Halfway House

The Howard County Health Department is seeking a state grant for a halfway house that would help women of child-bearing age who are substance abusers and their children who suffer from neglect or abuse.If funded, the program would be the first of its type in the state and could be operating by June, officials said."We hope to include a focus on families where children are abused or neglected," said Dr. Joyce Boyd, county health officer. The intent is a program where "the whole family can get everything they need to be a whole, healthy family."

The former executive director of the Havre de Grace housing authority was sentenced Monday to serve six months in a halfway house and fined $1,200 for taking kickbacks from contractors to replace kitchen faucets in a residential complex. U.S. District Judge William D. Quarles Jr. also sentenced the former director, George R. Robinson, 63, to three years' probation. The Bel Air resident had faced up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine after pleading guilty in January to bribing a public official, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office.

PLANS TO expand Damascus House substance-abuser halfway house operations in the neighborhood will be discussed at a meeting of the Brooklyn Heights Improvement Association at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Brooklyn Park branch library, 1 E. 11th Ave. Speakers will be Charles Mooneyhan, program director of Damascus House, and Lisa Keough, coordinator of special programs and supervisor of field services for the county health department. Damascus House plans to purchase an approximately one-acre property on Edison Street near Ritchie Highway, demolish a house on the site and build a 15-bed facility that would be operated in addition to the halfway house it has had in the 4200 block of Ritchie for 27 years.

The wife of disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff says he is at a halfway house in Baltimore. The wife of disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff says he is at a halfway house in Baltimore. Pam Abramoff declined to name the facility during a brief telephone conversation Thursday with The Associated Press. The 51-year-old former power broker was released Tuesday from the minimum-security federal prison camp in western Maryland after serving about 3 1 / 2 years of a six-year sentence for fraud, corruption and conspiracy.

The former inmate at a Baltimore halfway house accused of shooting another man told police that it was relatively easy to leave the facility at night, according to a tape recording played in court yesterday. In Baltimore Circuit Court, prosecutors played the audio recording from May in which Nolan L. Evans insisted to detectives that he never shot Larry Parks. Parks died from his injuries in November 2006. But Evans - son of death row inmate Vernon Lee Evans Jr. - also acknowledged on the tape that he had been able to stay out of the halfway house on East Monument Street at night, and told the homicide detectives that it would be possible for an inmate to spend an entire weekend away from the partially secure facility.

A bill to lease a building at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital in Jessup for $1 a year for 40 years and use it as a drug and alcohol halfway house probably will be put on hold at the County Council's next legislative session.The council had planned to discuss the bill at tonight's work session, but background information requested last week has not yet been provided. Unless the information is received this week, the council will probably postpone a vote on the bill until March 1.Council members started rethinking the project after Rebecca Horvath, director of general services, told them the county should be prepared to underwrite the halfway house at a cost of up to $50,000 a year for the first two years.

The Howard County Health Department has received a $629,000 state grant to establish a halfway house for women of child-bearing age who are substance abusers and their children who suffer from neglect or abuse.County health officials expect to receive a formal award letter this week from the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene."It's a pretty healthy grant," said Frank McGloin, the county health department's addictions director. "We'll be able to do some good things."At a Tuesday meeting of the county Board of Health, county health officer Dr. Joyce Boyd described the halfway house project and another project, the proposed expansion of an addictions treatment program at the Howard County Detention Center.

Robert E. Lipscomb, a retired millwright who was a guiding force behind Chip House, a halfway house for recovering alcoholics in Charles Village, died Wednesday of a heart condition at his home in Parkville. He was 73. Mr. Lipscomb was born and raised in Baltimore, joined the merchant marine when he was 16 and served in the Air Force during the Korean War. For many years, he operated his business servicing and repairing large conveyer belts at power plants and manufacturing operations, including Bethlehem Steel Corp.

Pete Rose ended his three-month sentence at a halfway house yesterday, but still faces nearly three months of his community-service sentence for tax cheating."

The multimillionaire founder of a Chicago generic drug company has been fined $25,000 and sentenced to three months in a halfway house for bribing a U.S. Food and Drug Administration branch chief in Rockville and another government official in Philadelphia.Judge John R. Hargrove suspended nine months of a one-year term for defendant Kun Chae Bae and ordered him to perform 1,000 hours of community service while he serves three years on probation afterward.Hargrove, who imposed the sentence in U.S. District Court in Baltimore yesterday, said it was "a compromise" between the need to send a message to other drugmakers and a "reward" for Bae's cooperation with federal prosecutors in a continuing investigation of the generic drug industry.

Though confident of reaching a new labor agreement before the 2010 season, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell criticized a union report that said the league was highly profitable and therefore the current revenue-sharing system still works. "There's a lot of fiction in that report," Goodell said at his annual "State of the NFL" news conference yesterday in Tampa, Fla. On Thursday, a union-commissioned study showed the average value of franchises has increased from $288 million to $1.04 billion during the past decade, and that teams averaged a $24.7 million profit in the past year - even as the economy took a turn for the worse.

The results of an autopsy on a woman's body found March 20 in Gwynns Falls Park in West Baltimore show that she was strangled, a police spokesman said. About 6 a.m. that day, police received a 911 call from someone who reported seeing a man dump what appeared to be a body onto the ground off the 3600 block of Winterbourne Road and then drive off in an unknown vehicle, said Agent Donny Moses, the spokesman. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and her body was sent to the medical examiner's office.

A man accused of leaving a half-way house to commit murder in Baltimore has been acquitted by a Baltimore Circuit Court jury, according to the city prosecutor's office. Nolan L. Evans, 38, the son of death row inmate Vernon Lee Evans Jr., was charged after a witness came forward months after the April 2006 shooting of Larry Parks. Before issuing its verdict Tuesday night, jurors asked Circuit Judge Kaye A. Allison to allow them to review the videotape of the witness' testimony, a request the judge granted.

Halfway houses ease re-entry into society Halfway houses such as Volunteers of America's Comprehensive Sanction Center are not intended to restrain violent criminals ("A halfway house full of holes," Feb. 17). As the photograph that accompanies The Sun's article demonstrates, a halfway house is not a jail. Jails are built to separate criminals from society, while halfway houses are designed to integrate criminals into the community. Many halfway house occupants are authorized to leave the facility during working hours, and these facilities feature no razor-wire fences or sharpshooters.

The former inmate at a Baltimore halfway house accused of shooting another man told police that it was relatively easy to leave the facility at night, according to a tape recording played in court yesterday. In Baltimore Circuit Court, prosecutors played the audio recording from May in which Nolan L. Evans insisted to detectives that he never shot Larry Parks. Parks died from his injuries in November 2006. But Evans - son of death row inmate Vernon Lee Evans Jr. - also acknowledged on the tape that he had been able to stay out of the halfway house on East Monument Street at night, and told the homicide detectives that it would be possible for an inmate to spend an entire weekend away from the partially secure facility.

Someone should have been watching Nolan L. Evans. On a night in April 2006 when court records show he was supposed to have been secured inside a halfway house, authorities charge that the convicted felon was able to shoot a man in Northwest Baltimore. Months later, the man died from his injuries. The little-publicized homicide case, scheduled for trial this week, could be another blow to Volunteers of America's Comprehensive Sanction Center. The Sun reported last month that during a spot-check in April 2007, 10 inmates were discovered missing from the halfway house and that two probationary employees suspected of accepting bribes from those inmates were fired as a result.

The county's only halfway house for women recovering from drug and alcohol addictions, the Marty Mann House, will close Nov. 30 as a result of state budget cuts.The board of directors for the Marty MannHouse and its companion, the Mann House, a men's recovery center, decided to close the women's program because $65,800 was cut from the $131,000 state grant to operate the two programs."There is not a similar resource to that in all of Harford County," said J. Sue Henry, coordinator of the county's Drug and Alcohol Impact Program.

The Howard County Health Department is seeking a state grant for a halfway house that would help women of child-bearing age who are substance abusers and their children who suffer from neglect or abuse.If funded, the program would be the first of its type in the state and could be operating by June, officials said."We hope to include a focus on families where children are abused or neglected," said Dr. Joyce Boyd, county health officer. The intent is a program where "the whole family can get everything they need to be a whole, healthy family."

Employees at a privately run Baltimore halfway house have allowed federal defendants to leave the secured facility at night in violation of court-ordered restrictions. Officials at the nonprofit Volunteers of America suspect that two employees - who have subsequently been fired - accepted bribes in exchange for letting the defendants out. But despite questions about the integrity of the program, judges continue to send defendants there because there are few other places in Maryland to house minimum-security defendants awaiting federal trials.

A Remington rowhouse, badly damaged in a fire Tuesday that seriously injured a woman, was the scene of a triple killing over a drug dispute more than two years ago. Police and arson investigators have preliminarily determined that the fire at 541 W. 27th St. was caused by an electrical malfunction of a fan, said Officer Troy Harris, a city police spokesman. "First, the shooting and now this. What next?" said Margaret Marousek, 79, who lives next door to the burned building. Marousek said her rowhouse, where she lives with her sister, had smoke and water damage.