Randallstown High School

A small fire broke out yesterday in a boys' locker room at Randallstown High School, the fifth suspicious fire at the school since August.No one was injured, but $200 worth of property in the locker was damaged, a Baltimore County Fire Department spokesman said.Fire officials could not say if the latest fire is connected to fires set in August, November and December. Battalion Chief Mark F. Hubbard, the spokesman, said fire and police arson investigators, with the cooperation of school officials, are interviewing students and faculty.

William Thomas doesn't want anyone to pity him, and he doesn't want to spend his life feeling sorry for himself. Paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet seven years ago in the mayhem of a shooting at Randallstown High School, Thomas will never have the football career he so ardently desired, but he has found another cause: making sure others don't end up like him. Far from conceding defeat to his physical limitations, the 24-year-old former...

Finding that the risks of building a cell phone tower near tennis courts and athletic fields at Randallstown High School were too great, the Baltimore County Board of Appeals overturned yesterday a zoning commissioner's ruling to allow the project. The three-member panel debated the proposal for about an hour before unanimously agreeing that T-Mobile should not be allowed to lease a patch of land on the high school campus to build the tower. "I don't think a school is an appropriate place for a cell tower," said Margaret M. Brassil, chairwoman of the panel considering the cell tower case.

With a passion for constitutional questions that bubbles just below the surface, a group of mostly foreign-born students from Randallstown High School beat out teams from schools in Montgomery, Washington and Charles counties for a chance to represent Maryland at a national social studies contest. Perhaps it is because they come mostly from Nigeria, Liberia, Grenada and Egypt, countries that have all seen political turmoil, that these students, with the help of their teacher, have turned the new experiences of living in a democracy into a quest to win the We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution National Finals to be held in Washington this weekend.

William "Tippa" Thomas III, He didn't know who shot him. He didn't know how many bullets were fired that day. And he didn't know why anyone would open fire on a crowd of students at his high school on a sunny Friday afternoon in the midst of graduation preparations and prom season. So for six days, William "Tippa" Thomas III, who was left partially paralyzed by the May 7 shootings at Randallstown High School, wheeled himself into courtroom No. 2 in Baltimore County Circuit Court and listened.

On May 27, 2003, SHAWN O. GEORGE, of Randallstown High School; devoted son of Sharonda Ellerby; fond brother of Sharod and Princeton. Visitation at the Calvin B. Scruggs Funeral Home, 1412 E. Preston St, on Monday, June 2, from 1 to 8 PM. Family will receive friends on Tuesday at Memorial Baptist Church, Caroline & Preston Streets, from 10 to 10:30 A.M., at which time funeral service will begin. Interment King Memorial Park.

Angela Marie Drechs ler, a former health-care caseworker and lifelong Randallstown resident, died of respiratory failure March 1 at Genesis HealthCare's Randallstown Center. She was 47. Miss Drechsler was a 1976 graduate of Randallstown High School and a graduate of the nursing assistant program at the state's Spring Grove Hospital Center. In 1983, she earned an associate's degree in general studies and a certificate in early childhood development from Catonsville Community College. She worked as a case manager with the mentally ill for several years in the 1990s at North Charles Health Care Center.

Winifred B. Serra, a homemaker and former music teacher and school crossing guard, died Sept. 22 of complications from a stroke at Westminster Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. She was 94. Winifred Barbara Tibbals was born in Baltimore and lived most of her life in the Randallstown farmhouse that her grandfather had built in 1869. She was a 1939 graduate of Randallstown High School and that year married Rudolph J. Serra. Her husband, a produce manager for A&P, died in 1995. Mrs. Serra worked as a school crossing guard at Randallstown Elementary School in the 1950s.

A former Randallstown High School student who had been jailed since shortly after last month's shooting at the Baltimore County school was freed yesterday after prosecutors dropped attempted-murder charges against him. In announcing that charges had been dropped against 20-year-old Ronald Patrick Johnson Jr. of Owings Mills, Baltimore County Deputy State's Attorney Stephen Bailey said there wasn't evidence linking him to the shooting. "There is no evidence that he brought a gun to this altercation, no evidence that he ever handled the gun, fired it or discarded it after the shooting," Bailey said.

One Randallstown High School parent wants to use the school parking lot, the site of a quadruple shooting, as the site of a prayer vigil tonight. Eleanora Franklin, whose son is a senior football player at the school, said she organized the prayer vigil because "praying is all we can do right now." The gathering, she said, will be held to lift the spirits not only of the four victims - one of whom remains hospitalized - but also teachers, students and parents. "It has touched us all," she said.

Eunice K. Jones, a homemaker who was a founding member of a volunteer fire department, died Sunday of pneumonia at Chapel Hill Nursing Center in Randallstown. She was 92. Eunice Katherine Schmidt was born, raised and lived her entire life in Randallstown. She was a 1934 graduate of Randallstown High School. In 1934, she married Elmo L. Jones, a builder and postal worker, who died in 1974. Mrs. Jones was one of the founding members in 1949 of the Liberty Road Volunteer Fire Company, and had been a past president of its ladies auxiliary.

A lawsuit filed by the mother of a former Randallstown High School student paralyzed in a 2004 shooting on the school's parking lot will be tried in Baltimore County, a Maryland appellate court ruled yesterday. The decision from the Court of Special Appeals - the state's second-highest court - means that the civil suit will be transferred from Baltimore City, where the case was filed last year by Edna "Peggy" Payton-Henderson, the mother of William "Tipper" Thomas III. A wide receiver for the Randallstown High School Rams who had intended to play football at Morgan State University, Thomas was paralyzed from the waist down when he was shot in the neck, back and lung.

Reginald Corwin "Reggie" Johnson, a longtime Baltimore County and Carroll County football coach who helped lead Randallstown High School to the 1984 state championship, died Wednesday of heart failure related to diabetes at Northwest Hospital Center. He was 84. Born in Waynesboro, Pa., Mr. Johnson played on his high school football team and followed his coach, Rip Engle, to Penn State. He left after his freshman year to enlist in the Navy during World War II, serving in the Pacific, said his son, Kenith "Speedy" Johnson.

Given what happens daily around here - and just about everywhere else these days - it comes as no surprise to discover, after a search of The Sun's computerized news morgue, that the last time this columnist mentioned Randallstown High School it was in commentary about a shooting on the vast parking lot there. Some young fool with a 9 mm semiautomatic Glock drove up to the school and handed the pistol to another young fool, who got into a brawl and opened fire on a crowd of students. That was on a lovely Friday afternoon in early May 2004, right after a charity basketball game that had finished the school day. Bullets hit four young people, leaving one of them, William "Tippa" Thomas III, paralyzed from the waist down, another tragedy wrought by fools empowered by guns.

After the arrest of a long-missing witness in the Randallstown High School shootings, the man accused of bringing the gun to the school that day has been charged with attempted murder in the fight that left one student paralyzed and three others injured. Antonio R. Jackson, 24, of Owings Mills was ordered held without bail yesterday on an 18-count indictment that charged him with the same crimes that prosecutors dropped in 2005, when they could not find their key witness. Prosecutors vowed then to refile the charges when the witness was found.

Nearly three years after prosecutors dropped attempted-murder charges against the man accused of bringing to Randallstown High School a gun used in the shootings that left one student paralyzed and three others injured, authorities have found the witness that prosecutors said they need to bring the suspect to trial. Ronald P. Johnson Jr., 23, of Owings Mills was charged last week with obstruction of justice and criminal contempt of court for failing to show up to testify when Antonio R. Jackson was scheduled for trial, court documents show.

A 20-year-old Pikesville man was shot and killed yesterday after he and a stranger stared at each other at a downtown Baltimore intersection, police said. Marshall H. Contee, a former Randallstown High School football star, was driving his pickup truck about 12:10 a.m. when the shooting occurred, police said. Both vehicles were stopped at Baltimore and Charles streets when police say the other driver shot Contee once in the head. Contee's vehicle then accelerated and slammed into a McDonald's restaurant at Baltimore and Light streets.

A lawsuit filed by the mother of a former Randallstown High School student paralyzed in a 2004 shooting on the school's parking lot will be tried in Baltimore County, a Maryland appellate court ruled yesterday. The decision from the Court of Special Appeals - the state's second-highest court - means that the civil suit will be transferred from Baltimore City, where the case was filed last year by Edna "Peggy" Payton-Henderson, the mother of William "Tipper" Thomas III. A wide receiver for the Randallstown High School Rams who had intended to play football at Morgan State University, Thomas was paralyzed from the waist down when he was shot in the neck, back and lung.

Finding that the risks of building a cell phone tower near tennis courts and athletic fields at Randallstown High School were too great, the Baltimore County Board of Appeals overturned yesterday a zoning commissioner's ruling to allow the project. The three-member panel debated the proposal for about an hour before unanimously agreeing that T-Mobile should not be allowed to lease a patch of land on the high school campus to build the tower. "I don't think a school is an appropriate place for a cell tower," said Margaret M. Brassil, chairwoman of the panel considering the cell tower case.

A finding by the state attorney general's office suggests that Maryland law could be changed to ban cell phone towers from public school properties in Baltimore County, a state senator assured a group of residents hoping to thwart plans for a tower at Randallstown High School. It is possible to draft such legislation in a constitutionally sound format, and possibly apply it retroactively to void a contract between the school system and T-Mobile, state Sen. Bobby A. Zirkin told about a dozen residents at a community meeting this week in Randallstown.