Calvert County

Hopkins Children's Center ranked 3rd In its first ranking of the nation's best children's hospitals, U.S. News & World Report has awarded third place to the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Topping the list is Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, followed by Children's Hospital Boston. Since 1990, the magazine has ranked "America's Best Hospitals," with Johns Hopkins topping the list each year. As part of that, there have been rankings of pediatric departments at various hospitals -- Hopkins has always been in the top four -- but those were based solely on reputation.

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives voted yesterday to approve a national historic trail to link sites from the Chesapeake Campaign of the War of 1812. As outlined in legislation filed by Rep. John Sarbanes, 3rd District Democrat, the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail would mark battles from St. Leonard Creek in Calvert County - site of two skirmishes between the British Navy and the American Chesapeake Flotilla in June 1814 - to Fort McHenry in Baltimore. Sarbanes' father, former Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, had sponsored similar legislation in recent years.

Three high school students were killed yesterday when their car and a truck collided head-on near the entrance of the community of Chesapeake Ranch Estates, south of Lusby in Calvert County, state police said.Pete Piringer, a state police spokesman, said the car's driver, Michael Keith Vito, 17, and Jacqueline Suzanne Rose, 14, both of Lusby, and Rachel Lynn Thomas, also 14, of Solomons, were pronounced dead at the scene. The victims attended Patuxent High School in Lusby.He said the truck driver, Donald Lee Roberts, 35, also of Lusby, suffered multiple injuries and was airlifted to Prince George's Hospital Shock Trauma Center in Cheverly, where he was in very critical condition last night.

The attorney for a man wrongly imprisoned for more than seven years warned yesterday that he will sue the state unless Gov. Parris N. Glendening grants a pardon and the state agrees to pay the man hundreds of thousands of dollars.The warning was issued a day after a House of Delegates committee killed a bill that would have paid Anthony Gray Jr. $7.5 million.The 31-year-old Calvert County man was jailed for 7 1/2 years in the killing of a Chesapeake Beach woman. He had been sentenced to life in prison but was released last month.

PRINCE FREDERICK -- More than seven years after being arrested and sentenced to life in prison for a murder he did not commit, a 31-year-old borderline retarded man walked out of the Calvert County Courthouse yesterday, free.With his first breaths of regained freedom, Anthony Gray Jr. shed the two county deputies escorting him to the courthouse lobby and squeezed into the waiting arms of his weeping mother, Corine Reed. "Thank the Lord, thank the Lord, thank the Lord," she said and brushed the tears from her cheeks onto her son's shoulder as they swayed, hugging.

Susan Higley, an eighth-grade mathematics teacher at Cherry Hill Middle School in Elkton, was named last night as Maryland's Teacher of the Year for the year 2000.The Cecil County teacher was recognized for her innovative teaching techniques, particularly for linking math lessons to the real world and for working with business partners."I am so honored," Higley said. "It takes all of us working together as one for students to learn."The award was announced by state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick during a ceremony at Martin's West honoring the teachers of the year from Maryland's 24 public school systems.

Vera's restaurant is a jolt of eccentricity and exotica amid a staid subdivision in Calvert County. It looks like it's right out of a movie set for "South Pacific."Banana trees line the bamboo-covered entrance. Polynesian wood carvings and Easter Island statues fill the restaurant. And the bar, about as long as an outrigger canoe, is covered with leopard-skin prints.The owner, Vera Freeman, is even more dramatic than the decor. With her flowing gowns, pearl headbands and diamond rings the size of oyster shells, she looks like she swept into town from Hollywood.

Esther Benson Haugh, 95, helped preserve Md. historyEsther Benson Haugh, who championed preserving Maryland's historical heritage, died of heart failure Friday at a retirement village in Lancaster, Pa. She was 95.The descendant of Colonial-era settlers spent much of the past four decades researching the history of her family and Maryland. She was responsible for establishing several historical roadside markers. One stands in Fells Point and another next to an old quarry in Cockeysville, where marble was dug for Baltimore's Washington Monument.

PRINCE FREDERICK -- The legal travail of Anthony Gray Jr. -- poor, luckless and slow of wit -- began more than seven years ago, when all indications say he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison merely for being in a very frightened place at a very frightening time.On Monday, Gray is likely to be freed from the prison where he has spent the bulk of his adult life.In an extraordinary admission, the Calvert County state's attorney will tell a judge here that prosecutors made a horrible mistake: No convincing evidence exists that Gray committed the murder that has kept him behind bars.

A Baltimore legislator yesterday introduced a bill that would have the state pay a Southern Maryland man $7.5 million for serving more than seven years in prison for a killing he did not commit.The bill, introduced on the House floor by Democratic Del. Clarence Davis, directs Gov. Parris N. Glendening to budget the money for the "wrongful conviction and wrongful imprisonment" of Anthony Gray Jr., 31, of Calvert County.The bill must go to a committee -- most likely the House Appropriations Committee -- for consideration.

Suddenly, On Sunday, July 26, 2009, HOWARD HENRY KENT, son of the Rev. Howard Kent and the late Mary Kent. Also survived by his children Quante', Tinya and Keisha and one sister Mary Cali and a host of other relatives and friends. Friends may call at the Victory Ministry of Christ Church, 240 S. Hilton St. on Friday at 5 P.M. Musical Wake 7 P.M. On Saturday, family may receive friends at 9 A.M. at the St. Bernadine RC Church, 3800 Edmondson Ave., Funeral AT 9:30 AM. Interment 1 P.M. at the St. John UMC, Lusby, MD (Calvert County)

Manhole cover blown after small underground fire Fire officials say a manhole cover blew off a downtown Baltimore street Friday when a small electrical fire broke out underground. There were no injuries. It happened about 8:25 p.m. at Saratoga and Eutaw streets. Fire Department spokesman Chief Kevin Cartwright said fire crews arrived to find one manhole blown off. Light smoke was coming from the manhole. Cartwright said crews from Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. determined that a small fire had occurred, but it went out by itself.

Warning that the water is rising in the Chesapeake Bay, scientists and activists urged Tuesday that Congress act to reduce climate-warming pollution that threatens to flood bayfront communities and worsen the fish-suffocating "dead zones" that plague North America's largest estuary. With a House vote possible Friday on a bill that would seek to curtail greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, two natural resources subcommittees held a field hearing Tuesday at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater to learn more about what global warming might mean for coastal regions like the Chesapeake.

Two to head U.S. attorney's team on violent crimes 3 Two men have been named heads of the Maryland U.S. attorney's office's Violent Crimes Section, which oversees prosecutions and investigations of violent repeat offenders and gangs. Michael Hanlon, deputy chief since the fall, is now chief of the section, replacing Jason Weinstein, who left the office to join the U.S. attorney general's office as a deputy assistant in the Criminal Division. Kwame Manley, who is a prosecutor in a federal death penalty trial that went to the jury Tuesday, will become deputy chief.

Phillip Garrett remembers the day he spotted her walking down the street - her pink nightgown caked with blood, her body covered in bruises. He recalls watching as investigators descended on the 8-year-old's house in Calvert County on Sept. 26, where they found the remains of her two sisters in a freezer. Garrett organized an auction to help the child. The "Our Project Charity Benefit" will be today from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn in Solomons. Authorities found the bodies of two girls, who would have been 9 and 11, in Renee Bowman's basement freezer.

SOLOMONS - As watermen have done for decades, Ronny Jetmore guides his small boat into a creek off the Patuxent River to tong oysters from the bottom. Oysters, once so bountiful in the Chesapeake Bay that their shells were used to pave roads, have become scarce in recent years - decimated by disease and by pollution that has smothered their habitat. But Jetmore knows where to find these oysters because he helped put them there. In a departure from the hunter-gatherer tradition of Maryland's watermen, Jetmore and others in Calvert County have banded together to try raising for themselves what nature is no longer providing in abundance.

Officials from the state Department of Human Resources said they found nothing out of the ordinary during a January visit to the home of the Calvert County woman who is being held in connection with the deaths of her two adopted daughters last year. A DHR caseworker went to Renee Bowman's residence, then in Charles County, after the department received an anonymous call alleging child neglect there. Calvert County authorities said Bowman, 43, has admitted killing the two girls, who would now be 9 and 11, and placing their remains in a freezer.

The state's highest court ordered a lower court yesterday to reconsider its decision in a judgment that allowed the former wife of Tom Clancy to control a series of books marketed under the Baltimore-born author's name. In 2005, a Calvert County Circuit Court judge gave Wanda T. King, formerly Wanda Clancy, control of a series of a dozen books called Tom Clancy's Op-Center. The books, which revolve around a fictional U.S. anti-terrorist agency, were written in Clancy's style but penned by others.

On July 26, 2008, ARLINGTON of Calvert County. Friends may call WYLIE FUNERAL HOME, P.A., 638 N. Gilmor St. on Tuesday from 5 to 8 P.M. Family will friends on Wednesday 9 A.M. Wake and 9:30 A.M. Funeral Service. Perkins Square Baptist Church, 2500 Edmondson Avenue. Inquiries at www.wyliefuneralhome.com.

Baltimore Govans Police investigate suspicious death Baltimore homicide detectives are investigating after the body of a man was found in Govans early yesterday. About 2 a.m., the body of an unidentified man was found outside a home in the 5500 block of Ivanhoe Ave. near Tunbridge Road, police spokeswoman Nicole Monroe said. The body appeareds to have suffered trauma. The case is being considered a suspicious death, she said. Julie Scharper Calvert County Chesapeake Bay Catamaran capsizes; 1 rescued, 1 dead One man was found alive and the body of another was recovered after a weekend boating accident.