Hutzell: Baltimore has a poop-in-the-pool problem. And pee in the stadium, too

I promise, I won’t be juvenile about this.

Baltimore has a serial pooper on the loose. It’s a serious serial problem, one that is a journalist’s duty to expose.

Duty.

Maybe a little juvenile.

Combined with the infamous public pee at M&T Bank Stadium, it has been Baltimore’s summer of bodily fluids. Maybe it’s something in the water.

June 6: Patterson Park.

“Overnight vandalism caused damage to our facility, requiring repairs before we can safely reopen,” city Recreation and Parks officials posted the next morning. “We are working as quickly as possible to restore the pool and apologize for any inconvenience this causes our visitors.”

Of all the swim joints in all the world, you had to defecate into this one.

This first incident was really No. 2. It’s where the mystery pooper started, just two weeks after pools opened for the summer.

City officials probably knew in their gut this was coming.

They call it pool hopping. In a city with a dozen neighborhood public pools, kids and young adults often jump the fence on hot summer nights looking to cool off. And unload.

Right after the Patterson Park dump job, Recreation and Parks called on the public to report pool hoppers before the water got any muddier.

“Would you want it on your conscience if you saw kids in the pool and you did nothing, and then you saw on the news the next day that something tragic happened, and you could have prevented it?” city aquatics chief Nikki Cobbs told my colleague, Shayla Colon.

But the runs continued June 19 at Walter P. Carter pool, then again at Towanda over the July 4 weekend. The Baby Ruth fairy returned to Patterson Park on July 25, depositing another reminder that this messy problem is hard to wipe out.

No one is pushing too hard to flush the culprit from his hiding spot.

Alex Silverman, a city parks spokesperson, told my colleague Darreonna Davis that the focus has been on recovery, repairing the damage. People enjoy these pools, and repeatedly forcing the city to close and clean them is a disservice to the public.

“These isolated incidents do not reflect the thousands of residents and families who use our pools responsibly every day,” she said. “Our focus is on getting pools back online quickly while working to ensure the community understands the dangers of unsupervised swimming and trespassing.”

Just to mix things up, the too-public bathroom drama of Baltimore’s summer of 2026 switched to public urination on July 18.

That’s when police say a North Carolina man allegedly went No. 1 on a family at Morgan Wallen’s M&T Stadium show. When a guy sings as much about drinking as Wallen does, maybe this shouldn’t have been a surprise.

I’ma need some whiskey glasses, ‘cause I don’t wanna pee the truth.

OK. I might have made part of that one up. But drinking, Wallen and peeing go together:

Your memory gets to burnin’, lean back on the bourbon

Jayson Reed, 33, was arrested in Wilson County. Police in Maryland say he urinated on members of a family, including an 8-year-old girl, during the second night of Wallen’s “Still the Problem” tour.

Aptly named, don’t you think?

Troy Grevelding, the girl’s uncle, told Darreonna — wow, she’s having a strange summer — that his wife felt a liquid running down her leg. When he turned around, he saw a man with his pants down “relieving himself on myself, my wife and on my niece.”

In a video he shared on social media, Grevelding can be heard arguing with Maryland Transportation Authority Police who seem reluctant to get involved. You can tell by their pained expressions that they’d rather pass a kidney stone.

A guy who’s peeing on 8-year-olds deserves handcuffs. But, really, who wants to touch him?

This kind of crime, poo in pools or pee in public, is hard on police.

How do you catch someone who has something other than summer fun in mind when they say they’ve got to drop the kids off at the pool? Splish-splash.

Video security cameras come to mind. DNA analysis is probably not an option, thanks to the use of chlorine in the pools. I guess hygiene has its drawbacks.

Baltimore is no different from any other part of Maryland.

Ocean City — careful where you put the “sh” sound — has been running an aggressive crackdown on using its sandy beaches as a bathroom for years. I don’t think they’re talking about someone who suspiciously wades out waist deep, stands still for a moment and then comes back to shore grinning.

If, as Grevelding says, Reed had pulled out his little trick there, police might have charged him with a sex crime. I didn’t make that up. They aren’t messing around in Ocean City.

Any time someone does a dooky in Baltimore’s deep end, Silverman — who’s probably counting the 20 days till Labor Day and the end of pool season — said it prompts a deep clean, including an eight- to 12-hour rinse cycle to wash out the yick.

“Pool hopping is often accompanied by vandalism, a problem experienced by Baltimore and other cities nationwide,” she told my colleague, Sara Ruberg. “This is the second instance of vandalism at Patterson Park pool this week.”

Someone isn’t getting the hint.

Aug. 12, and a cable was laid at Ambrose Kennedy Pool.

It’s a pride of Baltimore, Darreonna reported, built in 1973 and renovated for $2 million in 2024.

“Our young people and our families deserve safe, modern, and state-of-the-art facilities, and we aren’t stopping until every neighborhood across Baltimore has access to world-class parks, pools, and facilities,” Mayor Brandon Scott said at the rededication.

I think, Mr. Mayor, it’s time to ask for help.

Baltimore needs an extraordinary crime fighter, someone who can get to the bottom of this pile of, er, clues.

Seriously, it might be time to call for...

doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo.

Batman.