Handcuffs

The escape of a Harford County inmate last month could have been prevented with a device that costs $20, county authorities said. The county sheriff's office has purchased two dozen "blue boxes" - plastic-and-metal devices placed over handcuff chains to restrict wrist movement - in response to the Jan. 24 escape of Terrence Kasses Washington. "It's so simple; it's also so ingenious," said Lt. James Eyler, a sheriff's spokesman. "There should be no way that you would be able to mechanically defeat the locking mechanisms on the handcuffs."

Harford County Detention Center inmate Terrence Kasses Washington went into the back seat of a Crown Victoria with arms and legs bound in chains. He came out of the car running. He has been arrested again and again on charges that include bank robbery and car theft, and his slippery ways - he's confounded jailers in Louisiana, Arkansas and Maryland - have made him something of a regular on America's Most Wanted. More than a week after his latest escape, Terrence Washington has left a trail of stolen trucks from Bel Air to Alabama.

Keith Ray has been in jail since July, after city police detectives arrested and charged him with a string of brazen carjackings across Central and North Baltimore. But yesterday, Ray dashed out of the downtown courthouse a free man -- albeit for a few moments. After his case was postponed, Ray was being escorted by corrections officers when he somehow slipped out of his leg irons and one of his handcuffs, breaking free, officials said. With a pair of handcuffs dangling from his right wrist, the detainee barreled down several flights of stairs from the fourth floor and fled onto St. Paul Street about 11:30 a.m., officials said.

A Baltimore judge yesterday sentenced a man convicted of first-degree murder and a weapons violation to life in prison plus 20 years. Corey McMillon, 29, of the 2000 block of Ruxton Ave. was found guilty June 20 in the shooting death of Jamel St. Clair, 17. St. Clair was shot four times April 1, 2005, in the 2000 block of E. North Ave. Police believe McMillon tried to rob St. Clair and shot him when St. Clair tried to run away. McMillon briefly escaped custody in October when he was taken to Mercy Medical Center downtown for an unknown medical problem.

The guy who supervises the crime lab for Baltimore City police is a crime novelist in his spare time. The department also has an officer who was assigned to the Western District around the time JFK took office - and is still there. Where can somebody see stories like these, the upbeat, human-interest side of Baltimore's finest? Newspapers? TV news? Fat chance, says department spokesman Matt Jablow. With the media more interested in street-crime gore and police scandals, the department has decided to take its good news straight to the people - producing its own video features and posting them on www.baltimorepolice.

They had met like this many times. Brian O'Neal Hodge would steal jewelry, then meet the "fence" -- a person who buys stolen goods to resell them -- on a parking lot, where he would receive a lump sum of cash, Hodge told police, according to charging documents. So just hours after robbing a Timonium jewelry store of more than $200,000 in merchandise with a woman posing as his fiancee, Hodge traveled to the parking lot of a Baltimore gas station to meet the fence, known to him as "Kay," documents say. In return for all of the jewelry stolen during the robbery, Kay handed Hodge $2,500, with the promise of more, according to documents.

DENVER --Bernard J. Ebbers of WorldCom had to do it. so did Enron's Kenneth L. Lay. Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, too. But former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, indicted in Denver Tuesday on 42 counts of illegal insider trading, was not paraded in handcuffs before photographers and TV camera crews in a ritual that's known as the "perp walk." Prosecutors allowed Nacchio to travel to Denver from his New Jersey home Monday night on a commercial flight and surrender to the FBI the next morning. Agents fingerprinted him, then drove him across the street in a car with tinted windows into the garage of the federal courthouse.

BOSTON - The Bayhawks seemed to be in trouble early in last night's Major League Lacrosse game against the Boston Cannons. They lost the league's best faceoff man, midfielder Paul Cantabene, after he suffered a seven-stitch gash above his left eye barely four minutes into the game. Shortly thereafter, they lost midfielder Josh Sims to a hamstring injury. But Ben Defelice filled in admirably for Cantabene, winning 19 of 33 faceoffs, and Jeff Sonke stepped in for Sims and contributed five points, including one two-point goal.

I'M NOT a scientist - my older brother got that part of the brain, not me - and that I've read about chronic wasting disease in wildlife indicates that the science on this matter is far from conclusive. So I'm not the one to tell you that the 17 pet fallow deer seized by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in Anne Arundel County during the past month presented a risk of introducing CWD into Maryland and threatening our burgeoning wild deer population, giving the DNR the full right to kill them all as a precaution against potential disaster.

A Baltimore police officer was indicted yesterday on charges that he hit a handcuffed teenager in the face with a metal baton, the city state's attorney's office announced. Officer Gregory M. Mussmacher of the Police Department's Northwest District is charged with one count of first-degree assault, two counts of second-degree assault and two counts of misconduct in office, prosecutors said. The charges stem from an incident April 27 in which Mussmacher arrested a 17-year-old boy involved in a family dispute.