Escapees

The girlfriend of a convicted killer has been charged with helping her lover and his cellmate escape last month from the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, state police said yesterday.Geneva Viola Shadeed, 36, of Baltimore surrendered late Wednesday and was charged with two counts of harboring a prison escapee and two counts of being an accessory after the fact. She was released on her own recognizance.Shadeed, girlfriend of Gregory Lee Lawrence, is the second woman arrested in the double escape.

In the wake of an embarrassing escape by two felons this week, top prison officials are blaming lax security and said yesterday that negligent corrections officers failed to notice the breach quickly enough and then were tardy in their reaction.Corrections officers were not aware that anything was amiss at the Maryland Correctional Institution until a woman called to say her son had seen two men jump over the fence and flee into nearby woods.A motion detector sounded as the escapees scaled the fence, but the guards monitoring it were slow to respond.

Casey Miller,77, a feminist author who believed that words such as "mankind" and "congressmen" are sexist, died of lung disease Sunday in East Haddam, Conn. Ms. Miller, and companion Kate Swift, wrote many articles and two books on "male-biased" language.Their "Handbook of Nonsexist Writing," published in 1980, is an influential reference on how to avoid degrading women with words. They inspired changes to the language including the adoption of "artisan" instead of "craftsman" and elimination of the word "authoress."

SAN FRANCISCO -- Spurred by new information from a former inmate, the U.S. Marshal's Service has revived its hunt for three bank robbers who escaped from the notorious Alcatraz Island penitentiary in 1962 and were presumed drowned or eaten by sharks.Former convict Thomas Kent, interviewed for an episode of "America's Most Wanted" airing later this month, provides "significant new leads" in the remarkable escape, the subject of a popular Clint Eastwood movie, a spokesman for the Marshal's Service said yesterday.

An Edgewood boarding house operator with a shotgun captured one of 11 escapees from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School for juvenile offenders yesterday as police in cars, on foot and in a helicopter closed in on the youth after a five-mile chase.Police arrested another Hickey fugitive in a relative's home in Chase, leaving only one of the escapees from last week's breakout at large."I didn't know whether it was a murderer, or what," Dewey Nichols said last night after he had apprehended the exhausted youth in a field behind the boarding house and turned him over to police.

The District of Columbia's chief of Human Services said that more guards, new campus patrols and new door locks will help end an era of continuous escapes from the Cedar Knoll youth detention center in western Anne Arundel County."

Seven juvenile offenders remained on the run last night after an escape from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County, where 11 teen-agers overpowered staff members and broke out of their detention unit yesterday.The youths, ranging in age from 15 to 18, pushed a male staff member, took his keys and grabbed a phone from a female staffer trying to call for help, said Sgt. Gregory M. Shipley, a state police spokesman.Police said the teen-agers were at the school for juvenile delinquents for offenses including auto theft, armed robbery, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and kidnapping.

Ten teen-age residents of the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School at Cub Hill in Baltimore County escaped just after midnight today after overpowering two live-in youth supervisors.Tim Neidermeyer, director of operations at Hickey, said a parent of one of the escaped youths called the school today and reported her son was at home. That youth was returned to the school."We have filed assault charges against the two students who attacked the staff members and escape charges against the others," Mr. Neidermeyer said.

State Police today continued their search for three juveniles who escaped from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Cub Hill.The escapees are not considered dangerous, said Jacqueline Lampell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Juvenile Services.During visitation time at the reformatory, four juveniles -- aged 15 and 16 -- escaped just before 1:30 p.m. yesterday as they were being taken by van from Unit 1, a minimum-security detention area, to the visitation area, Lampell said."Sometime during their transportation, they made good their escape," Lampell said.

Two men who escaped from the Eastern Pre-Release Unit in Queen Anne's County in June were arrested yesterday morning by state police in North East.John Lewis Williams, 30, and John Edward Perry, 29, were picked up from a house after a source told police where they were. The two men were taken to the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, where they will face escape charges, said Sgt. Gregory M. Shipley, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Sergeant Shipley said Williams had been in prison since 1984, serving 15 years for second-degree rape and robbery.

One of 2 prison escapees recaptured on Shore Authorities yesterday captured one of two inmates who walked away from an Eastern Shore correctional facility Wednesday evening. The second escapee was still at large yesterday evening. James Allen Cramer, 52, was arrested about 3 p.m. by the Queen Anne's County Sheriff's Office at an undisclosed location. Authorities said an anonymous tipster aided police in Cramer's apprehension. Police were still searching for Billy Gene Dolly, 41. He was described as a white male, 5-foot-6 and 160 pounds.

The zebras made a run for it. Spotting a door ajar, three striped members of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus broke out yesterday from their temporary home in Baltimore's 1st Mariner Arena. But they didn't get far. Evidently bewildered by the bustle on Hopkins Place downtown, Mali, Giza and Lima -- geldings born in Missouri seven or eight years ago -- allowed themselves to be corralled by trainer Karin Houcke and two handlers within half a block of their exit point. No need for a lasso, since each animal wore a bridle.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - Four Arab escapees believed to be members of al-Qaida eluded a U.S. military dragnet for a second day yesterday as Islamic extremists celebrated the breakout from a detention center here as proof of American weakness. U.S. and allied Afghan troops backed by Apache helicopter gunships set up checkpoints and searched villages that surround the Bagram airbase, about 25 miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul. The base houses the detention center where several hundred suspected militants are held and serves as the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON - Future escapees from high-rise disasters might find themselves hurtling to safety down giant, inflated chutes if a well-connected Israeli company makes good on its invention. The Advanced Modular Evacuation System, which looks like a giant elephant trunk hanging down from a building, is intended to rescue people who are stuck above the reach of a hook-and-ladder. According to its manufacturer, upgrades of the device someday could rescue people from 100 floors above the street.

Nine teen-age boys who removed a window and cut through two fences to escape from the Charles H. Hickey School on Saturday were back in custody by the end of the night, authorities said yesterday. Two of the boys were caught shortly after the 8:30 p.m. escape from the school for juvenile offenders in Cub Hill. State troopers and Baltimore County police, using helicopters and police dogs, caught the other seven escapees about 11:40 p.m. in a residential area near Joppa Road and Walther Boulevard, about two miles from the school.

Two teen-age sex offenders were back in custody yesterday after escaping from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County, officials said. The offenders, 17 and 19 years old, escaped about 7 p.m. Wednesday, said Lee Towers, spokesman for Maryland's Department of Juvenile Justice. He said the teens were dressed in street clothes. A guard, apparently believing they were employees, opened the gate and let them pass. The two were being held at a 26-bed facility for sex offenders run by the Chesapeake Center that is housed on the Hickey grounds.

In Baltimore County 3 boot camp escapees may have stolen car in Timonium TIMONIUM - Three escapees from a state prison boot camp are thought to have stolen a car yesterday in Baltimore County, county and state police said. A white 1995 Plymouth Neon was reported stolen about 9:45 a.m. by a woman who found in its place a brown 1984 Chevrolet Caprice, which police think the escapees carjacked Wednesday in Baltimore. The Caprice was found on Ridgely Road in Timonium, police said. Police are searching for Phillip Schimminger, 24, and Gerard Shaffer, 29, both of Baltimore, and Matthew Gibalia, 19, of Johnstown, Pa. The men escaped Tuesday from Herman L. Toulson Boot Camp in Jessup.

IRVING, Texas - Up in Colorado, they're calling it the "Texas Lottery" - the half-million-dollar reward for the captured escapees. At least four tipsters appear to be eligible, but they may have to wait a while. Most of the organizations that are offering the reward money say they will wait for the Irving Police Department to determine who will receive it. An Irving police officer was slain on Christmas Eve, and one of the escapees is suspected. "That's something we won't be able to get to until further in the case," police spokesman David Tull said.

HOUSTON - A shrewd, well-organized master criminal appears to be the leader of seven escaped Texas prisoners suspected of killing a policeman, authorities said Thursday - and they fear the escapees might be planning a violent showdown with police. A Christmas Eve robbery in Irving, in which Officer Aubrey Hawkins was slain, bore marked similarities to the El Paso robberies that landed escapee George Rivas in jail in 1994. Rivas, 34, whom El Paso prosecutor Marcos Lizarraga once called "the most dangerous man in Texas," had led a group of thugs posing as security guards in at least a half-dozen robberies.

The girlfriend of a convicted killer has been charged with helping her lover and his cellmate escape last month from the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, state police said yesterday.Geneva Viola Shadeed, 36, of Baltimore surrendered late Wednesday and was charged with two counts of harboring a prison escapee and two counts of being an accessory after the fact. She was released on her own recognizance.Shadeed, girlfriend of Gregory Lee Lawrence, is the second woman arrested in the double escape.