False Imprisonment

A civil jury found yesterday that a Baltimore County police officer trespassed when he entered an Owings Mills apartment a year ago after a neighbor complained about noise, lawyers in the case said. However, the Circuit Court jury limited the damage award to $1 to each of the two women who brought suit, and also ruled in favor of Officer Kenneth W. Brown regarding claims of false imprisonment and battery. Crystal Rose Van Allen and Elizabeth Marie Couvillion also brought claims of false imprisonment and trespass against officers William McGladrie and Conrad Herold, but the jury decided in favor of the officers.

A Texas woman was arrested over the weekend on charges including child abuse after her 8-year-old autistic son was found wandering alone in her room at a downtown Baltimore hotel with his hands bound behind his back, city authorities said. The mother - identified as Crinne Bohanon, 41, of the Dallas suburb of Allen - was being held without bail at Central Booking and Intake Center on charges of second-degree assault, child abuse, reckless endangerment, leaving a child unattended and false imprisonment, said Margaret T. Burns, spokeswoman for the city state's attorney's office.

The second of two bounty hunters accused of bursting into an Ellicott City apartment, taking the occupants' money and holding them there for more than two hours pleaded guilty yesterday to five counts of false imprisonment after conceding that he made a "mistake" and stayed "too long." "It definitely was a mistake, and because of that, that's why I'm in the situation I'm in," Everett Ambush Chambers, 27, told Howard County Circuit Judge Diane O. Leasure. Noting prosecutors' belief that Chambers, of the 4400 block of Mary Ave., was "less culpable" than his co-defendant, Darnell Anthony Brown, 30, Leasure sentenced Chambers to 18 months in jail, suspending all but the month and a half he served while the case was pending, and placed him on two years' unsupervised probation.

Mike Austin learned his musicianship in a hard school - his 27 years of wrongful imprisonment in Maryland Penitentiary. He talks with passion and conviction about his musical life in and out of prison. He learned to play trumpet and piano in the penitentiary and to sing in the warm, mellow ballad style of Johnny Hartman. He learned music theory. He studied and practiced ceaselessly. Austin went to prison in 1975 when he was 25, convicted of a murder he swore he did not commit. He came out in December 2001 when the evidence against him was discredited.

A 25-year-old Baltimore woman, one of the 70 members of the Salisbury-based 115th Military Police Battalion scheduled to leave yesterday morning, never arrived at the Parkville Armory. Four hours before she was to depart for Fort Stewart, Ga., Telayia Marshall, 25, was killed in a car crash during a domestic dispute with her husband, police said. Marshall, who lived with her husband, Leroy, 26, in the 5900 block of Daywalt Ave., was arguing with him inside a car near Charles and Mulberry streets about 2:30 a.m., according to reports.

A 43-year-old Columbia man who pulled a knife on his teen-age daughter, sparking a tense confrontation with police, was convicted on Monday - nearly a decade after he was convicted of holding his wife hostage in a bank. Howard County Circuit Judge James B. Dudley found Kenneth Robert Welk Jr. guilty of three counts of second-degree assault, one count of reckless endangerment and one count of resisting arrest in the June incident. Welk was acquitted on two additional counts of reckless endangerment, two counts of carrying a weapon openly with intent to injure and one count of false imprisonment.

CUMBERLAND -- A jury is to begin today to decide whether John A. Miller IV, convicted of killing a Carroll County girl whom he lured to his apartment with the false prospect of a baby-sitting job, should be sentenced to death. Closing arguments are scheduled for this morning, with jury deliberations to follow -- after Lawyers for Miller rested their case in his sentencing hearing yesterday. In a bid to persuade the jury to spare their client's life, they presented testimony that Miller's ability to cope with adult life was stunted by a "chaotic" upbringing.

A Baltimore legislator yesterday introduced a bill that would have the state pay a Southern Maryland man $7.5 million for serving more than seven years in prison for a killing he did not commit.The bill, introduced on the House floor by Democratic Del. Clarence Davis, directs Gov. Parris N. Glendening to budget the money for the "wrongful conviction and wrongful imprisonment" of Anthony Gray Jr., 31, of Calvert County.The bill must go to a committee -- most likely the House Appropriations Committee -- for consideration.

Melvin "Little Melvin" Williams, a drug dealer who revolutionized Baltimore's heroin culture three decades ago and who was recently released from federal prison, was arrested Monday night on charges that he assaulted a 37-year-old man in Southwest Baltimore.Williams, 57, was charged yesterday in the Monday night incident. He faces trial on charges of first-degree assault, possession of a handgun, false imprisonment and reckless endangerment. Williams, of the 8600 block of Winands Road in Randallstown, was released on $50,000 bond.

A man who says he was held at gunpoint on Interstate 695 by an off-duty Baltimore police officer after a minor traffic collision has sued the officer, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and city police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, seeking $28 million in damages.Andrew J. Paladino of Reisterstown filed the suit in Baltimore County Circuit Court yesterday. He charges that Officer Tarodd Shawndre Jacobs assaulted and battered him in rush-hour traffic Oct. 9 near the Falls Road Bridge on the Beltway after Officer Jacobs' car "superficially" struck his vehicle as it inched along in a traffic jam.This week, criminal charges of assault, false imprisonment, reckless endangerment and improper use of a weapon were filed against Jacobs in Baltimore County.