East Side

The East Baltimore Development Inc. community will gain a prestigious new occupant - and about 250 jobs - when the state of Maryland builds a $180 million Public Health Laboratory there, officials said. Maryland's Board of Public Works this week approved $6.45 million in state funds to begin designing a 200,000-square-foot laboratory building to house state employees who now work at 201 W. Preston St., part of the State Office Complex in Baltimore. The building will be one of the next major projects to get under way on the East Baltimore property, an 88-acre tract north of the Johns Hopkins medical campus that is being developed as a $1.8 billion mixed-use community with housing, shops, offices, life science facilities, a school and a rail station.

On Thursday morning, Lionell Green watched construction vehicles pile debris from the fire that killed his grandmother, two cousins and his cousin's daughter in East Baltimore's Oliver neighborhood Wednesday night. It was a familiar sight. In 1994, he was one of three survivors of a house fire in Southwest Baltimore that killed nine members of his family, seven of them children. "Death just came right back around," he said. Investigators were still working to determine the cause of the overnight blaze that led to the city's first fire fatalities of 2010, said Fire Department spokesman Capt.

A single-alarm fire late Wednesday killed four people, whose bodies were found in separate rooms inside an East Baltimore rowhouse. Their identities, genders and relationships were not immediately available, but at least one was elderly, said Chief Kevin Cartwright, a Fire Department spokesman. Cartwright said the incident is the city's first fatal fire this year and that its cause is under investigation. One person was found in a second-floor front room, another in the rear of the house, and the third and fourth in other sections of the house in the 1600 block of E. Oliver St. Reported at 11:10 p.m., the blaze filled much of the dwelling with smoke before firefighters were able to beat back flames.

Beyond the biotech high-rise, the townhouses and the condominiums sits what developers call the real centerpiece of the new East Baltimore Development Inc. - a school. The East Baltimore Community School has been open for only half a school year, housed in an assembly of temporary buildings at Washington and Chase streets. But almost everyone involved in the sprawling $1.8 billion EBDI redevelopment project - which aims to rebuild the area north of Johns Hopkins Hospital - refers to the school when discussing the neighborhood's odds of success.

Three men were shot, one of them fatally, during a span of less than four hours Tuesday in East Baltimore, said a city police spokesman. No arrests had been made in the shootings. And in Brooklyn, a girl, 15, was shot in the head about 8:10 p.m. while talking to several other people in the 4200 block of 10th St. and was in critical condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, police said. Her name was not released. Police were attempting to determine whether the girl was an intended target.

On Saturday morning, thousands of people running the marathon will turn northwest onto McCulloh Street. About the time they hit the first water station, they will run right over the spot where Israeli Mason was shot and killed Sept. 13. At that point, they will be within three blocks of where three other killings occurred this year. As they continue on the route, they will pass within a block of 13 other spots where people have been fatally shot, stabbed or beaten since January, including eight on the city's east side.