Bus Stop

Carroll County's year-old policy restricting the number of changes students can make in their school bus stops was upheld by the state last week.In a challenge to the county's policy -- which limits the20,000 students who use school buses to one morning stop and one afternoon stop -- Eldersburg parent Susan Ballas had asked the Board of Education to allow her third-grade daughter to get off the bus at a different stop a mile from her home two days a...

A serial rapist who was convicted of one attack and pleaded guilty to three others, each during daytime hours and in different neighborhoods of Baltimore, was sentenced yesterday to 50 years in prison. Yesterday, Erskine Jones, 31, of the 400 block of E. Eager St., admitted raping three girls, ages 14, 16 and 17, from December 2003 to August 2004. DNA evidence linked Jones to the attacks long after they occurred. Circuit Judge Lynn K. Stewart accepted the guilty plea to three counts of rape.

SILVER SPRING -- Twelve people were injured during rush hour yesterday morning when a car careened into a commuter bus stop off U.S. 29, police said.Montgomery County police said a 1997 Ford driven by Dufiauluisu Domingos, 53, of the 13800 block of Castle Blvd. rammed two shelters at Briggs Chaney Road and Castle Boulevard at 8: 40 a.m.The injured were treated for broken bones and minor injuries.Police said Domingos was leaving Briggs Chaney Shopping Center when his vehicle struck another car. Police said the car ran a red light and struck the shelters.

WASHINGTON -- Anonymous tips may be all that police have when they go after a suspicious individual, but it is not clear that they can frisk someone just because of a tip about a hidden gun. Yesterday, the Supreme Court said it would settle that issue.Three decades ago, the court ruled that police may stop and frisk an individual only if they have solid reason to believe the person has committed a crime, or is about to do so.The dispute the justices now face, in a new case from Florida, is whether police may frisk a person without such a reason if they have been told that the individual is carrying a weapon.

A woman waiting at a traffic light near a North Baltimore shopping center was forced from her car yesterday only to watch helplessly as the attacker drove away in her car with her 10-month-old daughter.Several witnesses chased the car, which jumped a curb and crashed into a bus stop sign four blocks from the Belvedere Square shopping center. Police said they caught the suspect after a brief foot chase, and the girl was unharmed."We want to express our gratitude to the people who helped get the man who did this," said the victim, Margaret Curley, 35, also speaking for her husband.

Parents in the Cattail Woods neighborhood thought they had a simple, common-sense request: Let the bus driver who takes their children to Lisbon Elementary School drive around a loop instead of performing a three-point turn to exit the neighborhood.Stopping and backing up at Brittle Branch Way and Cattail Meadows Drive in Lisbon seems dangerous to the parents -- especially with dads, moms, their cars and their preschool children taking up space at the bus stop. So they asked the Howard County school system's transportation office to permit the driver to loop around Cattail Meadows Drive back to Brittle Branch, something she wanted to do.But transportation officials said no. The school board upheld that decision at the end of last month.

Her real name is Rashima Nadine Alexis Tuck, but her mother already is calling her "bus stop baby" because that's where she was born yesterday morning -- in a bus stop at Old Eastern Avenue and Rickenbacker Road.Karen Tuck, 21, of the 1600 block of Rickenbacker Road was in labor and trying to catch a cab to the hospital just before 9 a.m. But she couldn't get one. The labor pains were getting worse and she was frantic -- so she decided to take the bus.The bus didn't come, but Maryland State Police Tfc. Mark Yingling saw her and the baby's father, Keith Trusty, and approached the couple.

A teen-ager was killed and two young men were wounded early yesterday outside a bar in Southwest Baltimore -- the latest outbreak of violence in a neighborhood targeted by police as a "hot spot" for crime.The incident in Carrollton Ridge marked the fifth slaying this year in a 35-square block area where state and federal funds are paying for extra police patrols to minimize homicides and shootings."We managed to curtail a lot of problems over there in the past six or seven weeks," said Maj. John L. Bergbower, the Southwestern District police commander.

In yesterday's Howard County edition of The Sun, it was incorrectly reported that residents protesting a facility proposed for the Henryton Hospital live in the Meadowood community. The residents live in an area along Henryton Road that is not part of a formal community.The Sun regrets the error.Some Henryton Road residents are afraid a proposed center for recovering addicts and the poor will threaten the safety of their secluded community.The rural Howard County community of Meadowood is separated only by woods and a shallow, narrow part of the South Branch of the Patapsco River from the former Henryton Hospital in Carroll County, which is due to be turned over to a nonprofit agency Oct. 1."

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Brand-new clothes on the first day of school. A sense of hope and fresh beginnings. This is the schoolchild's timeless ritual, accompanied by the blessings of anxious parents.For 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, these feelings were even more intense on September 4, 1957. She wore a freshly ironed dress that she had made with her mother especially for the occasion. Elizabeth tried to comfort her nervous mother, as her father paced the room. The family prayed together before Elizabeth stepped onto the public bus.Elizabeth Eckford was one of the first nine students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

A 20-year-old Rosedale man was shot in the head while sitting on a bicycle near a bus stop on Northern Parkway in Northeast Baltimore, one of two fatal shootings Friday, a city police spokesman said. Police Agent Donny Moses said the man, Trenton Marshall of the 2200 block of Bluegrass Heights Court, was transported by ambulance to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. Authorities said the area where the shooting occurred, near McClean Boulevard and the Hamilton Shopping Center, was packed with students and others rushing to nearby shops or to a covered bus stop to escape a driving rainstorm.

A 25-year-old woman was robbed of her purse and cell phone early Monday at a downtown bus stop steps away from City Hall, according to a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department. The woman flagged down a patrol officer about 2:30 a.m. and said she was attacked minutes before on East Fayette Street near Guilford Avenue, toward the back of City Hall and the Circuit Court buildings and also near several city and state office buildings. Anthony Guglielmi, the department's chief spokesman, said the woman told officers that she was waiting at a bus stop when a man came up behind her and asked for her number.

Drug charges against city educator dropped The head of a city high school's special-education department has been cleared of drug charges after prosecutors could not locate a lab analysis of what police said was crack cocaine recovered from her home. Victoria Carter, a 35-year educator assigned to Northwestern High School, was arrested at school administration headquarters in April after police alleged that she conspired with her 19-year-old son to distribute 50 grams of suspected crack cocaine found in a first-floor bathroom.

Police in two counties were investigating attempted abductions of boys about the same time Friday, authorities said yesterday. Law enforcement officials in Howard and Harford counties said they had no indication that the incidents were related. An 11-year-old student of Howard County's Glenwood Middle School reported that he was approached by a maroon GMC sport utility vehicle shortly after getting off a school bus on Hipsley Mill Road in Woodbine about 2:50 p.m., county police said. The boy told police he heard a man ask for help finding a lost puppy.

Md. to use stimulus funds to buy 100 hybrid buses 1 Maryland will use money from the economic stimulus plan to purchase 100 hybrid diesel-electric buses, state officials said yesterday. The purchase of the fuel-saving vehicles had been on hold because of a shortfall in the state's Transportation Trust Fund. The $65 million purchase will more than double the number of hybrid vehicles in the Maryland Transit Administration's bus fleet. The MTA has 10 hybrids in service, with 30 more to be on the street by summer and now another 100 to come.

Police identify man shot in eye but have no suspects Baltimore police have identified the man who was wounded by gunfire in the eye, back and arm Friday afternoon at Washington Street and Lafayette Avenue. Dawron Johnson, 41, of the 3000 block of Federal St. was in serious condition at Johns Hopkins Hospital yesterday afternoon and was undergoing surgery on his eye, said Agent Donny Moses, a police spokesman. Johnson has been arrested more than a dozen times in Baltimore. He has a 1994 conviction for robbery with a deadly weapon and at least two drug-related convictions, one in 2002 and the other in 2007.

The problem : Bus drivers didn't stop at an unmarked Canton bus stop. The backstory: If a bus stop is missing its sign, should the driver still stop? It's one of those philosophical questions that Gary Brukiewa has been asking himself. The lifelong Canton resident says he takes the No. 7 bus, which is supposed to stop on Fait Avenue between Luzerne Avenue and Rose Street. A sign had been affixed to a light pole there. But after the pole was knocked down in a traffic accident months ago, the pole was replaced - but not the bus stop sign.

THE PROBLEM A Northeast Baltimore bus shelter that was damaged in an accident has not been replaced. THE BACKSTORY Edna Bedford lives near Cedonia and Radecke avenues in Baltimore and regularly uses the No. 5 bus that stops there for, in her words, "everything." Whether she's heading to church, the supermarket, or to get her medicine, Bedford takes the bus. That's why she was so distressed after hearing secondhand that a car had run up on the sidewalk several weeks ago and struck the bus shelter that protected her and other passengers from the elements.

The problem: A wooden bench at a Towson bus stop has been broken for more than a year. The backstory: Charles Carrow, who lives in the Courthouse Square apartments on Goucher Boulevard in Towson, relies on the two buses that stop in front of the complex - the No. 3 and the No. 55. The retiree uses the buses to get around Baltimore County and the city, whether he's visiting a cousin in Canton or grabbing lunch at Cafe Hon in Hampden. "I have no problem with the bus service itself. It would just be nice if they put a new bench out there," he said.

Baltimore police have arrested one person and are looking for three others suspected of kidnapping two teenagers from a bus stop, holding them captive for hours and beating them in an attempt to elicit information about a stolen PlayStation, a department spokesman said yesterday. The suspect in custody - identified as Christopher Johnson, 21, of the 5600 block of McClean Blvd. - is being held without bail at the Baltimore City Detention Center pending his June 3 court date. The 31 charges filed against him include multiple counts of first-degree assault, kidnapping, sodomy, false imprisonment and using a dangerous weapon.