Unlocked

Police Blotter is a sampling of crimes in Howard County.Elkridge: 5400 block of Kerger Road: Someone broke into a house through the window in a rear door Sunday or Monday. A television, tools and a bird feeder were taken.East ColumbiaOwen Brown: 7100 block of Minstrel Way: Police are searching for a man who assaulted a juvenile Monday on a bike path behind Burger King. The boy's bicycle was stolen.Dorsey's Search: 12400 block of Route 108: Someone attempted to steal a 1981 Dodge Aries Sunday or Monday.

Two Columbia youths were charged with attempted robbery Tuesday night after a pizza store reported a suspicious phone order and Howard County police responded to the address.Employees at the Pizza Boli's store on Oakland Mills Road called police at 8:40 p.m. Police traced the number and found that the call had been made from a pay phone.Plainclothes officers went to the 5400 block of Emberend Terrace in Long Reach, where the pizza was to be delivered, and spotted two teen-agers. Police said a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old were carrying rubber gloves, masks and a BB gun shaped like a 9-mm handgun.

The 19-year-old man charged with fatally stabbing Dennis Lane allegedly told investigators that his girlfriend had instructed him to kill her father and his fiancee, specifying the number of times each was to be stabbed in the throat - 10 for him and 15 for her. Jason Anthony Bulmer charging documents In a conversation at school hours before the Ellicott City blogger and businessman was killed, Jason Anthony Bulmer said, 14-year-old Morgan...

Morgan Lane Arnold, an emotionally frail 14-year-old freshman, navigated the hallways of her Howard County high school each day filled with anxiety, unable because of a learning disorder to decipher the social cues, jokes and emotions of her peers. Her preferred environment, often accented by a Japanese anime soundtrack streaming through snug earplugs, featured a mix of fairies, mermaids and vampires, according to her mother. They were the protagonists of a digital realm where she said she was "practicing making friends" through role-playing games and social media.

The following is compiled from police reports. It is the Baltimore Messenger's policy to include descriptions only when there is enough information to make identification possible. If you have any information about these crimes, call the Baltimore City Police Department's Northern District at 410-396-2455. Amberly Way 100 block, between 3 and 4:15 p.m. May 14. Handbag, ID, credit cards stolen from vehicle. Art Museum Drive Unit block, between 6:15 and 7:30 p.m. May 14. Toshiba laptop stolen from vehicle.

Vandals ransacked the Spanish room of Magothy River Middle School Sunday morning, throwing papers on the floor, breaking pencils and urinating on a textbook, county police said.Eastern District Officer Neil McKee went to the school around 10:30 a.m. to investigate the alarm sounding. He found an exterior door ajar.Police said the vandals got into the school through an unlocked outer door. Also found unlocked were the door to the Spanish room and an interior hallway door that would have prevented the culprits from getting into the school, police said.

HADDONFIELD, N.J. - Sometimes I think of myself as threads of my father, angles of light that come forward in time to illuminate the years since he passed away. On his famous marathon walks through the city, he taught me to read by mouthing words off overhead signs, window advertisements and billboards that plastered construction sites. Six-foot-four with a mop of orange hair, he'd act like a kid sometimes. He loved to gawk at skyscraper excavations, which opened up like the Grand Canyon as gargantuan machines rumbled down earthen ramps and tiny men rode elephantine tractors and giraffe-like cranes to raise steel scaffolding high into the noonday sun. Dad loved to share the mysteries of the world with us as kids, as if there were great secrets hiding behind every corner.

Tossing and turning with the sad vision of children being turned away from closed Pratt Library branches (adults, too, but I particularly thought of children), I had a brainstorm Thursday night. Following up on Friday I phoned Pratt Director Anna Curry and asked, "If I send you a $10,000 check -- and several dozen other people and organizations do the same -- will that keep some branches open?""It sure will," she excitedly replied, adding, "I just talked to Mayor Schmoke and he found $200,000 for us. If we could raise another $200,000 it would buy us some time until our fiscal year ends on June 30. Then we can move forward permanently."

MILWAUKEE -- Last year, Melvin Whitaker watched the NCAA tournament from a prison in Virginia where he was serving time for slashing an opponent's face after a disagreement in a pickup basketball game.Tonight, he will start at center for Mount St. Mary's against Michigan State in the first round of the Midwest Regional, with his keen defensive skills essential to the Mount's slim hopes of an upset.Ordinarily, that's a sequence of events that might raise eyebrows. A former felon helps a low-profile team rise up and reach the promised land of March Madness?

TRYING TO FIND out what's really happened with Carroll County's school construction program is like trying to build the Great Wall of China one brick at a time.It's a seemingly endless task, wrapped in imperial infallibility -- with a giant stone wall at the end.The recent problems, failures, gaffes and obduracy of the school board and its administration in building and expanding schools have been well-publicized.Less familiar is the incredible series of delays and evasions used by the school system to avoid accepting responsibility and accounting to the public.