Cherry Hill

A 25-film retrospective of the films of the great Alfred Hitchcock kicks off this weekend at the Charles, 1711 N. Charles St. First up is 1935's The 39 Steps, starring Robert Donat as a Canadian visitor to London who gets caught up in an international spy ring (after the woman he had tried to help is found murdered in his apartment). With Madeleine Carroll (as his unwilling partner), Peggy Ashcroft and John Laurie. Showtime is noon tomorrow, with encore screenings set for 7 p.m. Monday and 9 p.m. Thursday.

The problems of urban education are rooted in poverty and the racial divide. No big-city school system has solved them. The No Child Left Behind law won't solve them. The best that school systems can do is work around the edges to mitigate the consequences of this uniquely American reality. The Baltimore school board may have taken a step in that direction Monday night with its sweeping reorganization - which amounts to a significant, albeit limited, decentralization - but it will work only if all concerned act intelligently, cooperatively and diligently.

Madeline Wheeler Murphy, a passionate community activist, civil rights champion and popular panelist on the WJZ-TV show Square Off, died of a heart attack Sunday at her Roland Park Place residence. She was 84. Mrs. Murphy was active in city politics and ran for City Council three times, twice in the 1960s and again in 1983, the same year that her son, William H. Murphy Jr., made an unsuccessful bid to unseat then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer in the Democratic primary. Mrs. Murphy often appeared as a guest on local television and radio shows, most notably Square Off, where she aired her progressive views and seemed to relish clashing with conservative panelists.

Baltimore has asked the state to double the number of neighborhoods designated Hotspots for crime, making them eligible for grants and crime-prevention programs targeted at small geographic areas.Officials have identified six communities from Highlandtown to Harlem Park to take advantage of the first expansion of the statewide program since its inception three years ago.Statistics show that crime has dropped markedly in most of the 36 original community-designated Hotspots throughout Maryland, which share $10.5 million in grants.

At home in Cherry Hill, Tyrell Taylor was known as a voracious reader and honor student who excelled at a suburban school for developmentally challenged children.In the tough Baltimore neighborhoods where he lived and hung out, he was called "Scar," known by police as a troublemaker who stood on street corners into the wee hours of the morning.Taylor, 14, sits in a cell at the city detention center, held without bail and charged with first-degree murder as an adult in the shooting of a man in a dispute over a girl.

A school bus collided with a car yesterday afternoon at an East Baltimore intersection, careened onto a sidewalk and hit a woman and a child sitting on the steps of a Patterson Park Avenue rowhouse.The child, Maia Alexandria Washington, 2, was taken to Johns Hopkins Children's Center with cuts on her face and leg and was in stable condition, city police said.Falayon Knight, 27, suffered leg injuries, and the child's grandmother, Hattie Washington, was hurt when she tried to avoid the bus. Both were taken to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.

Making their second joint appearance in five days, Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Democratic mayoral nominee Martin J. O'Malley toured a revitalized Cherry Hill shopping center yesterday and pledged to strengthen city and state ties.Glendening dedicated $1 million in state money to add six "hot spots" in Baltimore to a crime-fighting effort in city neighborhoods. The governor said the state will also pay $5 million to improve roads around the former Procter & Gamble Co. plant being redeveloped in Locust Point.

The Baltimore Police Department is poised to shake up its homicide unit for the first time in 50 years and assign detectives to geographic beats, hoping to reduce the murder toll in the nation's fourth-deadliest city.Under the plan, which significantly alters the way the homicide unit has worked since it was formed after World War II, detectives will answer to a new commander who will also oversee nonfatal shooting investigations and a task force that targets youth violence.The changes are part of a departmentwide overhaul that makes district lieutenants responsible for groups of neighborhoods on a 24-hour basis, turning the lieutenants into mini-chiefs with discretion over officer deployment and money.

Fifty years in Cherry Hill, and Sarah Hackett is ready to move.The 72-year-old widow complains that she has too much space in her two-bedroom public housing apartment. But she refuses to leave the southern Baltimore community.She might not have to go.Representatives from Philadelphia-based architects Wallace Roberts & Todd and developer Penn Rose Properties unveiled designs late Wednesday for a community senior housing center during a final planning meeting at Hemingway Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church.

A 25-year-old Anne Arundel County man with a lengthy criminal record was found shot to death early yesterday on a street in Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighborhood, city police reported.Shawn Lee Sudler, 25, whose last address was in the 8000 block of Solley Road in northern Anne Arundel, was declared dead at the scene from multiple gunshot wounds after police responded to a call shortly after midnight in the 2700 block of Spelman Road.Police said yesterday that they had no suspect in the shooting, and the investigation was continuing.

Maryland, birthplace of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall, is endowed with one of the richest legacies of African-American history of any state in the union. Before the Civil War, the state was home to the largest population of free blacks in the country, and it also sat squarely athwart a major route of the Underground Railroad through which thousands of slaves escaped to freedom in the North. After the war, new African-American communities sprang up across the state, centered around hundreds of small, fiercely independent churches that provided their congregants with a sense of belonging and a spiritual and physical refuge in an often hostile world.

A little more than 12 hours after a stray bullet pierced a window frame, traveled through the back of a couch, a thick purple cushion and into her upper left chest, Shirley Foulks held court on the front porch of her Cherry Hill town house. "Praise the Lord," she shouted to a friend on the other end of her cell phone. "I'm fine, I'm blessed," she shouted to the driver of a red car who stopped to check up on her. "I was in my house, in my chair," she exclaimed to a police officer helping with the investigation.

The 19th-century laborers pooled their money and did what they could to build this biscuit box of a church along Offutt Road in the southwest corner of Baltimore County. Atop a stone foundation they put up four walls, eight windows, a peaked roof, three rows of pews, a pulpit for inspiration and a wood stove for warmth - and called the thing done. It can hardly have been much to look at when it was completed in 1887, and it surely isn't now. That there is a now at all is notable. It will be noted more widely if the Friends of the Cherry Hill African Union Methodist Protestant Church make good on their plans to turn it into a museum dedicated to local black history.

Alleged police handcuffing incident under investigation City police are looking into whether a patrol sergeant handcuffed a homicide detective during a disagreement as they investigated a reported abduction. The incident is alleged to have occurred Friday night in the Northwest District after patrol officers secured a possible crime scene in the reported abduction of a female corrections officer, who was later located unharmed. Sources with knowledge of the incident say homicide detective Joshua Ellsworth arrived to assume control of the investigation.

Two men were killed and another was critically injured in three separate shootings over an eight-hour span in Baltimore, police said Monday. About 10:25 p.m. Sunday, an officer responded to a call for a shooting in the 600 block of Cherry Hill Road, said Detective Nicole Monroe, a police spokeswoman. Police found Charles Gregory Pratt, 18, of the 8700 block of Church Lane in Randallstown lying in the parking lot of the Cherry Hill shopping center. He had been shot several times, according to Monroe.

Man fatally shot in Cherry Hill fight A man died shortly after he was shot in the neck Saturday afternoon during a fight in the Cherry Hill neighborhood of South Baltimore, according to Baltimore police. Detectives are investigating why a group of men began fighting in the 2800 block of Winwood Court about 2:30 p.m., said Agent Donny Moses, a Baltimore police spokesman. The man's identity was not released. Liz F. Kay Pizza deliveryman shot in $15 holdup A Baltimore pizza deliveryman was shot during a robbery on a delivery run Friday night, police said.

On March 20, 2009, RUBY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS. On Friday, friends may call at the VAUGHN C. GREENE FUNERAL SERVICES, 5151 Baltimore National Pike from 4 to 8 P.M. On Saturday, Mrs. Williams will lie in state at First Baptist Church of Cherry Hill, 823 Cherry Hill Road, where the family will receive friends from 11 to 11:30 A.M with services to follow

Janice Elaine Brown, a Baltimore City public schools assistant principal, died of heart disease Wednesday at her Randallstown home. She was 58. Born Janice Elaine Singleton in Baltimore and raised in Cherry Hill, she attended Cherry Hill Elementary School and was a 1968 Edmondson High School graduate. She earned an education degree at what is now Morgan State University. She joined the city's Department of Education and taught at the Robert Poole and Fairmount Hill schools, as well as Northeast Middle School and Dunbar Middle schools.

On October 25, 2008, DAVID E. JR., of Cherry Hill. Friends may visit the family owned MARCH FUNERAL HOME EAST, 1101 E. North Avenue on Thursday after 2 P.M., where funeral services will take place on Friday at 12 noon.

A woman who proved to be unarmed was shot by police in Cherry Hill yesterday morning after she refused to show her hands to an officer, police said. About 9:30 a.m., police received a call about an armed person selling drugs in the 1700 block of Cherry Hill Road, in an industrial area of South Baltimore near a bus stop and the Cherry Hill light rail stop, said Sterling Clifford, a police spokesman. A patrol sergeant observed a woman who fit the description of the suspect and who had her hands behind her back, Clifford said.