Body Was Found

Anne Arundel County police today announced that they have issued an arrest warrant for a Glen Burnie man, charging him with second-degree murder. Police said they identified Nelson Antonio "David" Rivera, 23, as a suspect in the death of Marco Tulio Nova Romero, 20, whose body was found Monday morning near a storage garage behind the 7700 block of Hancock Lane in Glen Burnie's Colonial Manor apartment complex. Wounds and blood covered the upper part of Romero's body, and the medical examiner's office ruled Romero's death as a homicide Tuesday, according to authorities.

Relatives of a slain homeless man wept in court yesterday as they described their love for someone who they said was kind but who had problems and ultimately chose a lifestyle of homelessness despite their continued efforts to get him treatment for alcoholism and support him in a more traditional life. "His death has laid heavy on our hearts," Tom Hawkins, stepfather of Martin David Dorsey, told Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Pamela L. North. His remarks came during the sentencing of Roger Lee Kronawetter, 41, who was ordered to serve four years in prison for killing Dorsey, 41, with whom he often shared a communal campsite in a wooded area in Glen Burnie.

When asked to recall one moment in the life of Joy Patricia Hayward, friends of the Annapolis resident spoke instead of her continual, contagious good cheer. "You knew the day started when she came down the stairs in her zebra-print bathrobe and told you how great the day was going to be," said Jenny Martin, a business student at Salisbury University who shared a house with Hayward and two other women last year. "There were four girls in our house - all strong personalities - but Joy was the strongest of them all."

An Edgewater man - who police say cashed a forged check with his mother's blood on it - has been charged with fatally stabbing her last month and leaving her body in the freezer of the Annapolis-area Subway sandwich shop where she worked. Jason Austin Blevins, 24, is in jail in Iowa on unrelated bad-check charges, but Anne Arundel County police issued an arrest warrant Thursday and said they will soon extradite Blevins to face a first-degree murder charge in the death Dec. 12 of Mary Ella Ginger, 51. He was arrested when a routine background check immediately after the killing turned up an outstanding warrant against him in Baltimore County on bad-check charges, and he was later extradited to Iowa to face similar charges there.

Baltimore County police yesterday said officers acted appropriately Sunday night when they checked on a report of a woman calling for help in a Randallstown-area neighborhood where a 52-year-old state worker was later found bludgeoned to death. But neighbors say they don't think officers did enough to prevent the killing of Linda Carol Brooks, whose body was discovered Monday night in her home. The officers didn't knock on anyone's door, they said, or search the area after a neighbor called police Sunday night and said she could hear a woman yelling, "Help me!

Frederick police are trying to identify a man whose decomposing body was found Saturday afternoon in a recently harvested cornfield off South Market Street. Documents found at the scene indicate that the man was alive in late June. Investigators believe that he was dead when the several-acre field was harvested Sept. 16, said Lt. Thomas Chase. The body was found about 150 yards from the road, in a cornfield between a Costco store and the Maryland School for the Deaf, he said. The state medical examiner's office determined that the man was African-American, between the ages of 20 and 40, and about 6 feet tall, police said.

Baltimore County police arrested and charged a county man last night in the strangulation and rape of a woman whose nude body was found Sunday in Dundalk. Arrested at headquarters in Towson after an interview with detectives was Harry Louis Rivera, 30, of the 7900 block of St. Gregory Drive in Dundalk. Police said Rivera was being held without bail at the county detention center pending a review hearing before a District Court judge. Rivera is charged with killing and raping Raemee France, about 30, whose address was not available.

An autopsy was performed yesterday on an unidentified woman who police said was killed and raped before her nude body was found Sunday in Dundalk. The woman was found in a wooded area near railroad tracks off the 2800 block of Sollers Point Road, according to Baltimore County police. They have not released her name pending notification of the next of kin. Police spokesman Bill Toohey said there was "a possibility' that the death was related to three recent killings of prostitutes in the city but added, "We have no evidence directly linking the two."

A 31-year-old man found shot to death in Clifton Park early yesterday might have been the second victim of the same attacker in the past five days, police said. Police said a golf course worker found the body of Tony Rogers about 6:45 a.m. in the 2700 block of Indian Head Drive, near the park's golf course. Rogers had been shot once in the back where his body was found, police said. Rogers, a Parkville resident, was last seen by his family about 11 p.m. Monday, police said. Detectives were looking for Rogers' car, a gold 2001 Chevrolet Malibu with Maryland temporary tags 79200W, which police think was taken by his killer.

Biologists are trying to determine what killed a bald eagle found yesterday in Crownsville. The eagle was discovered about 6 a.m. in the front yard of a home in the 1100 block of St. Stephens Church Road, said John Surrick, a Department of Natural Resources spokesman. A DNR officer gave the bird to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is conducting an investigation of the eagle's death. The cause was not immediately apparent. "There were no visible signs of any injury," said Chris Brong, a special agent for the Fish and Wildlife Service.