Daggett

A Carroll County circuit judge set bail at $75,000 yesterday for the owner of a Reese carpet store who is charged with more than three dozen theft counts.Roy D. Marshall, 32, owned and operated Marshall's Carpet & Services. Two buildings that he leased in the 1800 block of Baltimore Blvd. were destroyed by arson Sept. 21.No one has been charged in the incident.His lawyers told Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr. that their client intends to live with his mother near Riverside, Ohio, where he will operate one of her four cellular phone franchises.

A Westminster man who pleaded guilty yesterday to assaulting his former girlfriend with a knife, breaking into her apartment and twice violating court orders to leave her alone was released with a suspended sentence of five years and five months.Despite a heightened awareness of domestic violence after three deaths in two incidents in Hampstead last month, Carroll prosecutors said they were forced to accept a plea bargain because the victim and other witnesses failed to cooperate.Under terms of the agreement, Juan Manresa Leyva received a suspended five-year, five-month sentence from Carroll County Circuit Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr., who again ordered Leyva to stay away from Nancy Rodriguez.

A Taylorsville man pleaded guilty to drunken driving and two counts of auto manslaughter yesterday in the deaths of a young South Carroll couple last fall.Carroll Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns Jr. accepted the guilty plea from Brian W. Ridings, 23, of the 1700 block of Bloom Road and placed him in a presentencing probation program, which is monitored by parole and probation officials.Ridings will be sentenced Aug. 25 in the deaths of Andrew M. Thompson, 22, of the 900 block of Lee Ave., Sykesville, and Kimberly Ann Reals, 19, of Lavender Court, Mount Airy.

A Hampstead teen-ager was being held yesterday at the Carroll County Detention Center in lieu of $96,000 bail, charged as an adult in a string of burglaries and vandalism last winter.Douglas K. Baker, 16, was arrested last week on multiple charges stemming from 17 incidents alleged to have occurred between November 1996 and February, court records show.Baker was waived to the adult court at a Circuit Court hearing Friday, prosecutor David P. Daggett said yesterday.Daggett asked District Court Judge JoAnn M. Ellinghaus-Jones yesterday to forward all of the cases except three involving misdemeanor charges to the Circuit Court.

Leaders in education yesterday were given a grim preview of the future if changes in American education aren't made soon: Fast-food workers will be flipping imaginary hamburgers, secretaries will be searching the classifieds for work, and editors will be standing in unemployment lines.William R. Daggett, director of the International Center for Leadership in Education, told an audience of educators at Dundalk Community College that U.S. education lacks relevancy to the job market and must change.

DALLAS -- DeWitt Daggett's tapes won't fill a car with pure mountain air or the scent of cedar. But his cassettes recorded by a who's who of nature writers can lift a driver's heart and mind above the sounds of traffic.Daggett, the founder of Audio Press, grew up in Dallas. He says he got out of geology and into recording America's literature of the land by accident.The seed for his line of cassettes was sown in 1985 when a college roommate tried selling audio tapes for Christmas."We got to thinking," says Daggett.