Trainees

Female firefighter trainees will get shower stalls and a new restroom at the 36-year-old Baltimore Fire Academy on Pulaski Highway after the Board of Estimates approved a $50,000 expenditure yesterday.But the board didn't go far enough, said one of the three female firefighters in the Baltimore Fire Department."We need it in the firehouse, too," said Yvette Stanley, 33, who has been assigned to Engine Co. 21 on Roland Avenue for five years and showers only after battling a fire."You need separate [facilities]

The accidental shooting of a University of Maryland police officer trainee in a an exercise is a public relations disaster that Baltimore's mayor and police commissioner wish were just a bad dream ("Campus officer shot in training," Feb. 13). Everyone is asking how this incident that reeks of a Keystone Cops caper could have occurred. But sadly, it's no laughing matter. Apparently the proper authorities were not notified that the training sessions were being conducted at the former Rosewood facility.

It all began, J. Randall Evans recalls, with the women who talked from behind their hands.Evans, Maryland's secretary of economic and employment development, was touring the state to meet people in Project Independence, a job training program for welfare recipients.At a stop in Hagerstown, Evans noticed that the women he met held their hands to their mouths and seldom smiled. "After a while, I had to ask: Why are these people mumbling in their hands?" he said.The women told him they were embarrassed by their teeth, decayed and wrecked by neglect.

The director of Baltimore's police training academy didn't know that instructors were holding exercises at an abandoned psychiatric hospital in Owings Mills. There were no supervisors on site. A police service weapon somehow got mixed up with a practice paint-cartridge pistol. The gun was pointed at a trainee. Many of the missteps surrounding the exercise at which a University of Maryland police recruit was critically wounded last week ran afoul of nationally recognized training safety standards, according to law enforcement experts and a review of past incidents from around the country.

WASHINGTON -- Two women training at the FBI have complained that a firearms test that measures trigger-pulling strength has been used by the law enforcement agency to discriminate against women, a lawyer for one of them said yesterday.The other woman resigned yesterday after she had tried several times to pass a test in which new agents are required to pull the trigger of an unloaded handgun 29 times in 30 seconds.Agents who repeatedly fail the test are dropped from the FBI.Jessica Jurney, the trainee who resigned, said that at one point she pulled the trigger 27 times with her left hand and 25 times with her right hand.

WASHINGTON -- Officer trainee Malik A. Jenkins-Bey felt the unstable grate floor beneath him. He took in the grim steel-and-concrete decor, the punishing overhead lights and the elevators designed to evoke memories of gas ovens -- and felt uncomfortable, vulnerable.It was precisely what the soon-to-be-rookie Baltimore police officer had traveled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to do: gain empathy with victims of the Holocaust of World War II and of police abuse anywhere."I can imagine how those people must have felt," Jenkins-Bey said.

The presiding judge in the Aberdeen Proving Ground sexual misconduct case ruled yesterday that a soldier facing uninvited sex with a military superior does not have to say "no" -- only think it -- for the act to be called rape.The decision could turn the unfolding court-martial of Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson into a landmark rape case. If military jurors agree, the decision would drastically tighten the rules governing sex between boss and subordinate in the American military and further complicate relationships between men and women in uniform.

At 2: 30 a.m. Sunday, the voice emanating by radio from the U.S. Coast Guard station at Woods Hole on Cape Cod said an EgyptAir Boeing 767 jet had gone down 60 nautical miles off Nantucket. On the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy training vessel, crew members realized it was clearly within range of their 224-foot ship."It was surreal," said Gilbert Cadena of Nederland, Texas, a senior at the academy. "We didn't expect this to turn into anything."The transmission set the 26-member crew into action, plunging the team of mariners in training into a real-life odyssey of international scope and monumental human tragedy.

Under their own power. That didn't seem possible when the five teenage girls stepped aboard Unicorn in Atlantic City, N.J., just five days earlier or when they stood their first nighttime watch or when they wrapped their hands around the smooth, wooden wheel of the 118-foot schooner. It certainly seemed beyond the horizon when they took their first tentative climbs into the rigging more than nine stories above the deck. But there they were Friday - alongside veteran officers and deckhands, raising and trimming the sails, responding to commands from the helm and bringing the tall ship into the Inner Harbor - under their own power.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Pat Langenfelder got a preview yesterday morning of the environmental scrutiny that all large Maryland livestock farms might face in the near future.About 25 inspector trainees with the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental offices of surrounding states converged on her Kent County farm.They were looking for evidence of harmful byproducts from the manure streaming from the 2,400-hog operation. Those byproducts could seep into the waters of nearby Morgan Creek and eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay.The inspector trainees looked at the mustard-green slime produced from the flow of hog manure from a breeding barn into a 1 1/2 -acre storage lagoon.

When police and prosecutors gathered in a cramped media room on the ground floor of the Police Department's Fayette Street headquarters to finally announce an arrest in the killing of Phylicia Barnes, the victim's half-brother merely rode down an elevator to watch. Bryan Barnes, inspired by the detectives who worked relentlessly for 16 months on his sister's case, has joined the Baltimore Police Department as a paid trainee. The 24-year-old already has passed background checks, and is scheduled to start as a cadet in the academy this week.

Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski has asked for an immediate appeals hearing to make the case that the two children of a Baltimore fire cadet killed in a training exercise should be awarded a federal survivors' benefit. In her request Friday to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Mikulski referred to a letter from Baltimore Fire Chief James S. Clack that stated for the first time that trainee Racheal Wilson had the authority to act as a firefighter when she died - information the Justice Department said it was lacking when it denied her family's nearly $300,000 claim.

Under their own power. That didn't seem possible when the five teenage girls stepped aboard Unicorn in Atlantic City, N.J., just five days earlier or when they stood their first nighttime watch or when they wrapped their hands around the smooth, wooden wheel of the 118-foot schooner. It certainly seemed beyond the horizon when they took their first tentative climbs into the rigging more than nine stories above the deck. But there they were Friday - alongside veteran officers and deckhands, raising and trimming the sails, responding to commands from the helm and bringing the tall ship into the Inner Harbor - under their own power.

A prospective Baltimore firefighter was arrested at the department's training academy Monday, one of nine people indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute heroin, as part of a sweeping drug investigation that netted several federal indictments in September. Fire officials confirmed that Brandon Ferebee, 20, was taken into custody at the fire academy, where he was slated to graduate next month. He was among a group of people indicted Dec. 3, a follow-up to a wiretap investigation that broke up a large-scale heroin operation on Baltimore's east side and led to the seizure of drugs, guns and thousands of dollars.

At the Air Force Student Detachment barracks at Fort Meade, almost every room contains mold. Water drips from leaky pipes into buckets on the floor. Shower water seeps down a hallway wall. Forty-seven airmen live in these half-century-old barracks, among the worst on the Army installation in western Anne Arundel County. "I think we've gone beyond the point of saying these barracks are unsuitable," said Maj. Danny S. Chung, commander of a Marine Corps detachment at Fort Meade.

For more than an hour they listened to stories about what it felt like to be a victim. A woman talked about her husband's brutal beating. Someone else tearfully recounted her brother-in-law's murder. The teenage offenders inside the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center didn't participate, responding with silence and the occasional sneer. Then, hours after the counseling session ended, some of them attacked an employee -- hurting him so badly that he needed a neck brace and 14 staples to the back of the head.

When police and prosecutors gathered in a cramped media room on the ground floor of the Police Department's Fayette Street headquarters to finally announce an arrest in the killing of Phylicia Barnes, the victim's half-brother merely rode down an elevator to watch. Bryan Barnes, inspired by the detectives who worked relentlessly for 16 months on his sister's case, has joined the Baltimore Police Department as a paid trainee. The 24-year-old already has passed background checks, and is scheduled to start as a cadet in the academy this week.

One of seven remaining defendants in the Aberdeen Proving Ground sex scandal has struck a deal with Army prosecutors and is implicating more sergeants and several officers, in what could be the most significant expansion of the investigation since it became public last year.Staff Sgt. Wayne Gamble, who faces sexual misconduct charges involving 14 female trainees, has agreed to accept a five-year prison term in exchange for pleading guilty to most of the 32 charges against him, according to people familiar with the case.

The investigation into a breakfast-time armed robbery of a fast-food restaurant led officers yesterday to the Baltimore police academy, where, authorities said, a department trainee was arrested. Aaron Victor Seivers - who had been in field training, with a gun and badge, after joining the force this year - is accused of driving the getaway car in the robbery of a Baltimore County McDonald's last month, county police said. Seivers, 28, was fired yesterday, a city police spokesman said.

It covers 38 acres at the edge of a landfill and annoys some of its neighbors. But Howard County public safety officials are thrilled with the continued progress of the $35 million police and fire training center in Marriottsville. And tomorrow, the facility will be dedicated to state Sen. James N. Robey, the former county executive and police chief who was a strong proponent for the center. "This is a great time to dedicate it," said Fire Chief Joseph Herr. "It's where we're going to train the people that are going to provide the emergency services."