Fallen

Sergio Kindle is in stable condition after injuring his head only days before the team's rookies are scheduled to report to training camp, the latest off-field incident for the Ravens' first pick in the 2010 draft. Kindle, 23, suffered the injury in a house he was visiting Thursday night in Austin, Texas, where it is believed he fell down two flights of stairs. The former University of Texas linebacker has improved the past couple of days and should make a full recovery, according to a league source.

They walked in the rain, hundreds of them, police officers from all over the country. They passed by blighted blocks similar to what they're all too accustomed in their own cities. Police supervisors from California to New York didn't flinch as they marched Wednesday morning along East Biddle Street in a gathering meant to show solidarity with the community and with each other. They ended at a prayer service for fallen officers at Israel Baptist Church. New York police Lt. Marvin Louis has two brothers-in-law who live in Baltimore, but on this day he was here in uniform.

Four passengers were injured when a bus driver crashed into parked cars on the Alameda early Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the Maryland Transit Administration said. The bus hit one parked car on The Alameda near 33rd Street at 2:42 a.m. that triggered a domino effect, said spokesman Terry Owens. Eight parked cars were damaged as a result, he said. Four passengers were taken to Union Memorial Hospital for treatment of injuries that were not considered life-threatening, Owens said.

You had to knock loud, above the whir of air conditioning and the squeals from the community pool across the street. But eventually Michael Waters-Bey appeared. Not on the porch, where seven years ago he'd held a photo of his only son up for the television cameras, and implored the president to take a hard look at the price his family had paid for the war in Iraq. This time he came to an upstairs window. He lifted the sash, leaned out and politely declined to talk about his son, the war, Memorial Day or anything else.

Today at 1 p.m., a procession including bagpipers, drummers, horses, motorcycles and the governor will remember Maryland's fallen police and firefighters, a mournful pageant at the green expanse of Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens. Just three public safety workers in the state — one firefighter and two police officers — died in the line of duty during the past year, and two of them will be memorialized at the cemetery in Timonium. The family of the third requested that his public remembrance be held next year.

Ernestine R. "Ernie" Uncles, who as social services liaison for the mayor's office worked tirelessly for more than 40 years helping to improve the lives of the forgotten, homeless and impoverished, died Saturday of cancer at her Bolton Hill home. She was 69. "She was a legend in Baltimore. When anyone had been evicted, had no food, was in poverty or had some other emergency, you called Ernestine," Tom Saunders, who retired from the Baltimore Community Relations Commission, said Thursday.

He'd served the force for a third of his life, but tragedy struck Cpl. Duke G. Aaron III in an instant. One July day in 2004, Aaron, an officer with the Maryland Transportation Authority, had just returned to his patrol car after writing a traffic ticket when a speeding motorist — a Maryland man who later tested positive for cocaine — rammed his vehicle from behind. By the end of the day, the burly Aaron, 29, of Pasadena, was dead. It was the sort of news the family of every emergency responder dreads, and the two strangers who visited Jennifer Aaron, his widow, the next day knew there was nothing they could say to make it better.

No one should be surprised that the Orioles set a record Monday night for the smallest crowd in the history of Oriole Park at Camden Yards. They have had a succession of new lows periodically over the past few years, though there was something about Monday night that made it a more striking symbol of the baseball apocalypse that has taken place in Baltimore over the past decade or so. Maybe it was the number — 9,129 — that got everybody's...

N early a year ago, Chris Bynum was chosen along with two other African-Americans, Keith McAdoo and Tyrone Fisher, to officiate the North Carolina-Detroit lacrosse game. They were so surprised, they jokingly called it "The Obama Game." "You think we were surprised?" asked Bynum, 39, from Greensboro, N.C. "The trainer from Denver, who was African-American, walked way over across the field to shake our hands. He said he never thought he'd live to see this happen. Heck, we kept a couple of the game balls and took them home."