Door

The Maryland Commission on Human Relations has ruled that a condominium board's decision to prevent residents from using a rear door as a shortcut to an adjacent synagogue discriminates against a disabled resident. The decision stems from a complaint filed by Sylvan Wolpert, a 90-year-old physically disabled resident of the Imperial Condominium complex in Northwest Baltimore who uses a walker to get around. Wolpert and other Orthodox Jewish residents in the building had previously been able to use a rear fire door in the basement to get to the nearby Bnai Jacob Shaarei Zion Congregation synagogue.

I raised my hand to knock on the door, then paused, thinking about the tragedy that had shocked this quiet community. The day before, a gunman had burst into an Amish school four miles away and shot 10 girls, killing five, then taking his own life. By tracing the name of the father of two of the girls, I was led to this house on a hill on Little Beaver Road in Strasburg, Pa. I didn't want to trouble the family, but I wanted to learn about their daughters and tell their story. Still, I felt like an intruder as I ran my eyes over a pair of small black shoes that sat on the porch.

Her voice laced with disapproval, a District Court judge faced a young man yesterday who had just admitted to vandalizing the house of a community activist and asked him how he would have felt if someone had done the same thing to his own home. "You're an adult, and you're expected to behave like one," Judge Nancy B. Shuger told the defendant, Jamar Bailey, 21, who pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of property, trespassing and harassment in the Aug. 7 attack in Baltimore's Waverly neighborhood, where he lives.

The recent Burning Question about restaurant restroom shortcomings provoked an outpouring of reader responses. Most people agreed with my complaints (lack of toilet paper, no soap, unfortunate soap, lack of paper towels, inefficient paper-towel dispensers, faulty stall-door locks). Many more sent in their own. The No. 1-by-a-mile complaint among respondents: Stalls with no hook to hang a handbag. About a third of you vented frustrations about having to put your bag on the floor or hold it while you attended to ... other tasks.

The supervisor of a Baltimore police officer who is on trial on a rape charge testified yesterday that the door to his office -- where the attack is said to have occurred -- was defective and could not have been closed, an account that differed from the alleged victim's testimony. Jemini Jones, 29, is accused of coercing a woman to have sex with him in exchange for freedom from drug charges. Sgt. Robert Smith took the stand as a defense witness shortly after Assistant State's Attorney JoAnn Stanton rested the prosecution's case.

They crawled into the burning rowhouse on their hands and knees, advancing beneath fire and smoke, moving straight into an overwhelming heat that pressed in from all sides. They swept into darkness, each sealed head-to-toe in nearly 70 pounds of protective gear, breathing compressed air delivered from the tanks on their backs to the masks on their faces. The Baltimore firefighters who charged through the front door of a blazing Cecil Avenue rowhouse yesterday entered with a fire hose hurling about 100 gallons of water per minute.

The bodies of two gunshot victims were found early yesterday in a townhouse in Baltimore Highlands, Baltimore County police said.The bodies were found at 3: 07 a.m. in the first block of Twin Circle North in Highland Village Apartments after a neighbor called police, said Cpl. Vickie Warehime, a police spokeswoman.Police identified one of the victims as Johnmark Okay Nwolise, 40, but they were not certain if he lived in the townhouse. The other man's name was not available.Merab Rice, 56, also of the first block of Twin Circle North, said she was asleep in her two-story townhouse when she was awakened about 1 a.m. by a commotion next door.

Ruth Santiago was watching her favorite Spanish-language soap opera when two gunman burst into her two-story, brick rowhouse in East Baltimore Tuesday evening and fatally shot her and seriously wounded her live-in boyfriend, police and relatives said.Santiago, 40, died in the living room of the home, in the 3300 block of McElderry St. in the Ellwood Park-Monument neighborhood, shortly before 8 p.m. Her boyfriend, Rafael Abreu, 51, remains in serious condition at Johns Hopkins Hospital with gunshot wounds to the chest and leg, said police spokeswoman Agent Ragina L. Cooper.

Earnest Byner pointed to his office door."Imagine running into that door 20 to 25 times a game," the former NFL running back said, trying to describe Walter Payton's running style.Payton wouldn't wait for the door to crack open, or seek an easier way out. He would barge through that door, barrel over a defender. It was his preferred method of getting from Point A to Point B."I know for a fact that when defensive players got one-on-one with Walter, they preferred that he juke them or fake them, but he ran through them," said NFL Hall of Famer Ozzie Newsome.

Sales of new homes fell in Washington areaWashington area new-home sales in October fell 10.57 percent compared with the same period last year, according to statistics released by the Meyers Group, a Washington firm that tracks home construction.The number of units sold in October was 1,920 compared with 2,147 last year. But the average sales price rose 6.16 percent to $227,846 from $214,635.Single-family, townhouse and condominium sales dropped by 7.6 percent, 12.47 percent and 16.6 percent, respectively.

Shiretta Henderson can step outside her front door and see the front door of what used to be Rosemont Police Athletic League Center in West Baltimore. Her children, ages 16, 9 and 5, used to head over there and play, do their homework and get an after-school snack. They knew the two police officers assigned there by their first names. The signs are still there, but the doors are locked, permanently, and on Monday the mother of three guarded her front door to make sure her children stayed inside.

When you work out of your home during the summer, you have to learn to tune out all sorts of sounds and activities that would be major distractions in a typical office setting. You might not think this would be too difficult, but picture yourself working away in a cubicle, only the person sharing it is practicing "Lady Madonna" over and over on the piano. It could be tricky to take your conference call. Better yet, what if one of your co-workers liked to stroll about, strumming a ukulele?

Andrew Leonard received a check from the city to repair his broken front door and a phone call from Mayor Sheila Dixon, more than two months after police stormed his house in a raid on the wrong address and one day after his plight was reported in The Baltimore Sun. "We're done and satisfied and moving on with our lives," said Leonard, 33, who lives in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Medfield. "Everything is as it ought to have been, only much, much later than one would expect." Leonard had been trying to recoup damages to his home since Feb. 25, when Baltimore police knocked down his front door and searched his home while investigating a drug case.

Leonards' not the only door knocked down My house, like Andrew Leonards', was wrongly raided by the Baltimore City police in October, 2008. Not only did I receive no sympathy from the department's "Flex Squad," but the lead detective was rude and very dismissive of my claims. After coming home from work that day, I was stopped just short of entering my home, when an elderly neighbor informed me that the police had knocked down my door earlier that morning. My front door appeared normal at first, but I soon discovered that the lock was busted.

Just when you thought the reputation of faceless bureaucrats couldn't sink any lower, two examples in this last week from Baltimore City remind us that government functionaries know no limits in their ability to blindly follow regulations. The Baltimore Sun's Justin Fenton reported on the case of Andrew Leonard, whose door was knocked down by police executing a search warrant. The police had the wrong house. Mr. Leonard figured the city ought to pay for a new door, but the city thought otherwise.

Andrew Leonard was watching television with his wife not long after returning from Ash Wednesday services when police burst through the front door of his North Baltimore home. He was handcuffed, plunked in a chair and told to keep quiet as officers rifled through the house and interrogated him for 15 minutes about drugs and a dealer he knew nothing about. As it turned out, police had the wrong house. The man they were looking for lived two doors down. Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist who has no criminal record, said he and his wife, a 29-year-old credit analyst, were frightened and humiliated by the incident.

It took 42 minutes from the first gunshot to the first blog posting. "How many people were hit?" said one note put on line at 2:32 a.m. Saturday. "Where were they coming from? What are people doing walking around Fells Point with guns?" Four hours later came this: "I talked to two paramedics as they were leaving the scene around 2:30. They said the man who was shot died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital." As with the door-to-door gossip these blogs have replaced, some of the information about the gunfire at 1:50 a.m. on Lancaster Street was wrong - no one was hit or died (a man twisted his ankle, fell and hit his head in the commotion)

Bureaucracy, almost by definition, doesn't move fast, and it certainly didn't move fast enough to get Eduardo Perez's door fixed after police officers kicked it in looking for a woman screaming rape. That took more than six weeks, after lots of phone calls, a terse rejection letter and the intervention of the Baltimore County police chief. Soon, officials promise, Perez will get a check to repair the hole in his checking account created by the bill to repair the hole the police made in his home.

A Gambrills couple in their 60s was held captive at gunpoint by a pair of robbers, who tied them up and ransacked their home after using a ruse to get into the house, Anne Arundel County police said yesterday. The victims - a retired married couple who once owned a retail business nearby - were not seriously injured in the Wednesday incident, which lasted a little more than an hour. Police were looking yesterday for two men who fled in a white Jeep Cherokee or other SUV and said the crime might "possibly not be random" and are "investigating the possibility that this could be linked to another incident," said Justin Mulcahy, a police spokesman.

Police say a 28-year-old man was fatally shot in Mount Vernon after two men burst into his apartment building and placed a gun to his mother's head. The shooting occurred Dec. 6 in the 700 block of N. Howard St. Travis Makofski, 28, lived in a first-floor rear apartment with his mother, who was superintendent of the building. About 2:15 a.m., the doorbell rang and the mother went to the front entrance door of the triplex. Two men shoved the door open and one of them placed a gun to her head, police said.