Criminal Record

Marcus McDowell was just 16 years old, a teenager who already had a high school diploma, a girlfriend with a "promise ring" and plans to start community college this year. He was on his way home Monday evening when he left a store in the 5100 block of Harford Road and found three people trying to rob his friend, city police said. Marcus intervened. He was shot twice, dying less than an hour later. "It was just Marcus being Marcus," said his mother, Darlene Belvin, 33. "If you're his friend, he would put his life out there to help you."

A man named Nathaniel Nelson, who described himself as a 45-year-old recovering heroin addict with a criminal record, finally got clean and sober, and hit the streets of Baltimore a couple of years ago - not to find a fix, but to find a job. After being turned down numerous times by employers because of his criminal record, he went to an employment agency. The agency found Nelson a job in a downtown hotel as a kitchen utility worker, washing dishes and scrubbing pots. He had the job for 14 months and claimed to have had an exemplary work record.

He was 27, a drug addict with a lengthy criminal record who stumbled into a Baltimore public housing project, high on heroin and cocaine and hungry for more. The drug deal went badly, and Geronimo J. Hunt was shot twice, once in the head and once in the back. He fell onto a grassy spit of land in O'Donnell Heights, curled into a fetal position, bleeding to death. "He was a victim of a disease, drugs, and these people out here, standing here, selling drugs to him," said Hunt's 30-year-old fiancee, Melissa Beckette, who has turned the murder scene into a mini-shrine with photos, hand-written cards, a clutch of plastic flowers and a teddy bear in a white wedding gown.

The two teens charged in the killing of a St. Paul's School dean at Towson Town Center lived in working-class communities in Essex and Middle River, where they played basketball and video games. Neither John Edward Kennedy Jr. nor Javon Clark, according to friends and relatives, had been caught up in the kind of violence with which the two 18-year-old high school graduates have been charged. "I didn't think he'd ever do something like that," said Corey Crawley, 16, a friend who shot hoops, played video games and went to the movies with Kennedy.

Baltimore police have in custody a man whom they are calling a "person of interest" in the April killing of a Johns Hopkins University student, detectives said yesterday. The person in custody is believed to be the man seen on surveillance video taken in Charles Village shortly before the fatal stabbing, police said. The man -- whose name was not released yesterday -- has an "extensive" criminal record that includes arrests for burglary, said Sgt. Cliff McWhite of the Police Department's homicide division.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is dropping a plan to hire a private investigator to examine allegations that he groped at least 16 women over the past three decades. The governor is busy with the state's budget crisis and doubts that such an inquiry would appease critics, Rob Stutzman, communications director for Schwarzenegger, said Monday. Because of that, he has decided not to look into the charges himself as he promised to do in the final days of the recall campaign, Stutzman said.

A judge refused yesterday to grant bail to a Calvert County man accused of leading police on a 200-mile, high-speed pursuit and carjacking a woman's SUV in a Washington suburb and driving off with her two young children inside. Prosecutors described Carl E. Jones as an "extreme flight risk" with a long criminal record and told Montgomery County District Judge Patricia L. Mitchell that the children's mother, Marna Plaia, had pleaded that he be kept behind bars. "I have been in touch with" [Plaia]

A judge refused yesterday to grant bail to a Calvert County man accused of leading police on a 200-mile, high-speed pursuit and carjacking a woman's SUV in a Washington suburb and driving off with her two young children inside. Prosecutors described Carl E. Jones as an "extreme flight risk" with a long criminal record and told Montgomery County District Judge Patricia L. Mitchell that the children's mother, Marna Plaia, had pleaded that he be kept behind bars. "I have been in touch with" [Plaia]

When Baltimore recorded its 100th homicide early this month, police officials expressed frustration -- not just with an unexplained surge in deadly violence that puts the city ahead of last year's pace but also with their inability to directly attack the problem. Police are often stymied, they say, by the very nature of Baltimore's deadly violence, which springs from a culture where victims and killers are frequently part of the same milieu. In many cases, yesterday's suspect becomes tomorrow's victim, making it exceedingly difficult to break the chain of killing.

MILWAUKEE - Each year about this time, Gene Schuldt is maybe the most popular man on the planet. At least, he looks just like him. The bearded, white-haired and portly 51-year-old Wauwatosa resident holds court - in a red suit and assisted by a number of Santa's helpers - at Milwaukee's Brookfield Square mall for thousands of area children. He listens attentively to each one's Christmas wish. With Schuldt's gentle voice, smiling face and naturally snow-white hair - "It's something that happens to the men in my family when they hit 40," he says - there's no reason for any child to doubt he or she is sitting in the lap of the jolly old elf himself.