Year In Baltimore

Marian Shriver McSherry, long-time devotee of Maryland's Catholic aristocracy and mother of 12 children, died on July 24 of breast cancer at her home in Frederick. She was 85. A second cousin of R. Sargent Shriver, Marian Macsherry was born in Baltimore and grew up in Roland Park, spending her summers at Union Mills, the Shriver family homestead. She graduated from Noroton School of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Conn., and attended Manhattanville College in New York for one year before she got married.

Arthur Tyler Felton, who served more than 14 years in prison for killing a 6-year-old girl in Baltimore in 1991, was sentenced Monday to serve 12 years in prison for a carjacking outside the Annapolis Mall. Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Paul A. Hackner suspended the rest of a 30-year sentence in favor of five years' probation, said a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office. Because Felton, 38, is a repeat violent offender, he would have to serve 10 years without the possibility of parole.

Police were investigating a fatal shooting that occurred Wednesday night in Northeast Baltimore, the district's seventh homicide of the year. About 10:55 p.m., police were called to the 1600 block of E. 31st St. in the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhood for a reported shooting. Inside a home, they found Martez Anthony Hall, 22, who had been shot several times in the torso. Hall was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:32 p.m., police said.

All Shannon Sharpe thought about all Saturday was whether his 88-year-old grandmother, Mary Porter ever would see him get elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "I thought if it doesn't happen today…," Sharpe began, his voice trailing. "The only thing I've ever wanted was to make my grandmother proud and I said if I don't get in, she's not going to hear me thank her and be able to give a speech. Granny, thanks for everything you did. I'm the man I am today because of you. " Sharpe, a member of the Ravens Super Bowl team, was one of seven men elected into the 2011 Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday by a 44-member panel that met for 71/2 hours to pare down a list of 15 finalists.

When Stephen Pitcairn cried for help that night, Reggie Higgins answered. Higgins, who had just returned home to Charles Village from a trip, ran into the street and, seeing Pitcairn on the ground and bleeding from his chest, started screaming for help himself. He called for his neighbors by name — "Jacques!" "Regina!" — and ran back inside briefly to call 911. In the end, though, only Higgins would be there for Pitcairn, two strangers on St. Paul Street as cars drove by and nearby residents slept behind the aural wall of their air conditioners.

T he best movie to make its Baltimore debut in 2009 was Kent Mackenzie's "The Exiles." Set in American Indian neighborhoods of the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, this haunting fusion of fiction and nonfiction techniques was made in 1961. Yet it didn't appear here until last January, when the Charles had the wit to showcase as a "revival" a film that had never opened in the first place. In one legendary scene, when the Bunker Hill bars close, the men zip around to a vista point overlooking the sprawling city.

The notes were written by hand on orange, blue and yellow slips of paper, jotted down after a prayer during a New Year's Day church service to honor the dead children of Baltimore. The parishioners were called on to record their commitment to help a child, to stop the killings, to heal a city that seems beyond repair. No names were signed, but the papers were placed in the offering plate, a covenant with God and the people who attended the service nine days ago at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation on North Charles Street.

John Billingslea, the Franklin High School psychology teacher named yesterday as Baltimore County's Teacher of the Year, said that growing up on the family farm in northern Harford County taught him much about the value of hard work and the endurance he would need to sustain a career in education. He said his grandmother, Inez Billingslea, a kindergarten teacher, drilled into him the value of a good education. "My grandmother used to always, at dinnertime, tap me on my forehead and say, 'John, remember, they can't take this away from you,'" Billingslea recalled yesterday in a phone interview from the 97-acre farm in White Hall that he and his wife, Ellen, tend.

James D.M. Muldowney, a retired police officer who had been assigned to the Baltimore Police Department canine unit for nearly 30 years, died Tuesday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at Nichols Senior Care in Edgewood. The former longtime Overlea resident was 68. Mr. Muldowney was born and raised in Heckscherville, Pa., and served in the Navy from 1957 to 1961 as an underwater demolitions expert at the naval base in Little Creek, Va. After his discharge from the Navy, Mr.

Dr. Gino Franco Luigi Zarbin, a Baltimore pediatrician whose love of children was equaled only by his enthusiasm for Alfa Romeo sports cars and model trains, died Monday of cancer at his Hillendale home. He was 83. Dr. Zarbin, the son of a dentist, was born and raised in Vittorio Veneto, Italy, and raised in Milan. Educated at the University of Milan, where he earned his medical degree in 1948, Dr. Zarbin escaped conscription into the German army during World War II when he missed his regular train.