Basement

The thoughts tug at Bruce Raffel's mind and tumble his guts. Yet another Sunday night passes with little comfortable sleep. And as he tries to shift his mind to work on Monday, he just can't let go of the previous day's happenings. What if he had been able to tell Brian Billick to run on third-and-short instead of calling another fruitless pass? Might the Ravens have held on instead of crashing to another dispiriting loss? If you're wondering, Raffel doesn't work for the Ravens or any other NFL team.

FireLineboro: Firefighters from Lineboro, Manchester, Hampstead and York County, Pa., Station 52, responded at 4: 27 p.m. Thursday to smoke in a basement in the 3300 block of Tracey Mill Road. Units were out 31 minutes.

A Woodlawn truck driver was convicted yesterday of murdering his former girlfriend and hiding her body in his basement freezer for a year and 10 days, until his teen-age son found the body while looking for something to eat.The jury in the Baltimore County Circuit courtroom of Judge Lawrence R. Daniels convicted Corbett A. Powell, 42, of first-degree murder in the death of Deborah L. Blunt, a 7-Eleven clerk.During the three-day trial that began Tuesday, prosecutors Stephen Bailey and Marc Zayon presented evidence showing that Powell lied to police and to Blunt's relatives, saying he had no idea where she was after her disappearance May 9, 1998.

IT MADE NO SENSE. It was totally impractical. It was one of those rare occurrences, a few hours of spontaneous fun. The other night, on a whim, my 14-year-old son and I set up the model train in the living room.The living room floor is not the recommended spot to put a train. If you put a train track on the floor, there is a good chance someone will trip over it. Threading the tracks through the furniture can be problematic.A better spot would have been down in the basement, on top of the long, flat ping-pong table.

The 3-year-old East Baltimore boy who was shot at his home Sunday night with his father's gun died Tuesday night of a head wound at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.Police said Jordan Garris -- who had been in critical condition since suffering a single gunshot to the right side of his head in the basement of his North Ellwood Avenue rowhouse -- was pronounced dead at 8 p.m. Tuesday.The father, Cliff Garris, 23, also of the first block of N. Ellwood Ave., told detectives he was on the first floor of the house about 4 p.m. Sunday when he heard a gunshot in the basement.

Baltimore County police are investigating a Mays Chapel woman's claim that she was abducted in front of her home late Saturday.Alice Stonik Pauley, 43, of the first block of Castlebar Court, was found tied in the basement of a home in the 3700 block of Park Heights Ave. in Baltimore on Sunday morning after a woman going to church heard her cries for help, police said.Pauley was bound with duct tape around her forehead, waist and ankles, and a piece of white cloth was tied around her neck.

From the first month they moved in, when 12-foot-long cracks ran the length of the outside walls, something about Rich and Brenda Puderbaugh's brand-new suburban cul-de-sac home didn't seem quite right.Maybe it was the way the windows seemed to slope in the middle or the way the outside stairs pulled apart from the house, leaving a crack between the doorway and welcome mat. The couple would stand on their lawn, staring with their heads cocked first to the right, then to the left, looking for the root of the distressing feeling that something slow, something awful, was happening before their eyes.

A 3-year-old boy playing in the basement of his East Baltimore rowhouse with his father upstairs found a handgun hidden in bedding and accidentally shot himself in the head yesterday afternoon, police said.Jordan Garris, who lives in the first block of N. Ellwood Ave. with his parents and two sisters, ages 2 and 1, was in critical condition last night in the pediatric intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said a spokeswoman there.Police said they were investigating whether charges should be filed because the Ruger 9 mm semiautomatic handgun was not locked up.Baltimore law requires parents who keep weapons at home to have them unloaded and locked away so children can't get to them, said Sgt. Frederick H. Bealefeld III of the homicide unit.

There comes a time when every homeowner, faced with decades of accumulated clutter, decides to set his basement on fire. The wise alternative at this point is to seek help."

Conrad Himmer Jr., an accomplished model ship maker and railroad enthusiast, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at Bright-wood Center in Brooklandville. He was 82 and had lived in Cockeysville since 1983.Known as Connie, Mr. Himmer hand-built models of Chesapeake Bay overnight packet boats that steamed from Baltimore to Norfolk between 1815 and 1962. He faithfully copied them from original blueprints and mechanical drawings.The intricate and highly detailed vessels that were hand-carved from balsa wood were built on a scale of one-eighth or three-sixteenths of an inch to the foot, and often took from 400 to 800 hours to complete.

As Dundalk residents affected by Friday's water main break tossed out ruined appliances and soggy furniture from their flooded basements Saturday, they also told stories of recovery and loss, of good luck and bad. Here are a few: Pet fish made it When the wall of water roared down Loganview Drive, Jerry Bolding, a 40-year-old construction worker, was convinced that he had lost his pet fish, Filleto. Bolding kept the fish in an aquarium in the now-flooded basement apartment at 3427 Loganview Drive, a home owned by his stepfather, Carl Persiani.

Mike Pell heard about the rising water when his cell phone rang. His wife was on the line, trying to tell the 33-year-old drywall contractor that the torrent from a water main break a few blocks away was flowing into the basement of their home in the 3500 block of McShane Way in Dundalk. Even more shocking were the piercing screams of his 2-year-old son Gavin. "He was flipping out," Pell said. He knew he had to get home. But when Pell got within a few blocks, he was stopped by police.

Maryland has a governor who's not afraid to belt out: "With me wack-fol-the-do-fol-the-diddle-idle-day." Nor is Martin O'Malley shy, in the title song on his new CD, about singing an ode to Irish horse racing at a time when the Maryland racetracks he vowed to save with slots are in bankruptcy. There's even an image of a horse and jockey on the front of Galway Races, the O'Malley's March CD released yesterday. Perhaps the product placement on the CD's back cover will lift another local industry; O'Malley is shown from behind, one ripped arm aloft, in an Under Armour muscle shirt.

When James Buechler volunteered for the Style Network's Clean House, a show that clears the clutter from your home, he got more - actually, less - than he expected. He did get new furniture, paint and organization in his Sparrows Point house, which he said he is mostly pleased with. But much of the makeover stopped where the cameras did, leaving parts of walls without color, a hallway half-tiled and a lot of nicks and dents from the 50-person crew. The show did not haul away trash, storage tubs and plywood from a staging area in the backyard.

I sold my home in Vermont this past June (I now live in New Jersey), and since the closing, that area has received tremendous amounts of rain. As a result, the new owners have had water in the finished basement. They claim we knew about the leaking in the basement because they discovered "staining" from where it had occurred before. We never had water in the basement in the eight years we lived there, other than condensation on the pipes, which would weep onto the floor. After wrapping the pipes in foam insulation and having air conditioning installed in the home, we never had that problem again.

Human remains found in basement of rowhouse Human remains were discovered yesterday afternoon in the basement of an East Baltimore rowhouse that is undergoing renovation, authorities said. Police spokesman Donny Moses said that investigators were calling the discovery a "suspicious death." He said that the body was so decomposed that a fingerprint identification was not possible. "The bones have been there a long time," Moses said. Howard Wyman, 63, said that he and other workers were cleaning out the vacant rowhouse in the 1900 block of E. Lanvale St. for two days and had just moved on to the basement.

Brandon Pustejovsky was still awake, unable to sleep through the loud noises coming from the last-call crowd outside the historic Belvedere Hotel where he lives. Then came the sound of gunshots. Six of them, loud. "I looked at my wife - she said, 'You're kidding me. You're kidding me,' " Pustejovsky, 36, said. When he ran downstairs, he saw the aftermath of a fight that left two people shot and another man stabbed. A woman wearing a green shirt and white jeans was lying face down, with a bartender holding a towel to her leg to stop the bleeding.

A Randallstown man shot and killed his wife in the basement of the couple's home in the 4200 block of Mary Ridge Drive before turning the gun on himself yesterday, Baltimore County police said. The man called 911 about 7:30 a.m. and told the dispatcher that he had just killed his wife, police said. The man then said, "I'm going down to [the basement] to join her," police said. Police dispatched a SWAT team to the house. The unit entered the home and found both bodies in the basement, according to Cpl. George Erhardt of the county police.

A 49-year-old Baltimore historian who taught schoolchildren about Billie Holiday and Thurgood Marshall was working on a rowhouse on the city's west side yesterday when he apparently triggered a building collapse that killed him. Alvin Brunson, who in 2005 was named "Best Community Historian" by the Baltimore City Paper, ran the nonprofit Center for Cultural Education at 541 Wilson St., just around the corner from Pennsylvania Avenue, the one-time cultural...

The thoughts tug at Bruce Raffel's mind and tumble his guts. Yet another Sunday night passes with little comfortable sleep. And as he tries to shift his mind to work on Monday, he just can't let go of the previous day's happenings. What if he had been able to tell Brian Billick to run on third-and-short instead of calling another fruitless pass? Might the Ravens have held on instead of crashing to another dispiriting loss? If you're wondering, Raffel doesn't work for the Ravens or any other NFL team.