NEWS
By Tricia Bishop | May 12, 2009
A former prison guard and her incarcerated lover, a Black Guerrilla Family gang member, pleaded guilty Monday to extorting thousands of dollars from prisoners and their relatives, often using contraband cell phones to call the victims from jail. According to their plea agreements, Fonda Deneen White and Jeffrey Fowlkes, both 41, made dozens of threatening calls to an inmate's mother in 2007, "demanding money in exchange for her son's safety." The mother sent 27 payments totaling more than $7,000 before the FBI stepped in. The agency's investigation revealed that White had deposited into her bank account roughly 180 other prisoner payments beginning in October 2005, shortly after she was fired for having an "inappropriate relationship" with an inmate.
NEWS
By John-John Williams IV | January 18, 2009
Authorities are searching for a man convicted of first-degree murder who escaped from the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown yesterday morning by climbing over the prison's perimeter fence using clothing to cover the razor wire. The escape occurred between 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. Kanderlario Garcia-Ramos is serving a life sentence with all but 40 years suspended from a court case in Prince George's County in June 2008. Garcia-Ramos, 24, escaped from the prison while inmates were on their way to the dining hall for breakfast, authorities believe.
NEWS
By RICHARD IRWIN | July 7, 2008
An inmate at the Brockbridge Correctional Center in Anne Arundel County was stabbed yesterday afternoon and remained hospitalized while the attack is being investigated, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said. The 35-year-old inmate, whose name was not released, was stabbed multiple times during an incident with another inmate at the minimum-security facility and pre-release center and was taken by ambulance to University of Maryland Medical Center in downtown Baltimore.
NEWS
By Kevin Rector | July 5, 2008
Two separate stabbings at the Jessup Correctional Institution on Thursday sent two inmates of the maximum-security prison to Maryland Shock Trauma Center with multiple wounds, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said yesterday. Neither of the stabbings was life-threatening, said Mark Vernarelli, the spokesman, in an e-mail. One victim has been released from the hospital, and the other was in stable condition, he said. Their names were not released.
NEWS
By Nicole Fuller | July 1, 2008
A convicted murderer sentenced to an added 15-year term for assaulting a fellow inmate told an Anne Arundel County judge yesterday that he is being threatened in prison by gang members and was forced to resort to violence to protect himself. Richard Janey, 43, is serving a 30-year sentence at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland for the murder of an Annapolis woman in 1994. Janey was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of 29-year-old Susan McAteer, who was stabbed 58 times.
NEWS
By Jennifer McMenamin | June 9, 2008
When a twice-convicted killer in solitary confinement spent an entire night standing at his cell door talking to himself, a physician ordered that he be returned to the prison system's psychiatric facility. That decision was overturned. Sixteen days later, he was seated among other prisoners - not in an isolation cage - for an early-morning drive along the dark interstates that stretch between Hagerstown and Baltimore while correctional officers read the paper and watched TV. Kevin G. Johns Jr. emerged from the bus in a bloody shirt and restraints so loose that an assistant warden worried that he would step right out of them.
NEWS
By Melissa Harris | June 5, 2008
A Southwest Baltimore man who wrote notes, made threats and tried to arrange the poisoning of witnesses who were to testify at his murder trial pleaded guilty yesterday to murder and witness-intimidation charges and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Baltimore Circuit Judge Charles G. Bernstein acknowledged that Ray "Lucky" Williams' 30-year sentence, with all but nine years suspended, is "very, very lenient." Williams' previous trial ended with a hung jury, and the case against him was rife with difficulties common in Baltimore murder cases.
NEWS
May 23, 2008
You probably shouldn't take his word on it, but a fellow inmate diagnosed Kevin Johns thusly: "He was zapped out." Over the years, professionals with a more scholarly lingo at their disposal have diagnosed Johns as depressive, delusional, suicidal, homicidal, hallucinatory, bipolar, alcohol-poisoned in the womb, lead-poisoned as a child, post-traumatically stressed and schizo-affectively disordered. As the guy the next cell over from Johns said, "Zapped out." But what was clear to everyone from fellow prisoners to psychiatrists to Johns himself seems to have eluded correctional officials who over the years have confined him not in psychiatric facilities but regular prisons - to fatal consequences.
NEWS
By Jennifer McMenamin | May 13, 2008
Two inmates who have been housed in the same prison tier as twice-convicted killer Kevin G. Johns Jr. testified yesterday that he acted strangely in the months before authorities say he strangled another prisoner on a bus traveling from Hagerstown to a maximum-security prison in Baltimore. The two men, who are both serving time for murder convictions, told the judge hearing the case that Johns covered the walls of his cell with writing and drawings, often could be heard talking to himself and sometimes refused to eat prison food or candy from his friends for fear that it was poisoned.
NEWS
May 7, 2008
A tree grows in Hurlock. And while this is not a tale of lost innocence as recounted in a New York borough by novelist Betty Smith, self-improvement and redemption do figure in this account. Improving the world in which we live and giving back - that's how Maryland Public Safety Secretary Gary D. Maynard would describe his inmate-staffed conservation corps that is planting trees and seedlings across Maryland. At last count, they had planted about 11,567 trees, including 1,650 in Hurlock.