Pregnant

It's possible to summarize Andrew Irons' "Linus and Alora" as being about a man and woman anticipating the birth of a child, but its meaning is more difficult to pin down. That makes it a suitable choice for Single Carrot Theatre, because this group in Baltimore's Station North arts district thrives on such avant-garde work. When Alora (Susannah Edwards) visits a doctor at the beginning of the play, it's immediately clear from their conversation that the playwright is going to raise as many questions as he answers when it comes to Alora's back story and medical condition.

In the mind of Cleaven L. Williams Jr., the stabbing death of his wife on a Baltimore street was a tragedy that took place outside his control. The event, he said in court Friday, rendered him a victim, too. In sentencing the 35-year-old defendant to life in prison, Baltimore Circuit Judge Timothy J. Doory admonished him to "accept 100 percent responsibility" for killing Veronica Graves Williams on Nov. 17, 2008, something he avoided doing during...

After a two-week trial that traced a failing marriage's path from disharmony to a vicious killing, a former community activist in Northeast Baltimore was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of his pregnant wife in 2008. The jury also convicted Cleaven L. Williams Jr. of a dangerous-weapon charge in the death of Veronica Williams, with whom he had three children. Their relationship, testimony showed, was fast disintegrating in the weeks before she was attacked.

In a remorseful letter to her mother, a 23-year-old pregnant woman accused of burglarizing her parents' home described how her heroin habit had overshadowed her sense of right and wrong. "I'm sorry for everything that I have done to you," Crystal Ann Evans wrote in the letter, reproduced in court documents after her Feb. 14 arrest. "It really wasn't me, the drug took over my life!" Evans is one of two women picked up by police in connection with a string of crimes in recent months in the Baltimore County countryside that prompted some residents to arm themselves.

A Waldorf man was ordered imprisoned for life Tuesday for trying to kill his pregnant girlfriend — a hairdresser who prosecutors said refused his demand to have an abortion — at her home in Crofton. "I got my early Christmas present," Jodi Torok said after seeing her former boyfriend, Charles Brandon Martin, sentenced to life in prison by an Anne Arundel County judge. "I believe you were willing to snuff both of them out because they were an inconvenience to you," Judge Pamela L. North told Martin, in a reference to Torok and her unborn child, before sentencing him. Prosecutors depicted Martin, 33, as a ruthless would-be killer and alleged two murder plots centered on him. They said another man, Jerold Raymond Burks, shot Torok in October 2008 to work off a $400 drug debt to Martin.

Her Asics laced up and her water bottle at her side, Meredith Dobrosielski stepped onto the treadmill for a robust half-hour walk. For the Towson runner, this wasn't just any trip to the gym. The session took place in a lab at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. And each step offered information on the impact of exercise on her fetus. Dobrosielski is about 8 months pregnant. Doctors expect the information collected to fill in some gaps in the data on how much pounding is OK for a developing baby.

Those who remember the Academy Award-winning documentary "Scared Straight," which showed a group of lifers from New Jersey's Rahway State Prison terrifying a bunch of cocky juvenile delinquent boys with tales of jailhouse horror, will understand when I say that MTV's "16 and Pregnant" is the chick version. The show follows teen girls who find themselves pregnant — from the pregnancy test all the way to the delivery room and home again with baby — and it includes graphic scenes of pain, both physical and emotional.

The young woman believed to have tossed her newborn baby from a second-story window is being evaluated for mental competence at a state institution, Baltimore County police said Tuesday. Rebecca Diane Himes, 21, who maintained that she had not known she was pregnant before delivering the child, will be taken into police custody as soon as she is released from the institution, said Cpl. Michael Hill, a spokesman for the department. She was charged Monday with attempted first-degree murder, child abuse and reckless endangerment in connection with the July 22 incident at her home on Virginia Avenue in Reisterstown.

Rick Pitino never said a woman who claimed the Louisville basketball coach got her pregnant after a one-night stand had to get an abortion but did advise she "go out of town" to get medical care, his longtime aide told a Kentucky jury Friday. The aide, Tim Sypher , was testifying against the woman, his ex-wife Karen Cunagin Sypher , at her extortion trial. He testified about helping her get an abortion. The two divorced after she was indicted last year on charges of demanding cash and gifts worth millions from Pitino to keep secret their 2003 tryst on a restaurant table.

Two separate overnight shootings in Baltimore left a man dead and a pregnant woman injured in the eastern and southern parts of the city, according to police. The fatal shooting occurred about 3:30 a.m. in an alley in the 3300 block of Noble Ave. in Southeast Baltimore's Linwood neighborhood. Police found a 23-year-old man who had been shot multiple times. He was taken to an area hospital and died a short time later, police said. Officers are investigating the man's death as a homicide.