Two Families

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS Families finally meet' Two families, connected by one mother, finally meet after more than 55 years. Maryland baltimoresun.com/marbella Killer dessert topping Perfect for your next Baltimore-themed birthday party: Cupcakes sprinkled with shell casings from genuine criminal shootings. Maryland baltimoresun.com/vozzella OTHER VOICES Michael Sragow on Invasion -- Today Jean Marbella on two families -- Maryland Dan Steele on Jose pitching etiquette -- Sports 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY See J-Roddy Walston and the Business -- Local rock outfit J-Roddy Walston and the Business comes back to Baltimore tonight for a gig at the Ottobar.

Vincent E. Dobson Jr. and Brandi Logan had talked of getting married. He dreamed of being a computer engineer. She was preparing for nursing school at Coppin State College. Relatives described a bright future for the young couple.Nothing, they said, foreshadowed a violent Saturday night when Dobson pulled up at Logan's house in Northwest Baltimore in a rented green Dodge Durango and told his girlfriend: "You know I love you."Logan answered "Yes," then was shot once in the chest, Brandi told her family.

HUMANKIND rarely disappoints the pessimist. It is, therefore, not surprising that the families in an infamous switched-baby case, whom I once praised for intelligent selflessness, ultimately abandoned the high road and hired lawyers.What is surprising is that the court did the right thing. The judge sent the feuding adults home and, at least for now, has left the babies' psyches intact. A horror story comes to a noble, if not strictly happy, end.The switched babies case came to light in August 1998 when an unmarried mother sought genetic testing for a paternity suit.

Sandra Cassard fancies herself as a take-charge woman, a self-admitted "control freak." But now she was facing decisions that she couldn't just make by herself. These were situations that eventually confront most adults with aging parents. In Sandra's case, it was her husband's father and ailing mother.Her husband, Willem, had seen his parents live in the same Chevy Chase house for the past 25 years. But now their family -- the entire family -- was at a crossroads.Sandra and Willem, known to the family as Wim, decided to sell their Baltimore home and move to the county to take advantage of the elementary public schools for their three girls.

Two families were left homeless, and one firefighter was injured when a three-alarm fire that investigators said was set intentionally gutted two East Baltimore homes and badly damaged two others about 6 p.m. yesterday.A vacant house, 1602 N. Port St., caught fire first, investigators said, and the flames quickly engulfed the two occupied rowhouses. Another vacant house also was gutted, city fire officials said.Battalion Chief Hector L. Torres, spokesman for the city Fire Department, said investigators were treating the fire as an arson after neighbors reported seeing a man coming out of the door of the vacant house just before the fire was spotted.

THURMONT -- A summer dinner outing at scenic Cunningham Falls State Park turned deadly for two friendly farm families Monday evening, despite prompt rescue efforts.Three boys -- brothers 15 and 12 years old and a 15-year-old friend -- drowned after the youngest fell into the park's 44-acre lake about 7:15 p.m. Park rangers said the two 15-year-olds died after jumping into Hunting Creek Lake to save the youngest boy, who had slipped from a rock into a section of the lake that is 15 to 20 feet deep.

For the better part of the school year, the band members of the South Carroll High School Marching Cavaliers spend their time practicing instruments and routines, performing in competitions and participating in fund-raising activities. But when the holiday season approaches, their thoughts turn to helping out the less fortunate in our community.For several years, the students have been adopting two families from the Carroll County area and providing them with traditional meals for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

To hear the neighborhood tell it, what happened to Keisha Brown on Saturday night began as a fight between two families -- one involved in the drug trafficking at East Baltimore's Bonaparte Street and Garrett Avenue and another living at the rough-and-tumble intersection.The feud is not about the drugs -- drugs are business as usual there -- but about bad blood between families, neighborhood residents say. It goes back to the beginning of summer, when words were spoken and one woman took a bat to another woman's child, whose cousin then scuffled with an older boy. There has been fighting for months now, and Saturday, punches were thrown again.

FROM Forum, the journal of the National Institute for Dispute Resolution, by Beth Roy:"Family feuds are a vivid part of American folklore. How easy to assume we know what they are about -- hostilities among 'ignorant' hill people, handed down from generation to generation. Indeed, family feuding could be a prototype for truisms about escalation and intractability. . ."In their study of Appalachian feuds, Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings set out to challenge the notion that feuds are irrational responses to petty disputes.

People around the county have searched their cupboards this holiday season, guessing what items might be useful to families in need.Northwest Middle School students simply asked them and eliminated the guesswork."

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb By David Kushner Walker & Co. / 256 pages / $26 More than a half-century before our current disaster in the housing market, the United States confronted a very different sort of housing crisis. During the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economic boom of World War II, few private homes had been constructed. With demobilization after World War II, vast numbers of military veterans and their families, flush with cash and G.I. Bill-backed mortgages, were desperate for housing.

It is human - or perhaps just journalistic - nature to think we can explain the inexplicable. We take all the horrifying details that tumble from first one murder-suicide that wipes out an entire family and then unbelievably a second one - the sunny yellow house, the 10th-floor hotel room, the three little tykes, the two sisters, the mom who blogged and the one who volunteered - and we grasp for a universal string theory that will tie the who-what-where-when-and-how to...

A scuffle at a Howard County high school between adults and teens from two feuding families led to six arrests, police and school officials said. Four students and two adults were charged with disorderly conduct in the incident Tuesday at Reservoir High in Fulton, police said. The members of the two families - students ages 15 to 17 and two female adults - encountered one another in the front office during the school day and began to bicker, said school system spokeswoman Patti Caplan.

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS Families finally meet' Two families, connected by one mother, finally meet after more than 55 years. Maryland baltimoresun.com/marbella Killer dessert topping Perfect for your next Baltimore-themed birthday party: Cupcakes sprinkled with shell casings from genuine criminal shootings. Maryland baltimoresun.com/vozzella OTHER VOICES Michael Sragow on Invasion -- Today Jean Marbella on two families -- Maryland Dan Steele on Jose pitching etiquette -- Sports 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY See J-Roddy Walston and the Business -- Local rock outfit J-Roddy Walston and the Business comes back to Baltimore tonight for a gig at the Ottobar.

More than 55 years ago, Isabel Jackson left her native El Paso, Texas, bound for a new life in Baltimore. Sometimes she would look at the pictures she brought with her, including one of her walking hand-in-hand with her daughter, but mostly, she didn't talk about the past. This weekend, the girl in the photo, who is now 63, will arrive in Baltimore herself. She will meet the man her mother had married, see the East Baltimore house in which they lived and visit the graveyard in which her mother is buried.

MARPINGEN, Germany -- The snapshots show a family across an ocean in a foreign city called Baltimore. There is Denise Brown, thin and pretty with her dark hair pulled back, alongside her father, Robert L. Brown Jr. There is Denise's aunt, cheek to smiling cheek with her uncle. There is a gaggle of cousins, and her grandmother, in a silly purple wig. It was about a half-dozen years ago when Denise Brown, now 25, last saw her American father, a man who was in and out - but mostly out - of her life since childhood.

SABILLASVILLE - In today's weary ranks of the citizen soldier, the toll on the home front registers first at homes such as Lisa Cantwell's, a picture-perfect cottage in a green valley of corncribs and turning leaves. Here, during a two-hour conversation on a recent fall morning, Cantwell delivered a kind of casualty report from the family support group she leads for the Army Reserve's 324th Military Police Battalion. "We've had two who were suicidal, both wives. But they've gotten help; they're coping.

SARASOTA, Fla. - For two families in Florida, the pain of an adoption gone wrong is plainly visible on their faces. Carmen and Darlene Scoma talk sadly about the child from the Marshall Islands they thought they had legally claimed in Hawaii in 1997. For 4 1/2 years, Atina Erakdrik had been their daughter, until they lost her early last year after a bitter court battle. "She's our daughter. She will always be our daughter," says Darlene Scoma, her voice quavering. In Fruitland Park, 130 miles north, Atina's birth mother, Molly Juna, 31, who traveled more than 7,000 miles to reclaim her child, talks about the pain she endured during the protracted court fight.

Friday night family sitcoms are not the place one usually expects to find programming that breaks new ground. Goofy characters (like Steve Urkel) and big, happy families (as on Step By Step) have been the norm. But Like Family, which premieres tonight on the WB network, offers a sitcom household that flies in the face of more than 50 years of network programming when it comes to portraying African-American masculinity. The blended-family sitcom features two families - one black, one white - living in the same small house in New Jersey.

It has been more than a month since the city of Annapolis condemned the duplex known as Anchor House and the charity group in charge tried to evict two families. The same charity later filed suit in District Court, attempting to force the families out. But the families have stayed. Not because they love the house at 160 West St. - which reeks of raw sewage from a leaking toilet, is infested with mice and poses lead paint dangers - but because their alternative is homelessness, they say. "It's not that easy to pick up and leave if you have no place to go," said Susan Dixon, 25, who lives in the upstairs apartment with her husband, Jeremy Welch, and their four children.