Death

Simona de Silvestro walked through the lobby of an Inner Harbor hotel Thursday looking comfortable in her white shirt and black jeans. "I feel like I'm back home," the IndyCar driver said. "It was one of the best races we had last year, and I'm really looking forward to getting back on the race track here. " De Silvestro was one of the first drivers to come here to promote last year's inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix. Thursday, one day after officials confirmed the race will return Labor Day weekend, she was back with her newly designed HVM Nuclear Clean Entergy race car with a new Lotus engine that has proven powerful in practice.

Autopsies showed that deaths of a father and his two teenage sons found in a Kent County manure pit Thursday were accidental. Maryland State Police said Glen W. Nolt, 48, Kelvin R. Nolt, 18, and Cleason S. Nolt, 14, all of Peach Bottom, Pa., died of suffocation during a farming accident. Their bodies were recovered from a pond of liquid manure at Centerdel Farm, a 200-acre dairy farm in the 12000 block of Vansant Corner Road in Kennedyville. Multiple injuries contributed to Cleason Nolt's death, police said.

A poet long ago noted that the death of any one man diminishes us all. I do not think 19th century poetry envisioned 21st century cruelty. Hence, I and millions of Americans are taking solace from the death of the mastermind of September 11. Denny Olver

Less than a year after realizing his lifelong dream of becoming a Marine, Pvt. Anthony W. Romano-Caruso was found dead under mysterious circumstances in his Fort Meade barracks room on Wednesday. Rita Romano-Caruso said two Marines arrived at her front door in Burlington, N.C., on Thursday night to tell her that her 19-year-old son had died, but they didn't know why. "I am not sure exactly what happened," she said Friday. "It is bad to sit here in limbo, to not know what's going on. It's bad. ... "Everybody is still in shock.

City police are investigating a suspicious death Monday in Northeast Baltimore, a police spokeswoman said. The death was reported around 2:45 p.m. in the 5400 block of Hillburn Ave., said Det. Nicole Monroe. No further details were immediately available. Text NEWS to 70701 to get Baltimore Sun local news text alerts

The death of Phylicia Barnes has been added to the city's murder total for 2011, officials said.  The move is merely an administrative issue, though it does bump up the city's first murder count under 200 since the 1970s. Phylicia went missing from Northwest Baltimore in December 2010 and her body was found floating in the Susquehanna River between Harford and Cecil counties in April 2011. State police and Baltimore detectives worked the case together. Last month, authorities charged the ex-boyfriend of Phylicia's older half-sister in her death, indicting him through a grand jury in Baltimore.

Regarding the NAACP's recent rally for Trayvon Martin in Baltimore, I thought one of the goals of the organization was to improve race relations, not worsen them ("'We are Trayvon,' marchers proclaim," March 27). I am as outraged as anyone about the horrible fate that befell Trayvon, but how is the death of this young man any different than the hundreds of other innocent young black men slain every year In this country? The answer is: The race of the murderer. If the NAACP wanted to advance its goals, it would hold a rally every day, not just to shine a spotlight on mixed race-violence when the victim is black.

My view on Osama bin Laden's death is that it was long overdue. We have been searching for him for 10 years. I never thought it would take this long to find him, but I am happy they did. I am also happy the victim's families of 9/11 finally have peace. I just hope this does not make things worse than they were. Shawntay Peterson-Hoyte

Maryland State Police are investigating the stabbing death of a Westminster man found early Saturday. The victim is identified as Steven R. Hobson, 40, of the unit-block of Main Street, according to police. Shortly before 2:30 a.m., Westminster Police responded to a 911 call from a building in the unit-block of East Main Street. Officers found the victim in an apartment in the residential and commercial building. Responding medics pronounced the victim dead at the scene.

The news of Mayor William Donald Schaefer's passing saddened many Japanese, especially the residents of Kawasaki, our sister city since 1979. The late mayor was instrumental and vital in the creation of the sister city relationship with Kawasaki. The sister city program flourished under his leadership and his tireless slogan, "Do It Now. " He traveled to Japan many times, bringing the Baltimore Orioles and the famous manager Joe Altobelli. The Japanese people love baseball too and were so impressed with our team and observing our mayor who was so involved.

It was April 1978, and singer Judy Collins hadn't had an inspirational thought in four years. She'd been an alcoholic for 23 years — "and I was proud of it. " She'd toured and made records, but she knew the ride she was on — her father had been an alcoholic — and "as long as I was on it, I was going to enjoy every minute. " But in those last four years, she'd been drinking around the clock. Three-black-outs-a-day drinking. Jelly-jars-full-of-booze drinking. So her accountant and her assistant, the only people who would have anything to do with this version of Judy Collins, put her on a plane to a rehab facility.

— Many farmers in this rural Kent County community were left shaken after a father and his two teenage sons were found dead early Thursday in a pond full of liquid manure on a local dairy farm. The deaths appear to be accidental, but investigators will wait for autopsy results before ruling out foul play, said Greg Shipley, Maryland State Police spokesman. The bodies, tentatively identified as those of Glen W. Nolt, 48, and his two sons, Kelvin R. Nolt, 18, and Cleason S. Nolt, 14, all of Peach Bottom, Pa., had taken hours to find, submerged in a 20-foot-deep, 2-million-gallon manure pit on Centerdel Farm, state police said.

This championship was for Tracy Vander Kolk. The sophomore on the Severna Park girls lacrosse team died of undisclosed reasons May 10. Even though her teammates have been in mourning, the Falcons still managed to advance through the state playoffs, finding strength from one another and the support of the Anne Arundel community. Their resilience culminated in Thursday night's Class 4A-3A state championship game at UMBC, where No. 8 Severna Park knocked off Westminster, 13-6.

Something's rotten on the Baltimore area waterfront. Fish are washing ashore by the thousands in a mass die-off that officials say appears to be caused by a weather-driven worsening of the pollution that chronically plagues the Chesapeake Bay. State investigators expanded their probe Wednesday into what they believe are algae-related fish kills in Marley, Furnace and Curtis creeks in Glen Burnie, raising the estimated death toll there tenfold, while...

Ian Yarmus can spot them when he goes down to his favorite indoor climbing gym in Rockville or when he travels to Seneca Rocks in West Virginia, the place after which he named his now 3--year-old daughter. "I remember being 100 feet up [at Seneca], and there was a guy up there who was freaking out, he was completely paralyzed with fear," Yarmus recalled. "He was in over his head. He didn't have the skills or the training to be in the situation he was in. I had to tell him everything to do, tell him where to put every piece of equipment and what part of his body to use and where to put it in the rock.

The stories of marathon runners collapsing and dying at the finish line are enough to scare anybody thinking of participating in one of the 26.2 mile races popular around this time of year. But a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers has found the risk of deaths at marathon races is pretty low. Not impossible, but not all that likely either. A runner's risk of dying during or soon after the race is about .75 per 100,000 the research found. Men were twice as likely to die as women.

The death on Sunday of a woman who went down a trash chute at a downtown Baltimore apartment building is not linked to the fatal plunge of a man in the same chute last year, city police said Wednesday. After 23-year-old Emily Hauze's body was found Sunday in a trash bin at the Park Charles building, detectives reviewed the file of the earlier victim, 30-year-old Harsh Kumar. Authorities confirmed their earlier conclusion that Kumar's death was an apparent accident. An autopsy report reviewed Wednesday shows that Kumar had been drinking alcohol and had simultaneously taken a powerful sleeping drug before he died.

The wooden pews were filled Friday morning as friends and family remembered slain Hopkins researcher Stephen Pitcairn as a young man with an "intense" and "inquisitive" nature. "He grabbed you and you just wanted to be where he was," said Chris "Suds" Southard, youth director at First Presbyterian Church in North Palm Beach, Fla., where the funeral was held. Standing behind the pulpit, Rev. Ronald Hilliard tried to comfort the grief-stricken, still reeling from the death of the Jupiter, Fla., native who was robbed at knifepoint Sunday night while walking to his Charles Village apartment.

My heart goes out to the family of Jenny Olenick, who by all accounts was a talented and wonderful teen. The May 5 article detailing events surrounding the filing of a malpractice suit, "Lawyers question teen's health before death," got my attention for several reasons. To imply that pre-exiting conditions, such as stress, anxiety and heart disease would have contributed to or caused her death seem far-fetched. As reported in the article the autopsy report found "no evidence of a physical process, like cardiomyopathy having occurred," according to the state's chief medical examiner.