Randallstown High School

Angry about a decision they say was made without community consultation, local legislators and advocates are pressing the Baltimore County school board to scrap plans for a cell phone tower to be built at Randallstown High School -- a project that would pump an estimated $450,000 into the school system. State Sen. Bobby A. Zirkin said he plans to submit legislation designed to ban cell phone towers from school properties in the county and will file an injunction, if necessary, to stop construction of the 110-foot tower at Randallstown High on Offutt Road.

Dena Love Raitzyk, a commercial artist in Randallstown, died of lung cancer Saturday at the Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. She was 46. Dena Love was born and raised in the Baltimore area and graduated from Randallstown High School in 1979. She then attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, studying graphic arts. While at MICA she met Neil Raitzyk, and the couple married June 27, 1982. Mrs. Raitzyk left school to work in Baltimore for Williams & Wilkins, a Philadelphia-based publisher of specialized media for the health professions.

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.

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.

Car hits pole, apparently igniting home A fire apparently started in an electrical box at a Randallstown home yesterday after a car crashed into a nearby utility pole, authorities said. Marty Bernstein, who has lived in the home in the 4900 block of Old Court Road with her husband, Harvey, for more than 30 years, said she was in her living room when she heard a noise outside her house. "It struck like lightning. I could hear it crackling up and down the street," she said. Bernstein escaped uninjured.

THERE WERE NO balloons dropping from the ceiling and no streamers or confetti being tossed about from the Randallstown gym when the boys basketball team won the Class 3A North regional title Friday night. One can read that a few ways. Either the sixth-ranked Rams, emotionally exhausted from a bruising 64-63 win over No. 8 Douglass, were too spent to celebrate. Or with two state titles in school history already in the bank, they elected to act like they expected to be playing Thursday night against Crossland at Comcast Center in College Park, and that winning was just one more step in the journey.

He has characterized drug dealers as his pet peeve. He sent a man to prison for life for a fatal stabbing that the defendant argued was in self-defense. And last week, he handed down a 100-year prison term to a teenager convicted in the shootings last spring outside Randallstown High School. No one should have been surprised that Baltimore County Circuit Judge Patrick Cavanaugh sentenced the former Randallstown High student to as many years in prison as Maryland law allows for four counts of first-degree assault, lawyers who know and have tried cases before the judge said.

COST OF `BEEF' SKYROCKETS; MATT MCCULLOUGH SLAPPED WITH 100-YEAR BIT There's a headline written in language that Matthew Timothy McCullough can understand. McCullough, who'll be 68 when he's eligible for parole half a century from now, was only a boy of 17 when he was having "beef" last May with another boy at Randallstown High School. McCullough could have let the matter drop, let it die, squashed it. But he didn't. Ignoring admonitions of Randallstown High administrators to stay away and cool off, McCullough returned to the school with a veritable pistolero posse.

William L. "Buck" Frazier, a retired carpenter and construction foreman, died of a heart attack Sunday at Northwest Hospital Center. He was 79. Mr. Frazier was born and raised in Randallstown. After graduating from Randallstown High School in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy and served aboard the battleship USS Wisconsin in the Pacific. After the war, he took a job at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's downtown headquarters. "He hated office work and wanted to work outside, so he left the B&O," said his wife of 52 years, the former Elizabeth Ann Covahey.

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.