsey met just weeks ago. Sturgil, a 31-year-old native of Kentucky, was in Maryland to see his young daughter. He met Dorsey, 24, through acquaintances renting the upstairs of the Glen Burnie home where Dorsey had been staying, according to a family friend. Soon after the couple met, they began dating, the friend said. "She was just real carefree, just always happy, always having a good time," said Amanda Guy, the family friend who also lives in the home on Ferndale Road.

SAFETY PRACTICES involving automobiles have evolved over the years as much as the vehicles themselves. Most parents today, for example, would not dream of traveling down the highway in the front seat with their child on their lap, as their mothers may have done when they were young. Parents strap their kids into crash-absorbent safety seats today not only because it's the law, but also because more is known about protecting life and limb in vehicle crashes.Regarding seat-belt use, however, time has stood still -- or at least has not advanced as far as public policy has in other areas of highway safety.

Motorists can have on-off switches installed on their air bags beginning tomorrow, but relatively few in Maryland and nationwide have applied to do so.About 5,500 vehicle owners, including 110 Marylanders, have received federal permission for the switches, and 1,000 are waiting for approval, which is largely automatic.The small number is a sign that despite fears about air bag safety last year, most motorists think they are better off with the safety devices than without, said Phil Frame, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

This story isn't supposed to be about the crime. It's supposed to be about what happened after the crime. At least, that's how the victim -- I'll call her Mary to protect her identity -- wants it.The crime against her occurred three weeks ago, while the state was threatening to cut funds to rape-recovery centers. The way Mary tells the story, it's scary to think what she might have gone through had those cuts already been made.The crime started in northwest Baltimore, near Mary's home, and ended in northeast Baltimore two hours later.

My parents will KILL me," the little girl in the car pool sobbed.Normally, this 4-year-old was the world's most even-tempered child. What had thrown her? She was sitting in a borrowed car whose retro-fitted seat belts didn't look like what her parents had taught her was safe.We eventually talked the girl into the seat belt - which was safe - and didn't think much about the incident until the recent controversy over the safety of automobile air bags brewed up. If more adults were as responsible now as that girl's parents had taught her to be, the air bag controversy would have fizzled long before it started.

The region's late-spring heat wave ended with a bang overnight as a barrage of showers and thunderstorms pummeled the area, cutting power, toppling trees and frightening drivers. More than 58,000 customers in Central Maryland had lost power by 10 p.m. as the storms rolled toward the Baltimore region, according to BGE. The wind and rain boiled up ahead of a cool front moving out of the Midwest, which is expected to reduce the humidity that has smothered the area since Saturday. However, the storms that brought the cooler weather were fierce - and nearly fatal.

Five-year-old Gerald "Little Jerry" Gorham is tiring of his recent star status. He'd rather chat with his mom about a school party than talk on "Good Morning America" about the car wreck that seriously injured him almost eight months ago.But his parents, Tonya and Gerald Gorham, believe the safety advice they discovered after the accident is too important to keep to themselves.As the "spokesfamily" for last week's Child Passenger Safety Week -- a nationwide effort to reduce the misuse of child car restraints sponsored by the Safe Kids Campaign -- the Columbia family has shared its story with nationwide audiences, including a five-minute segment on ABC's morning news program and a news conference at Washington's Planet Hollywood.

It was a beautiful day at the beach -- blue sky, gentle breeze, calm sea. I knew these things because a man sitting five feet from me was shouting them into his cellular telephone, like a play-by-play announcer. "IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY," he shouted. "THE SKY IS BLUE, AND THERE'S A BREEZE, AND THE WATER IS CALM, AND ..." Behind me, a woman, her cell phone pressed to her ear, was pacing back and forth. "She didn't," she was saying. "No. She didn't. She did? Really? Are you serious? She did not. She did?

The 16-year-old girl, who is blind, held the prosecutor's arm and was ushered to the witness stand. She said she "met" the man accused of raping her through a telephone "party line" and invited him to her Glen Burnie home on the afternoon of St. Patrick's Day 1990.Sniffling and frequently hesitating, she went on to say Philip Michael Saunders and his friend, Bryon Charles Morrow, drove her to the parking lot of the Harundale Mall. Both raped her there in Morrow's Chevrolet Monte Carlo, she said.