Strangled

Several Maryland correctional officers witnessed Davon Cole, 19, strangle a cellmate at the Baltimore City Detention Center Monday night, according to court documents charging Cole with first- and second-degree murder and assault. The suspect "disregarded the officers' orders" to release Xavier Tilghman, 21, the documents state, and officers had to enter the cell to pull him off the victim. Cole had Tilghman pinned to the floor with his "arm wrapped tightly around Tilghman's neck," the officers told investigators.

A Baltimore jury convicted a man of second degree murder for strangling his grandmother to death after he smoked PCP and heard voices warning him of evil people. Demond Tyler, 37, who lived with his grandmother, was at home in the 3200 block of Spaulding Avenue on Nov. 4, 2011 and told investigators that the voices said evil people would not look at him. Tyler then grabbed his grandmother, Shirley Tyler, 67, by the throat and demanded that she look him in the eye. He said the pair collapsed on a bed and she smiled at him, according to the state's attorney's office.

Kathleen Leeson was loading clothes in her dryer just a few dozen feet away from her foster son in August when he accidentally strangled himself with the window blind cords in her Montgomery Village home. In just a few seconds, and with no noise, the 2-year-old boy was unconscious. Angel Duenas would die later in a hospital, one of the 12 children per year killed on average by dangerous window coverings. "They don't thrash around. They don't yell for help," Leeson said. "They die so quickly and so silently that there's no way for anyone to know they're in trouble until they're found."

A 22-year-old Glen Burnie man is in custody for allegedly strangling his 62-year-old great aunt to death Tuesday in the 300 block of Gatewater Court, police said. Brandon Zachary Duncan is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Dianna Lee Fitzwater. Duncan is under a guard's watch at a local hospital for unrelated issues, police said Thursday. Police responded to a call at 11:44 p.m. Tuesday and found Fitzwater's body. A witness at the house reported that she and Duncan woke around 11:30 p.m. and went to the living room, where they found the victim unresponsive.

An autopsy by the state medical examiner's office has ruled the death of a 19-year-old woman, whose body was found under a bridge in Herring Run Park on Friday, a homicide by strangulation, a city police spokesman said. The victim's name was being withheld pending notification of family, said Agent Donny Moses, the spokesman. About 7 a.m., a jogger found the woman lying on rocks between a paved trail and a stream that runs under a bridge on Harford Road. Moses said no arrest had been made in the woman's death and that there was no evidence linking her slaying to those of several other women, some of them prostitutes, who were either beaten to death or strangled over the past several months around the city.

A teen-age girl found dead Sunday near the Back River sewage treatment plant was strangled, an autopsy performed yesterday showed.The victim was identified yesterday as Courtney Danielle Letiro, 16, of the 1800 block of Grempler Way in Edgewood, who was reported missing Jan. 18, Baltimore County police said. Her family said she had run away from home."Jan. 22 was her birthday," said E. Jay Miller, a county police spokesman. "We don't know if she made it to her birthday. We believe she had been dead for more than a day or so, perhaps even several days.

A Carroll County jury convicted a 35-year-old Pennsylvania man of first-degree murder yesterday for strangling a woman on a Harney farm in 1991.The nine-man, three woman panel deliberated about five hours before returning the verdict against James Howard VanMetre III, a self-employed tree trimmer from East Berlin, Pa.As the foreman read the verdict, VanMetre stood and glanced toward the jury. He shook his head several times as the panel was polled by a court clerk.The status of two other charges against VanMetre is unclear.

The unidentified man whose body was found Tuesday afternoon by a farmer who was harvesting soybeans in rural South County was strangled, the state medical examiner's office said yesterday.Dr. Dennis Chute, who performed the autopsy, would not comment further.Police said the farmer, whom they would not identify, found the man's body about 3:25 p.m. Tuesday. The body was in woods 100 feet west of Upper Pindell Road, near Pindell Road, less than one mile from the Calvert County line.Officer Terry Crowe, a county police spokesman, said police believe the man may have been killed elsewhere.

MOSCOW - In a potentially crucial turn for a contentious criminal trial, two forensic psychiatrists testified yesterday that Yuri D. Budanov, a colonel in the Russian army, was insane when he strangled an 18-year-old Chechen woman nearly three years ago. The psychiatrists' judgment of insanity - the second such opinion in months - appeared to pave the way for Budanov's acquittal in a court proceeding that has become a yardstick for Russia's ability or...

City police have made an arrest in the strangling of a 51-year-old woman found dead in her apartment early Tuesday morning. Richard Kenneth Howard, 42, was charged with first-degree murder after a friend he accompanied to police headquarters told detectives Howard had been in the dead woman's apartment. Police were dispatched to the residence, in the 2200 block of Tucker Lane, at about 4:30 a.m. after receiving a call of an aggravated assault in progress, according to police spokesman Detective Nicole Monroe.

The death of a convicted murderer from Columbia who was found bloodied in his prison cell last month was ruled a homicide by strangulation in an autopsy report, Maryland State Police said Wednesday. Charles David Richardson IV, 28, who was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars for murdering two people in Columbia in 2007, was found under a blanket in his cell bed with trauma to his head on the morning of Sept. 27, police said. Guards at the North Branch Correctional Institution in Cresaptown had rushed into his cell about 5 a.m. after observing his cellmate "in possession of clothing that appeared to be bloodstained" outside the cell on an upper-level tier, police said at the time.

Baltimore Police have identified a man found dead Friday in an alley in Brooklyn as a 42-year-old Glen Burnie man. Armando Santiago was found unresponsive at about 6:15 p.m. Friday in an alley in the rear of the 700 block of E. Patapsco Ave. There were no signs of foul play or trauma to his body, but police say an autopsy shows that he had been strangled. Santiago was from the 5600 block of Park Road in Glen Burnie, and police say they don't have any additional information about the case as detectives investigate.

Maryland delegates will consider Thursday a bill that would separate men's and women's bedrooms in state psychiatric hospitals, a move that advocates contend would protect vulnerable women but that health officials say they need more time to research. The bill would also require the hospitals to screen patients for risk of abusive behavior and report all instances of sexual abuse and harassment to authorities. The bill is spurred, supporters say, by last year's killing of a female patient on a coed ward at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, a state psychiatric facility that houses the criminally insane.

The young teen accused of killing a teacher at the troubled Cheltenham juvenile detention facility has been charged as an adult with first-degree murder and attempted first-degree rape. He was ordered jailed without bond Wednesday. The charges come after Prince George's County Judge C. Philip Nichols Jr. ruled that Brian Lee Wonsom, now 14, could be tried as an adult. He was 13 at the time of the attack. Wonsom is charged in the killing of Hannah Wheeling, 65, a teacher from Bel Air whose bludgeoned and partially clothed body was found Feb. 18, 2010, at the Cheltenham Youth Facility in Prince George's County.

A judge ordered an 80-year-old Baltimore man accused of strangling his wife held without bail at a hearing Wednesday morning. Police said they found Philip Reid choking his wife, Glennie, 83, Monday night in the couple's Edmondson Village home. He was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree assault Tuesday night. According to police, the couple's daughter said she drove her father to the house and waited in the car, unaware of what he had planned. She said she heard screams and called police, who forced open the door.

In West Baltimore's Edmondson Village neighborhood, opinions about the state of Philip and Glennie Reid's marriage seem to vary from house to house. A man who lives a few doors from the couple said he has known them for more than four decades and never saw the two argue. But a next-door neighbor of about three months said he believed that Philip Reid had put his wife out of their home last week after a fight. There is one thing the neighbors agreed on: No one thought that Reid, 80, an introverted but giving man who shared cucumbers and peaches from his garden, was capable of strangling his 83-year-old wife.

Shawn E. Brown was found guilty yesterday of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two Baltimore boys whom he said he strangled as part of an effort to gain information about human sexuality and other topics.Brown, who described himself as a 3,729-year-old immortal, faces a maximum of two life sentences without parole for the murders of Marvin Wise, 8, and Obdul Richards, 16, when he is sentenced Feb. 17. Brown was also found guilty of kidnapping Obdul.The state is planning to drop charges of child molestation Brown was facing in assaults on three other boys.

In West Baltimore's Edmondson Village neighborhood, opinions about the state of Philip and Glennie Reid's marriage seem to vary from house to house. A man who lives a few doors from the couple said he has known them for more than four decades and never saw the two argue. But a next-door neighbor of about three months said he believed that Philip Reid had put his wife out of their home last week after a fight. There is one thing the neighbors agreed on: No one thought that Reid, 83, an introverted but giving man who shared cucumbers and peaches from his garden, was capable of strangling his 80-year-old wife.