Trailer Park

Two men remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds yesterday, but authorities have not determined whether anyone will be charged in the double shooting early Monday in a Finksburg trailer park.State police said Donald Talbert Sr., 36, of the 3200 block of Murray Road called 911 about 1: 20 a.m. to say he had just shot two of three friends who tried to break into his home.Troopers arriving at the Reservoir Airport Trailer Park found a wounded man standing in the road and another lying on the ground near Talbert's trailer.

SALISBURY - The mother of an Eastern Shore man who has pleaded an insanity defense in the killings of two law enforcement officers last year told jurors here yesterday that she became aware of her son's mental illness when powerful antipsychotic drugs were prescribed for him as early as the first or second grade. In the first day of testimony in the defense of Francis Mario Zito, who could receive the death sentence, Betty Zito said her son was admitted to mental hospitals perhaps a dozen times or more as a teen-ager.

Trip back to the '50s, when sci-fi movies contemplated all the horrible things that could result from nuclear fallout (mostly involving things that grow really big), on Sci-Fi tonight.Fourth of July fireworks (1 p.m.-2 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- If you missed all the hoopla Thursday, shame! Lucky for you, Channel 2 is giving us another chance with this film of the big Macy's Independence Day celebration in New York. You also get to watch (or endure) Chubby Checker and the cast of "Grease.""The First Eden" (7 p.m.-8 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67)

RIEGELWOOD, N.C. -- A tornado ripped through this Cape Fear River crossroads at dawn yesterday, killing at least seven residents and crushing more than 30 trailers and brick homes as residents were waking for jobs and school. More than 20 people were hospitalized, officials said, four of them children. A dark brown funnel cloud roared past the white double-wide trailer of Cissy Kennedy as she brushed her teeth at daybreak. She watched as the twister flattened two double-wide trailers and a single-width trailer next door, killing five of her neighbors but leaving her trailer untouched.

SALISBURY -- A half-dozen police and correctional officers, including the investigator who interviewed the Eastern Shore man charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of two law enforcement officers, told jurors yesterday that the accused, Francis Mario Zito, repeatedly talked about the shootings. In the second day of Zito's trial, Robert E. Williams, an investigator with the Queen Anne's County prosecutor's office, testified that Zito admitted turning a shotgun on the officers who answered a routine call at the trailer park where Zito lived on the outskirts of Centreville, the county seat.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- Hearing the winds whip outside his mobile home and the sound of breaking glass, Dustin Watts ordered his wife to get in the bathtub and then went to get his sons, ages 5 and 2. Watts, 28, doesn't know what happened next. But he thinks the tornado that killed at least 22 people when it struck northern Kentucky and southern Indiana early yesterday tossed his home into the air. "I don't know if it flipped over, but it felt like it did," Watts said as he sat on concrete steps that used to lead to his trailer but connected to nothing yesterday afternoon.

A 61-year-old Baltimore County man has been indicted in a nearly three-decade-old fatal shooting, one of the oldest unsolved crimes in which county cold-case investigators have made an arrest, police said. Ronald Ehrman Smuck, who was arrested Wednesday at his Rosedale home, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Ronald Paul McFarland in 1976, police said. Police in 1976 said the early morning shooting occurred after McFarland and an unidentified accomplice attacked a third man, construction company owner Franco Marcantoni.

On a small garden patch tucked inside the Beltway Trailer Park in Lansdowne, tomato vines are staked and stretching toward heaven. As winter's chill blends into spring, even the most experienced gardener might tsk at such optimism.But not in this blue-collar community, which has often seen rough times and toughed them out.Today, as the southernmost anchor of one of Baltimore County's enterprise zones, Lansdowne is poised to bloom as area businesses including Super Fresh, United Parcel Service and Baltimore Door & Frame Co., using tax incentives, have grown with $26.7 million in capital investments and jobs since December 1996.

A Mass of Christian burial for P. Walter Schruefer Sr., a retired insurance agent, will be offered at 9 a.m. tomorrow at St. Ursula's Roman Catholic Church, 8900 Harford Road.Mr. Schruefer, a resident of Baltimore County, died Thursday at Good Samaritan Hospital after a long illness. He was 74.A native of Baltimore, he attended St. James School on Eager Street.Mr. Schruefer went to work at Crown, Cork & Seal Co. in 1936 as a laborer and worked his way up to steel mill foreman. He left the company in 1958 when the steel mill was sold.

A 13-hour standoff in southern Carroll County ended yesterday when the female hostage escaped and the man accused of holding her at knifepoint surrendered.Ralph Ash, 37, who lives in the Ashley Mobile Home Park in Woodbine where the incident occurred, was charged with rape, attempted murder, assault and battery, false imprisonment and other offenses, according to state police.The woman, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy, was taken to a hospital.Police said the standoff apparently grew out of a domestic dispute.