I Was Scared

Hair cut high and tight along with a noticeably looser demeanor, Rocky Coppinger looks like a guy who has had a weight lifted from his shoulders.And his hips.And his gut.And just about any other place that sagged under the poundage of a ruinous 1997 season.Rocky Coppinger, the Orioles' 10-game rookie winner in 1996, missed the Baltimore Express last season. Actually, he threw himself off the train as a jumble of raw rotator cuff, painful right elbow and a fractured personal life. One season after living large as the Orioles' out-of-nowhere No. 4 starter, Coppinger became too large.

Apprehension. Trembling. Alarm. There are locations in Baltimore that just plain scare me.I realized my penchant for geographic skittishness the other night. I was driving with a friend. We took a wrong turn because of the construction outside Pennsylvania Station and wound up on Falls Road under the North Avenue Bridge.The masonry underbelly of that noble span is nowhere to be at 11 at night. Do I fear the trolls who live under bridges? Yes, if the wind's blowing in the right direction. Do I cringe at the hobos who lurk by the railroad tracks?

They are different now, their lives forever changed, yet they remain very much the same. Scott Hamilton is still the playful imp, Ekaterina Gordeeva the shy princess. They were once part of the same world. Now, they are members of the same extended family.When they appear tomorrow at Baltimore Arena in the first of a 57-city Discover Stars On Ice tour, Hamilton and Gordeeva will be part of a cast that also includes fellow Olympic gold medalists Kristi Yamaguchi and Katarina Witt.That they are performing at all is a testimony to their strength, drawn from each other, from within as well as from those around them, including their fans.

Baltimore Officer Gahiji Tshamba, on trial for murder, told a packed courtroom Wednesday that he feared for his life when he shot a Marine veteran a dozen times outside a Mount Vernon nightclub. "I was scared, I was in fear," Tshamba, 37, said from the witness stand in response to his lawyer's questions. "This man was chasing me. " It was the first time he has spoken publicly about the incident, which began when Tyrone Brown groped a woman's buttocks after a night of drinking.

A former Baltimore police officer testified yesterday that he feared he was going to be killed during a struggle in 1998 with Derek Robert McIntosh that resulted in McIntosh's fatal shooting. Shane C. Stufft, 29, said yesterday during a civil trial sought by McIntosh's family that he thought McIntosh was reaching for his service gun in the incident Jan. 13, 1998. Stufft was attempting to arrest McIntosh for an alleged narcotics violation. At the time of the shooting, Stufft was working undercover in a special police squad that focused on street-level drug sales.

In a surprising courtroom turn, a woman who lived with Rodney Maurice Stanley testified yesterday that Stanley forced her to tell police that he acted in self-defense in a fight that ended with the death of Thomas Jefferson Harding. Stanley is on trial in Howard County Circuit Court, charged in Harding's death. A jury was considering his fate last night. The woman, Marcia Minor, was living with Stanley in Columbia at the time of Harding's death in August 2000. In testimony yesterday, Stanley vehemently denied that he had threatened Minor and reiterated his assertion that he fought Harding only in self-defense.

Carl M. Pickett, a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became vice president of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Co., died Monday of pneumonia at Anne Arundel Medical Center. The Annapolis resident was 87. On Dec. 7, 1941, Mr. Pickett was aboard the destroyer USS Ralph S. Talbot moored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. "When the attack started, I opened the hatch and saw a [Japanese] Zero coming right toward me," Mr. Pickett wrote in response to a Midwestern high school student who had asked him about his memories of the attack.

Abby Culp never realized how much she loved running until she couldn't do it any more. After her freshman cross country season at Winters Mill, Culp's family moved to Florida for six months, and she had to take a break from running during a brief struggle with an eating disorder. Back in Carroll County at Manchester Valley, she got back into serious running as a junior. Last fall, she was an All-Metro second-team selection after finishing second in the Class 1A state cross country meet.

Called to action by the blast of a horn, more than 30 yapping spotted hounds spill down a hill, bound across a country road, leap a fence and rush a faded winter field. On the hound's heels are about two dozen hunters on horseback, men and women in britches and tweed and velvet hats. Motorists, what few there are this deep in the country on a hushed winter morning, a weekday, are slow to take it in. Some stop altogether. For it's something to behold, this pageant of beasts and man -- a scene from another time, another place.

RODNIKI, Russia -- Gennady I. Nikonov beams with fatherlike pride as he surveys his progeny. Some are mating in a quiet room, others are getting their first real meal (not a pretty sight); soon-to-be mothers are swollen with pregnancy.He watches happily as a young woman plunges her arm into a 10-quart glass jar and plucks a handful of tiny but already fat, squirming leeches from their cocoons. "This is the most tender moment," he sighs.Another generation of leeches has just been born, and Gennady Nikonov thinks they should suck your blood.