Cutters

Thieves pried open the back door of a Mars store in the 6700 block of Chesapeake Center Drive sometime between Saturday and Monday, and stole two meat cutters worth $4,000, county police said.A store employee told police the thieves apparently drove a vehicle to the loading dock, where they loaded the meat cutters.Police said the thieves cut a lock off an old cooler. The door that was pried open was the only one that wasn't locked from the inside with a chain. An infrared device that could have detected movement in the store had been cut down, police said.

The project manager at the former Patterson Park High School in Highlandtown stood atop a roof terrace and said, "This is not a cookie-cutter property. " That's an understatement. Shaffin Jetha and Chuck Nale, officials of Focus Development, gave me a tour of the Southeast Baltimore landmark it has taken me 50 years to visit. I wasn't procrastinating; I just never got an invitation to view this under-recognized Art Deco-style school that once accommodated 3,200 students. It is now being made into 138 apartments.

The U.S. Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay has been awarded a $30 million-a-year project to repair and modernize 27 of the service's aging medium-endurance cutters. Maryland lawmakers, who jointly announced the work with the Coast Guard, said the increased work should secure the yard's jobs for years and further cement Curtis Bay's role in national service. About 690 people, mostly civilians, work at the yard, which was established more than 100 years ago to maintain and repair the service's cutters.

The fleet of Coast Guard vessels that call Baltimore home port increased by one Wednesday when the 65-foot cutter Chock arrived from Virginia. The harbor tugboat, built in 1961, was transferred from Portsmouth. The Chock and its crew of eight will be used for homeland security patrols, law enforcement and ice-breaking in the upper bay. It also will continue to be used in the lower bay. Capt. Mark O'Malley, the Coast Guard's captain of the port of Baltimore, called it "a privilege" to add the cutter to the Curtis Bay operation, noting its "long history of superior service to the mariners of the Chesapeake Bay. " Baltimore's Coast Guard station responds to more than 200 search-and-rescue incidents and conducts more than 370 law enforcement boardings annually.

The college student from Maryland who tried to draw attention to flaws in airport security by smuggling box cutters, strike-anywhere matches, bleach and other banned items onto Southwest Airlines planes last year was sentenced yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to two years of supervised probation. Nathaniel T. Heatwole, 21, apologized again to the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI, the agencies that investigated his case, but repeated that his intent was to help authorities improve air travel safety.

Glen Alvin Snyder Sr., a longtime union official who retired in 1970 as assistant vice president of the Packing House Workers of America, died Thursday of cardiac arrest at his Bayside Beach home. He was 93.Mr. Snyder became a union organizer in the 1930s while working as a butcher in Washington for the Sanitary food market, which became part of the Safeway grocery chain."They were paying him a dollar an hour for 40 hours," said his son, Glen A. Snyder Jr. of Pasadena. "But then when it became Safeway, they wanted to pay him $40 for 50 hours.

OTTAWA -- Canada, renowned for its willingness to place its uniformed men and women in the cross-fire of other people's wars, finds its military in a weakened state, its combat units stretched to the limits of their capabilities."

The Coast Guard's newest and largest vessel pulled into the Fells Point pier yesterday, part of a national tour that federal homeland security officials say marks a watershed in the service's ability to patrol the nation's waters. The Bertholf, the first of the Coast Guard's national security cutters, is longer than a football field and stands nearly five stories tall. The biggest ship ever in the Coast Guard, it's built to do it all: search and rescue, drug busts, immigration patrol and battle.

DAMASCUS - The 20-year- old Montgomery County man linked to the discovery of box cutters on at least two planes is a brainy ham-radio operator who told his college newspaper last year that he wanted to show the federal government that he was a "voice of dissent." Nathaniel T. Heatwole, now a junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., told the newspaper that he sent the Selective Service System a strongly worded letter of protest after it mailed him a form letter on his 18th birthday asking him to sign up for military service in the event of a draft.

WASHINGTON - By allegedly planting box cutters and other prohibited items in aircraft lavatories, college student Nathaniel T. Heatwole said he was testing the effectiveness of the nation's aviation safety regime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But his case may also become a test of the fairness of tough new charging and sentencing procedures backed by Congress and Attorney General John Ashcroft. The attorney general has been pushing initiatives to limit the discretion of prosecutors and judges in seeking and imposing sentences.

Anne Arundel County police arrested and charged one man in a Christmas morning break-in at an Annapolis automobile dealership. A video security service notified police shortly before 5 a.m. Sunday of two people on the lot of Fitzgerald Oldsmobile Cadillac. Officers saw two men running, and arrested one when he tried to climb over a fence, said Lt. Doyle Batten. Police found bolt cutters and other tools on the lot that they suspect were used to cut catalytic converters from two vehicles there.

The book "Guardians of the Capes" asserts that "most of the marine casualties on the bay have been minor in nature. " But 33 years ago, the bay was the scene of a spectacular tragedy. On Oct. 20, 1978, the collier M/V Santa Cruz II, loaded with 19,500 tons of coal, was steaming southbound on the Chesapeake Bay when it collided with a northbound Coast Guard cutter, the Cuyahoga. The collision happened 3.5 miles from Smith Point, at the mouth of the Potomac River, near the Maryland-Virginia border.

The commandant of the Coast Guard, in Maryland this week to visit a newly launched national security cutter, said Thursday that he expects to deploy two of the state-of-the-art vessels off the East Coast. Initially, the Coast Guard had planned to berth all eight national security cutters on the West Coast. Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr., the top officer in the service, said the plan is being revisited. "The Pacific presents us with greater challenges then does the Atlantic," Papp said.

A father accused of slitting the throats of his wife and daughters in the family's Crofton home was ordered held without bail Monday, and no motive was offered for why he may have harmed his family and himself. Julio Cesar Esquetini, 49, of the 1600 block of Forest Hill Court in the Crofton Meadows Four townhouse community, appeared on a monitor in District Court in Annapolis from the Anne Arundel County Detention Center. He was arrested Friday and faces more than a dozen charges.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Close your eyes and you can hear the father's voice as the son speaks. Open your eyes and look beneath the son's spikes and you can recall the days when the father left a trail of tobacco juice on the outfield turf at Veterans Stadium. There is no mistaking this is Lenny Dykstra's son, and he's more than happy to admit it. Three years ago, when the Milwaukee Brewers selected Cutter Dykstra in the second round of the baseball draft, it was a feel-good story about the son trying to follow in the father's footsteps.

Baltimore County Police said a man suffered non-life-threatening injuries after he was assaulted and cut outside a Towson shopping center by two men Thursday night. Officers were called to Loch Raven Boulevard and Taylor Avenue at 9:14 p.m. where they say a man in his late 20s was beaten and cut with a box cutter causing, him to lose consciousness. The victim was taken to a local hospital for serious injuries, but he is expected to survive, police said. His identity was not released Thursday.

MARIETTA, Ga. -- Laser lights swept the room, white-hatted factory workers marched and clapped in rhythm, and Lee Greenwood himself sang "Proud to be an American" yesterday, as Lockheed Martin Corp. unveiled and defended the very first F-22 fighter plane.The 90-minute spectacle of patriotism and industrial force at the Bethesda-based company's Aeronautical Systems plant outside Atlanta was a full-throated pre-emptive strike for a defense program taking fire from budget cutters in Congress.

ABOARD THE FRANK DREW - As commanding officer Dave Merrill piloted the 900-ton, black-hulled U.S. Coast Guard cutter up the Chesapeake Bay yesterday, he contemplated a world that resembled the South Pole: a wide expanse of glittering white, with its only boundary the pale blue horizon. "There's ice as far as you can see," said Merrill, whose rank is chief warrant officer. "It's hard to tell if we're in Baltimore or Antarctica." Merrill's cutter and others like it are working overtime this winter.

Alexander Bostick, a retired meat cutter who lived to be nearly 106 and spent his early years sharecropping in South Carolina, died of heart disease May 19 at Maryland General Hospital. He lived on Eden Street in East Baltimore. Known as "Buddy," he was born in Dillon County, S.C., on Aug. 5, 1904. His parents farmed a small piece of land they did not own. "They picked cotton, raised chickens, cured tobacco and plowed the land with the help of a mule and a hand plow," said his son, Hilton O. Bostick of Des Moines, Iowa.

Police have charged a 41-year-old Baltimore man with attacking a Columbia security guard with a box cutter. Terrell Webb, of the 1500 block of North Decker Ave., was arrested Friday night in Baltimore after a patrol officer observed him behaving suspiciously, Howard County police spokeswoman Elizabeth Schroen said. A background check revealed an open warrant from the Feb. 27 incident at the Mall of Columbia. Webb faces charges of first and second-degree assault and carrying a concealed weapon.