Criminal justice

A woman reported that an acquaintance sexually assaulted her in 2023. Then a series of delays and scheduling conflicts began to upend the trial in Baltimore Circuit Court.

In a season of change, the new owners of Baltimore Sun Media stopped publishing the Maryland Gazette, which carried news of the Declaration of Independence on July 11, 1776. The Big Glen Burnie Carnival ended a summer run that started in 1908. And down in Ocean City, the city is phasing out a century-old seasonal police officer program.

Baltimore County detectives arrest Randallstown High School teacher and charge him with sexually abusing a minor.

“We are being attacked,” said Greater Grace church's head pastor, Thomas Schaller.

Newly passed legislation will force current members of the Maryland Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention to reapply to the commission. Attorney General Anthony Brown said he is eagerly looking forward to the application process that will populate the new commission.

Republicans, Democrats and my colleagues in journalism alike would be wise to heed the ghost of Willie Horton, whose story still haunts us 26 years after his name entered the American lexicon.

Baltimore Police and firefighters were called to the 2600 block of Port Covington Drive at around 5:50 p.m. Saturday to a report of multiple people in the water, said Lindsey Eldridge, a spokesperson for the Baltimore Police Department.

Marcel Traoren was last seen in Dundalk early Friday around 5 a.m., police said. The child was reported missing, and a search was launched around 7 a.m.

Join Baltimore Banner Senior Deputy Managing Editor Richard Martin and reporters Jessica Calefati, Justin Fenton and Julie Scharper for a discussion on the Greater Grace investigative series on June 27.

A West Baltimore man said he feared for his life when he tried to help a 67-year-old woman being attacked by pit bulls and the dogs turned on him. Police say one woman was killed and two people were injured when stray pit bulls attacked people last weekend.

Harford County District Judge Kerwin A. Miller Sr. said he agreed with the state’s attorney that Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 23, posed both a danger to the community and a flight risk.

A Salvadoran immigrant was flown back to Maryland Thursday to be tried in the rape and killing of Harford County mother Rachel Morin last summer.

Darrell David Rice, a computer programmer from Columbia who was arrested in 2001, was charged with capital murder, and authorities alleged that he selected the victims because of his hatred of women and gay people.

“The facts of this case are terrifying,” Baltimore County Circuit Judge Robert E. Cahill Jr. said as he sentenced Joseph Vickery, 44, of Wilmington, North Carolina, on a charge of attempted manufacturing of a destructive device.

Advocates hope the system will empower sexual assault survivors while holding police and prosecutors accountable for what happens to evidence kits.

“I was just so very grateful that they didn’t give up,” Patty Morin said. “That she wasn’t the folder on the desk that I was afraid might happen.”

City leaders, health care providers and law enforcement can work together to provide treatment, prevention and other strategies to confront Baltimore’s drug overdose crisis, directors of health and public innovation efforts at Johns Hopkins University say.

William Rich, 43, of Windsor Mill, is standing trial in U.S. District Court in Baltimore on five counts of wire fraud and one count of theft of government property. The indictment alleges that he faked being paralyzed and lied to receive more than $767,000 in benefits to which he was not entitled.

Nicholas Francis Xavier Giroux, 36, has been charged with first-and-second-degree murder in the death of Isaiah Oludayo Olugbemi.

A Baltimore spokesperson said that Mace was released after two groups of people got into an altercation, but people who attended think something else happened.