Rosewood

The latest news out of the Rosewood Center in Owings Mills is depressingly familiar: grim and unsafe conditions, substandard medical care, neglect, inaccurate records and more, according to the most recent inspection. Maryland Health and Mental Hygiene Secretary John M. Colmers says the numerous shortcomings at the state residential facility for the developmentally disabled are "completely unacceptable" - and he's right. Even if Mr. Colmers and Gov. Martin O'Malley can't yet commit to shutting the facility down, Rosewood ought to be better than this.

The latest in a string of reports describing serious problems at Owings Mills' Rosewood Center may lead the state to close the long-troubled institution for the developmentally disabled, key lawmakers said yesterday. A report released this month by the state's Office of Health Care Quality detailed numerous findings of neglectful and potentially dangerous treatment of some of the facility's 165 mentally retarded residents and a general failure to comply with federal and state standards of appropriate care.

Alternatives to autos offer better future Michael Dresser seems to think that traffic is our main transportation problem ("Pile-up," March 18). That's not so. Our current highway-sprawl-long-distance-commuting traffic problem is a product of cheap oil, and the days of cheap oil are numbered. Many oil experts believe we are at or near the peak of global oil production. We've been burning more than we discover since around 1980. As oil production declines, we will find we have bigger problems than traffic.

Juanita Pearl Morrison, who was a supervisor at then-Rosewood State Hospital for 35 years, died Sunday of undetermined causes at Homewood Retirement Center in Hanover, Pa. She was 76.The former Reisterstown and Westminster resident was a licensed practical nursing supervisor at Rosewood in Owings Mills from 1936 until retiring in 1971. Born Juanita Pearl Dennison in Cumberland, she graduated from high school in Flintstone, Allegany County, and received her nurses training at Rosewood.Mrs.

Buoyed by an increasing number of drunken-driving arrests, Baltimore County's DWI/Correctional Treatment Facility in Owings Mills -- which celebrates its fifth anniversary this week -- plans to nearly double its size in the next two years.Right Turn of Maryland, which runs the 100-bed facility at Rosewood Center, won state approval to lease two Rosewood buildings and plans to turn them into 40-bed dormitories for women.John Goings, the treatment center director, said Right Turn hopes to open the first 40-bed residence within six months and the second one about a year after that.

Director John Singleton's "Rosewood" (8 p.m.-10: 30 p.m., HBO) is a breathtaking story of the tragic events in Rosewood, Fla. in 1923, when a black, economically flourishing town of Rosewood was attacked by neighboring poor whites. All but a handful of the townsfolk were killed, and one house was left standing. Even more chilling was the fact that no one spoke of the massacre for 60 years.Singleton does a good job showing the mounting hysteria of those few days. And he gets good performances from Esther Rolle, Don Cheadle and Jon Voight as a white shop owner whose relationship to the people of Rosewood is drawn with realistic ambiguity.

Peter Cheung is trying to follow the path blazed by the people who founded stores like Scan and Ikea -- bring the furniture of one's heritage from a far-off land and sell it in America.Cheung has followed such a path from China to Elkridge. And while U.S. 1 might be the last place you would expect to find intricately carved furniture made from an exotic hardwood, Cheung finds it a suitable locale."There's more traffic and it's a bigger place," he said. "Before, we were behind an industrial park."

Undoubtedly a great tragedy occurred over the first four days of January 1923 in the small town of Rosewood, Fla. An American Lidice, the prosperous little village on the Gulf Coast xTC was wiped out by the combined forces of ignorance, cruelty, class envy and pure-D racism. Depending on sources, somewhere between six and 150 African-Americans died over those days.And undoubtedly a great movie could have been made of this still unhealed scab on the body politic. But "Rosewood," John Singleton's film of these events, isn't it. Passionate, powerful, even gripping, the movie finally gives up to base commercial impulses and falls back on the oldest and cheapest of strokes.

Maggie G. Hrabowski, 81, schoolteacherMaggie Geeter Hrabowski, a retired teacher who moved to Maryland from Birmingham, Ala., this year to live with relatives, died of kidney failure Sunday at Levindale Geriatric Center. She was 81.A native of Wetumpka, Ala., Mrs. Hrabowski taught in Birmingham public schools from 1952 to 1978.She graduated from Alabama State University in 1938 and received a master's degree from Tuskegee Institute in 1963. She did graduate work at Peabody's Teachers College in Nashville, Tenn.

An advocacy group investigating suspicions of substandard care at the Rosewood Center has identified some residents as candidates for placement in community programs, angering +V parents who want them to stay at the Owings Mills institution for the developmentally disabled.Officials from the Maryland Disability Law Center, which provides legal representation for the developmentally disabled in the state, are to meet today with officers in Rosewood's parents auxiliary to discuss the law center's demand for years of records for eight residents.

Group homes are no panacea; Rosewood will be missed In your editorial on the closing of the Rosewood Center ("Rosewood's reckoning," July 5), you write, "The strain of this transition on some residents and their loved ones has no doubt been significant. For some, Rosewood has been their home for decades. It's no surprise that not everyone is pleased with what has taken place. Group homes can have their faults, too." In fact, not everyone is pleased with the closure of Rosewood, and for good reason.

Last Tuesday marked the official closing of the Rosewood Center, the state residential facility for the developmentally disabled. The day came none too soon, given the center's troubled past. Eighteen months ago, Maryland Health and Mental Hygiene Secretary John M. Colmers promised that Rosewood's 166 residents would find a better quality of life in community-based settings. So far, that appears to have been the case, at least for most. The strain of this transition on some residents and their loved ones has no doubt been significant.

: Was the state right to close down the troubled Rosewood Center for the severely disabled and disperse most of its residents to group homes? Yes 44% No 44% Not sure 12% (333 votes, results not scientific) Next poll: : Should South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford resign? Vote at baltimoresun.com/vote

The Rosewood Center, founded in 1888 as an asylum for the "feeble-minded," closes its doors for good today and awaits an uncertain future - with an expansion-minded college expressing interest in its space. Stevenson University would like to take over most of the sprawling Owings Mills campus, now filled with dilapidated buildings contaminated with lead and asbestos, and many neighbors of the facility say they'd be pleased to see the school move in. "It is a completely neglected time bomb and an environmental cesspool," said state Sen. Bobby A. Zirkin, a Democrat who represents the area.

Land-use plans that officials consider crucial to the future of two Baltimore County communities are likely to be delayed or scaled back until the county Office of Planning completes its mandatory comprehensive master plan. The queue for various community plans, including Middle River and Rosewood in Owings Mills, is growing so long that one Planning Board member suggested last week that the office accept no more requests until the 2010 completion of the master plan. The board delayed action on that recommendation.

A fire last night at a vacant building on the campus of the Rosewood Center in Owings Mills destroyed that building, and embers from the fire burned part of an adjacent vacant structure, a spokesman for the Baltimore County Fire Department said. Fire Director Kyrle Preis, the spokesman, said that because the two-story brick building was slated for demolition, the officer in charge at the scene ordered firefighters to let it burn rather than endanger the lives of firefighters. "It was declared a control burn," Preis said.

Baltimore County Council members authorized the creation of a master plan to guide development of a state hospital property in Owings Mills last night, saying they want the document in place before the Rosewood Center is made available for development. The state announced in December 2007 its plans to close the hospital for the severely disabled. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been relocating the remaining nearly 150 patients to community placements and will shutter the facility July 1. After its review, the state will likely declare as surplus the nearly 225-acre property near Reisterstown Road and begin accepting proposals from the public and private sectors for its use. Rosewood, which opened in 1888, housed nearly 3,700 people at its peak.

Attorney Dyer wins seat on Howard school board 2 An attorney from Ellicott City was among the winners after the final votes were counted yesterday in Howard County's school board race. Allen Dyer, who ran unsuccessfully for the board in 2006, received 54,148 votes to capture the third and final seat at stake in the election. Janet Siddiqui, a pediatrician from Clarksville who was appointed to fill a vacancy on the board last year, led all candidates with 62,126 votes. Ellen Flynn Giles, the board's current vice chairman, was the other winner, with 57,266 votes.

Helen E. O'Neill, a retired social worker and longtime Guilford resident, died of complications from Alzheimer's disease Nov. 1 at Keswick Multi-Care Center. She was 85. Helen E. Hausamann was born in New York City and raised in Union City, N.J. She was a 1941 graduate of Emerson High School. She worked as a sales associate at Macy's department store in Herald Square and as a licensed practical nurse before her marriage in 1946 to Lawrence Richard O'Neill. "When she was working at Macy's, she bumped into Greta Garbo one day in the elevator," said a daughter, Siobhan O'Neill of Eldersburg.

Unreported problems still plague Rosewood The Baltimore Sun created a misimpression in the article "Rosewood families speak out" (Sept. 15). The article said, "In recent months, no significant problems have come to light in the incident reports that Rosewood submits to the Maryland Disability Law Center." But if The Baltimore Sun had contacted MDLC prior to the publication of this article, we would have alerted the reporter to the recent annual survey of Rosewood Center performed by the state's Office of Health Care Quality, a survey mentioned in "Rosewood treatment improves in most areas" (Sept.