Leakin

A 24-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced yesterday to life in prison plus 135 years for the 1997 kidnapping and execution-style murder of an Owings Mills woman whose body was left in Leakin Park.Thomas George Brown of the 1600 block of N. Calhoun St. received life in prison for the first-degree murder of Antoineen Darden, 30, who was shot once in the head after being driven around the city.Circuit Judge Carol E. Smith also sentenced Brown to 30 years each on two counts of kidnapping, 15 years each for first-degree assault and robbery with a deadly weapon, 10 years for burglary, and 35 years on two counts of using a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence.

NEW YORK -- We pulled into the Miro Parking Lot at 45th Street off Times Square and stayed for an hour and a half. The charge was $30. That is not a misprint. Then we drove downtown to Greenwich Village and found a parking lot around Lafayette and Astor, and stayed for four hours, and were delighted that the bill was only $17.It's a great time to live in America, if you can afford it. New York lets you know this right away. Between the $30 parking lots and the $17 parking lots, there is so much money and good cheer that you almost fail to notice those shadowy nighttime figures who stumble, half-clothed, out of trash bins where they've been scrounging for other people's castoffs.

The 17-year-old former boyfriend of Hae Min Lee was charged yesterday in the killing of the Woodlawn High School student, whose body was found Feb. 9 in a West Baltimore park, city police said.Sgt. Scott Rowe, a police spokesman, said Adnan Musud Syed was arrested about 6 a.m. at his home in the 7000 block of Johnnycake Road in Woodlawn, Baltimore County, and taken to the Central Booking and Intake Center, where he was charged as an adult with first-degree murder.Rowe said Syed and Lee, 18, were classmates and became friends in May. At some point in the relationship, Rowe said, they started dating.

In a couple more months, this flat part of the park will be transformed into a baseball-basketball -picnic area.The Yellow Cab that carried me across Gwynns Falls Parkway encountered an ominous orange detour sign at the entrance to the Windsor Hills neighborhood on the city's western edge. For the next 10 minutes we twisted and turned along gloriously leafy streets.As the meter ominously clicked into the double-dollar digits, we emerged on West Forest Park Avenue and shot down the hill to Franklintown Road, past local landmarks such the Mill Race Tavern.

THE OPENING of the first leg of the 14-mile Gwynns Falls Trail is cause for celebration. In a city where recreation and parks activities are constantly under threat of budget cuts, this joint project of the nonprofit Trust for Public Land and the municipal government is an unusual achievement.The paved pathway makes much of 2,000-acre Leakin Park accessible to the public for the first time since the devastation of Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972.The 4.5-mile first leg runs from the western end of Franklintown Road, near Winans Way, to Leon Day Park.

Insect ZooHave plans for lunch on Saturday? How about a bit of insect cuisine at Gwynns Falls Leakin Park? The grand opening of the Insect Zoo at Carrie Murray Outdoor Education Campus features creepy, crawly, tasty insect samples, as well as cooking demonstrations, cockroach races, insect crafts, bee-keeping events, a tarantula-feeding demonstration, preserved insect displays and a meeting with an entomologist from the Smithsonian Orkin Insect Zoo. Event...

After two decades of careful planning, engineers are finally ready to design and build a 4-foot-diameter pipe to help bring 30 million gallons of water a day from Baltimore City to Howard County.The design should be finished by next summer, and construction is expected to begin in January 2001, engineers said.The engineers have worked closely with civic activists in West Baltimore, who were concerned that construction of the huge pipeline would cut a 60-foot swath through Leakin Park.The new pipeline will serve office buildings, homes and businesses coming to Howard County through 2025.

Standing atop a cliff in Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park, Chris Rogers was awed by the magnificent view of the lush, green stream valley below. He completely forgot the hustle and bustle of city life -- only the occasional sound of a nearby siren reminded him that he was in an urban area instead of a mountain wilderness.The oasis of peace in the heart of Baltimore inspired the Recreation and Parks intern to energize a group of people into implementing the Gwynns Falls Trail project.That was eight years ago.Saturday, Phase I of the 14-mile trail officially opens and you're invited to join the celebration.

Solving a medical mysteryA DISCOVERY by researchers at the University of Maryland's Greenebaum Cancer Center helps explain why some breast cancer patients have better success with chemotherapy treatment than others. The researchers identified a protein in some patients that "pumps out" the chemotherapy before the anti-cancer drug can reach and destroy the nucleus of the breast cancer cells.Now that the problem has been identified, researchers hope compounds can be added to chemotherapy drugs in the future that will inhibit the interference of these proteins -- allowing chemotherapy to work more effectively.

TOWSON -- County residents who wish to recycle their Christmas trees must set them out at the curb before Jan. 11. Trash haulers will not collect trees from alleys.Trees also may be dropped off for recycling Jan. 6-29 at Western Recycling Center in the 4500 block of Hollins Ferry Road in Halethorpe; Baltimore County Resource Recovery Facility off the 10300 block of York Road in Cockeysville; and Eastern Sanitary Landfill in the 6200 block of Days Cove Road, off the 11500 block of Pulaski Highway.

A former prostitute, who was raped, strangled, cut and left for dead in Leakin Park, took the stand Tuesday in Baltimore Circuit Court and tearfully recounted the details of the 2003 attack by an unlicensed "hack" cabdriver whose DNA is linked to two murders. "I felt his arm go around my neck and he started choking me," the 37-year-old woman said, waving her fists behind her head to show how she tried to fight the man off. "My eyes went up in my head, then everything went black." The Baltimore Sun is withholding the woman's name because she is the victim of a sex crime.

With the city staring at budget cuts, the top brass of the Police Department are scheduled to go on an $11,000 overnight retreat next week. But officials are defending the expenditure, with the trip paid for through cash seized from criminals and the destination hardly glamorous - commanders will be bunking at Leakin Park for the night. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said 48 members of the agency's leadership team - from Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III to the deputy majors - will attend the training and team-building retreat at the park's Outward Bound center.

The beats start slow, then swell with speed, clickety-clacks giving way to chucka-chuckas and shoo-shoo-shoos. A whistle, a squeal, a whoo-whoo. Low rumbles and trembling tracks - a percussion symphony led by a conductor in a pin-striped cap. "There are a lot of rhythms in the railroads," Charles "Bill" Kinzer says just as a train slides by outside in Leakin Park. He pauses to listen. "Choo, choo, choo!" he chimes, mustache jumping. Kinzer is president of the Chesapeake & Allegheny Steam Preservation Society, which kicked off its annual season of free train rides Sunday, part of a quarter-century-old deal struck with the city: Members allow the public to ride their miniature trains - one-eighth the size of the real thing - on the second Sunday of the month, April through November, in exchange for 10 park acres, which they lease for a dollar a year.

There's New Jersey's Pine Barrens, New York's East River and Baltimore's Leakin Park. Infamous body dumping grounds all. Do we add to the list the Inner and Northwest harbors and other waterways that wash up against downtown, Federal Hill, Canton and Locust Point? More bodies have surfaced from those watery graves in March (four) than in Leakin Park in all of this year (one). There was the body near the Broadway Pier in Fells Point on March 9; the body near the paddle boats in the Inner Harbor on March 19; the body near Thames Street in Fells Point on March 22; and the body near Fort McHenry on March 27. Two were men, ages 21 and 26; the others, a man and a woman, remain unidentified.

When members of the Bloods gang step out of line, authorities say, the Bounty Hunters step in. Two Baltimore members of the group - an enforcement arm of the Bloods gang - were convicted last year of shooting a fellow member in the back of the head for "false-flagging," or misrepresenting his status in the gang. In 2006, a California Bloods member, who was sent across the country to Baltimore to separate real Bloods from wannabes, slashed Terrance Randolph, 19, with a boxcutter, smashed him with a sledgehammer, stabbed him with a samurai sword and set his body on fire.

A man whose burned body was found in Leakin Park in late December had been beaten unconscious, wrapped in a blanket and doused in gasoline after angering members of a powerful gang at a Northwest Baltimore motel in December, according to police. With two arrests yesterday, four people - including three teenage girls - have now been arrested for their alleged roles in the crime, said Agent Donny Moses, a police spokesman. According to a source with knowledge of the case, 20-year-old Petro Taylor had failed to drop off $200 to a gang leader named "Sincere" who was being held at the Baltimore County Detention Center.

Man shot in Annapolis is first homicide of 2009 A 39-year-old man who was found shot in a car in an Annapolis public housing complex Tuesday night has died of his wounds, becoming the city's first homicide victim this year. Steven Lamorse Garrett of the 1900 block of Copeland St. was found suffering from a gunshot wound in a car in the Annapolis Gardens community about 9 p.m., Annapolis police said. The car in which Garrett was found had struck another car in the 1800 block of Bowman Drive, prompting a call to police, said police spokeswoman Jane Schlegel.

Yesterday's unveiling of the long-awaited Gwynns Falls Trail head near Leakin Park in Southwest Baltimore completes the 15-mile greenway trail and gives hikers and bikers a new gateway to downtown. Meandering past mallard ducks, an old waterwheel and pristine woodlands, on a journey billed to be 10 degrees cooler than elsewhere in the city because of the Gwynns Falls and the tree canopy, the trail connects more than 30 neighborhoods and 2,000 acres of parkland. "You'll be able to go from here to Baltimore and really enjoy the beauty of the park," Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin told a group of runners, hikers and bikers gathered at the Park & Ride at the end of Interstate 70 to celebrate.

The 1830s saw a "Franklin Towne" planned by William H. Freeman, a prominent Baltimore landowner -- but it didn't get off the paper because of a bank failure. Still, a leafy hamlet has grown up around what started as a gristmill along Dead Run, where Freeman envisioned his suburban oasis. Parts of Franklintown are recognized as local and national historic districts, and the former millhouse is a private home. The neighborhood is hidden between Leakin Park to the east and Security Boulevard to the west, just north of the tip of Interstate 70. Mostly in the city, Franklintown straddles the Baltimore City-Baltimore County line.

You felt awkward walking to last year's Halloween party in your bunny outfit? Thought driving in your mummy costume was tricky? Try running nearly four miles dressed as a sumo wrestler. Dan Parry can tell you - from personal experience during yesterday's XTERRA Gwynns Falls Trail Run - it isn't easy. Parry, a 46-year-old computer specialist, couldn't put down his arms because of the inflatable layer of skin. And after finishing the 6K, Parry said, "It was pretty hot, too." But he and others - including a Batman and Catwoman, a Green Giant and a skeleton - said the Halloween apparel added an element of silliness to the race, a fundraiser for the Gwynns Falls Trail Council.