Homeless

Anne Arundel police have charged a 29-year-old homeless man with attempted murder. Louis Vaden also faces assault charges stemming from an incident involving his girlfriend Monday in Brooklyn Park. The victim told police that the suspect had violently assaulted her early in the day in a wooded area behind the 6000 block of Ritchie Highway, where the couple had been living. Investigators said the two became involved in an argument that led to an altercation. The suspect dragged the victim through a bonfire, police said.

An unidentified homeless man was taken to Bayview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries Monday after firefighters found him unconscious inside a burning single-family home in Brooklyn Park. Anne Arundel County firefighters responded to the 4500 block of Ritchie Highway at 12:01 p.m., a spokesman said. It took about 30 firefighters 15-20 minutes to control the blaze in the otherwise vacant structure, he said. The fire caused $40,000 in damage. Its cause is under investigation.

A homeless woman died in a fire outside a Westminster thrift store early Tuesday morning, according to the office of Maryland state fire marshal. The woman, who has not been identified, was found by firefighters behind The Spare Room at 28 West Main St. in Westminster, officials said. The thrift store is operated by the Westminster Rescue Mission. The Westminster Fire Department was called to the one-alarm fire at 1:49 a.m. when they located the remains of a body and clothing effects burning.

The Fellowship of Lights offers shelter and counseling to homeless teen-agers and also counsels families under stress. For more information, call 385-1200 or 522-9605.

A year ago, if you'd asked David Moore to generalize about homeless people, he'd have said most were probably addicted to drugs or alcohol, lacking in ambition and unworthy of the general public's trust. Then he became homeless himself. "I'll be honest with you, I wasn't prepared for that to happen," said Moore, a 46-year-old Arnold native who lost his job and his apartment last fall, only to end up living in his car. He might have lost his hope as well, he said, had he not heard about Winter Relief, a program sponsored by the Arundel House of Hope in Glen Burnie that offers a select group of more than 90 homeless people a warm place to sleep every night through the winter months.

A county committee is considering alternatives for sheltering Carroll's homeless after the Shoemaker House addiction center moves to Sykesville in the spring.Shoemaker's program, operated by the Carroll County Department of Health, has doubled as an emergency winter shelter because it had beds, food and 24-hour staffing.The program will move to Sykesville in the spring because of budget and space considerations, forcing the county committee on homelessness to look for alternatives.Jolene Sullivan, the Carroll's director of citizen services, said the county could continue to use the addiction center after it moves to the Regan Recovery Center in Sykesville and transport the homeless to that town.

Homelessness and Howard County. The words don't seem to belong in the same sentence. Homelessness and the city? It's a given. But not in the super-affluent, intellectual, suburban nirvana of Howard County.Yet, at least 700 individuals and families find themselves homeless over the course of a year in Howard County. The fact that they are largely invisible to most residents is a testament to the charity shown by some people. But this charity is not enough.Grassroots, a non-profit agency based in Columbia that runs the county's only homeless shelter, is having a financial crisis itself.

The Howard County Council is about to wade into the thicket of disagreement over how much aid for the poor and the homeless is too much.Specifically, the council will hear arguments today on the merits of a proposed shelter for homeless men in the county.Grassroots, one of the primary shelters in Howard, would operate the men's facility with the help of a $30,000 grant from the county's Grant-in-Aid program. In addition to providing a place to stay, the shelter would offer services such as job training and substance-addiction counseling.

A Maryland advocacy group for the homeless reports an alarming rise in the number of families being turned away from shelters around the state for lack of room. The most serious finding of the survey, conducted by Action for the Homeless last year, is that families now make up almost half of all homeless people in the state, and that nearly a third of the people living in shelters are children.Every night some 5,000 people are homeless in Maryland. This year shelters will be forced to turn away 50,000 people, all told -- an increase of 20 percent over last year.

This is the time of year when people who run shelters for the homeless start getting nervous, start thinking about money, and beds, and the faces showing up at their doors. It's part of the cycle of city life: Homeless men, women and children fill the shelters during the winter, then some of the shelters close in the spring. Summer passes. Comes the fall, come the homeless. Again and again and again.The most recent estimates put the number of Baltimore's homeless at 2,400 nightly. Some years, the number has dropped to about 2,100.