Killer

A Rosedale man was sentenced Monday to life imprisonment for arranging a meeting between his aunt and the man she hired to kill her husband. Seamus Anthony Coyle, who turned 30 last week, was sentenced by Baltimore County Circuit Judge Thomas Bollinger for connecting Karla Porter with Walter Bishop, whom Porter hired to kill her husband, according to the Baltimore County state's attorney's office. Porter's husband, William "Ray" Porter, was shot to death by Bishop at the Hess gas station on Joppa Road in Towson on March 1, 2010.

Around the globe, the leading cause of death for children under age 5 is pneumonia, according to a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health . About 18 percent of the deaths are from the infection. That's 1.4 million kids out of 7.6 million who died around the world in 2010. “The numbers are staggering,” said Dr. Robert Black, senior author of the study, published in the May issue of the Lancet . Black, chair in the Department of International Health, said other leading causes of death were pre-term birth complications and diarrhea.

Baltimore County police are making another plea for help in finding the killer of Joann "Jody" LeCornu, a 23-year-old Towson University student who was shot in the back near her car in a shopping center on York Road in 1996. Metro Crime Stoppers has upped an reward to more than $30,000 in the 15-year-old case. The student was killed about 3:40 a.m. March 2, 1996 in the back of the Drumcastle Shopping Center, and managed to drive across the street to what was then York Road Plaza, where she died.

From The Aegis dated May 7, 1987: Accused cop killer Frank Green was transferred from the Harford County Detention Center 25 years ago this week to the state prison system. Green's lawyer said Green's life and health were at risk in the county jail because a county sheriff's deputy was one of the people wounded during the "incident" in September in which a Maryland Transportation Authority Police officer was shot and killed. Deputies staff the jail. Others called the "incident" involving Green more of a rampage.

When do I put down grub killer in the spring? Spring grubs are big, but they are barely eating now and not damaging your lawn. Don't waste your money on these grubs. Also, applying grub killer in spring sickens wasps that are predators of grubs. You've probably seen these beneficial wasps hovering over your lawn, looking for grubs to attack. Natural controls usually keep grub populations under control. A few grubs are normal and keep the predators around. Rarely is lawn damage caused by grubs.

The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports: Dante Parrish, a convicted killer who was freed from prison 20 years early with the help of the Innocence Project, was sentenced to life without parole Tuesday for brutally murdering a 15-year-old Baltimore boy in 2009, less than a year after his premature release. The brutal killing of Jason Mattison Jr., whose troubled life as a gay teenager drove him from house to house, only to take refuge in the very place he'd be killed as his heroin-laden aunt passed out, left the judge with a loss of words.

Dante Parrish, a convicted killer freed from prison with the help of the Innocence Project in a 1999 murder, was sentenced to life without parole Tuesday for murdering a 15-year-old Baltimore boy less than a year after his release. Baltimore Circuit Judge John Addison Howard quoted an old Scottish prayer when handing down the sentence, which included a second life term for attempting to sexually assault Jason Mattison Jr. before suffocating the teen with a pillowcase, slashing his throat and stuffing him in a bedroom closet in November 2009.

My brackets went up in flames this weekend -- like a raging oil refinery fire, if you want the truth. So for me, there is no hope of any respectable showing in the modest NCAA men's basketball tournament pool in which I compete.  ( Compete ?! Ha! That's a laugh!) Yes, it is. I picked more losers than all the Kardashian boyfriends combined. I had Missouri in the Final Four. Vanderbilt in the Elite Eight. Duke in the Sweet Sixteen. I could go on with the losers, but what's the point?

Someone fatally shot Terrence Joyner Sunday as he was walking with 15-year-old Donye Thompson through a Northeast Baltimore gas station parking lot. Police know this much - they and have it on tape. But while police don't know the assailant who killed Joyner, 42, they recognized Thompson and have charged him with attempting to kill an unknown person. He was seen on the video tape shooting back at the assailant, according to police. Detectives who work the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood where the shooting occurred have had “numerous, in excess of 15, encounters over the past four months” with Thompson, according to charging documents.

It appears that the governor of Maryland, a former prosecutor and Baltimore mayor who built his political career on zero-tolerance crime policies, might finally give birth to a conscience in the matter of Mark Farley Grant - an inmate who went to prison 28 years ago for a crime he most likely didn't commit. It's one thing to be tough on crime, another to be just and fair. In the matter of Farley Grant, the otherwise ambitious governor of Maryland has come late to the latter ... maybe.