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An elementary school under construction in Upper Marlboro will be named for President Barack Obama. The Prince George's County school board approved the name by a unanimous vote Thursday night. The 792-student school being built next to Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School is expected to open in August 2010. Board member Pat J. Fletcher (Dist. 3) spoke of civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X and Shirley Chisholm who gave generations hope for the future. "For my grandchildren, it is no longer a hope but a reality, and for many of our children, it's a reality now," Fletcher...

President Obama's name would grace a new Prince George's County elementary school a few miles from the White House under a proposal scheduled for a vote tonight, barely five months after he took office. If the Prince George's Board of Education approves the plan, Barack Obama Elementary School would be the first in the Washington region named after the president. The school is under construction outside the Capital Beltway in Upper Marlboro and is slated for completion by year's end. The school would not be the first in the country named after Obama. The Hempstead Union Free School District in...

ALEXANDRIA, VA—Sheila Chappell, age 39, of Mitchellville, Md., pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to distribute oxycodone, health care fraud and false statements to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This case stemmed from the ongoing Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) investigation named Operation “Cotton Candy,” which has secured more than 170 convictions of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, patients and drug dealers relating to the distribution and use of pain pills. Dana J. Boente, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Joseph Persichini Jr., Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI Washington Field...

A Prince George's County woman fatally shot her husband in an apparent act of self-defense Saturday after he attacked her at the Capitol Heights duplex where the pair lived in separate units, according to police and neighbors. Just after 8 a.m., authorities said, police were called to the home in the 700 block of Capitol Heights Boulevard on a report of a domestic dispute. In front of the house, they found Richard Marcellous Wilson, 30, with a gunshot wound. He was taken to a hospital, where he died. Police said Wilson's wife fired the fatal shot. The circumstances of the...

Greenbelt, Maryland—A federal jury convicted Earl Whittley Davis, age 39, of Washington D.C., today of robbery and using a gun in the murder of a Dunbar armored car employee, carjacking, using a gun in furtherance of the carjacking, and being a felon in possession of a gun and ammunition, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein. “Earl Davis will never again be able to commit a murder on the streets of Prince George’s County,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. “A jury verdict cannot replace a lost life, but it brings a small measure of...

Sorry for the vanity, but this just happened. Thought some folks would be interested here. School on lockdown -- apparently a kid with a gun in the school. More to follow

....Sean Sykes and an accomplice stabbed a man in Prince George's County last month and then threatened to kill a witness who saw them dragging the victim out of an apartment building. Sykes was arrested, charged with second-degree murder and held on $1.5 million bond. But when Sykes, 18, appeared in court last week, a judge took an unusual step: He released Sykes to the custody of his mother. Yesterday, District Court Judge Hassan A. El-Amin defended his decision and denounced the Maryland judicial system's method of determining whether and under what conditions defendants are released before trial... A spokesman...

On March 9, the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office was notified of a Lexington Park, Maryland woman, reportedly aged 27, who was flown to Prince George’s Hospital for an injury which occurred on March 8, as a result of a sexual act involving the use of a reciprocating saw.  The original 911 call was dispatched as a medical emergency.  St. Mary’s County Bureau of Criminal Investigation Detectives conducted an investigation which determined the injury was a result of a consensual act between two parties and no crime was committed. At approximately 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 8, units from Bay District Fire...

LEXINGTON PARK, Md. -- Some sexual experimentation landed a southern Maryland woman in a hospital with injuries tough to imagine and even more difficult to forget. Maryland State Police airlifted the 27-year-old woman to Prince George's County Hospital Center early Sunday morning after she was injured in an incident involving a sex toy attached to a saber saw blade, TheBayNet.com first reported. The man who called 911 about the incident admitted attaching the sex toy to the saw and then using the high-powered, homemade device on his partner, according to the St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office.

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law. But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out...

<p>A police SWAT team raided the home of the mayor in the Prince George's County town of Berwyn Heights on Tuesday, shooting and killing his two dogs, after he brought in a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been delivered to his doorstep, police said.</p>

The FBI has launched a review of the violent law enforcement raid of the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo in Prince George's County last week that resulted in the deaths of the family's two dogs. The agency has begun "reviewing the events that occurred at Mr. Calvo's residence," said Richard J. Wolf, spokesman for the FBI in Baltimore, which has jurisdiction over federal civil rights investigations in Maryland. (snip) Courts across the country in recent years have ruled that it is almost always unacceptable for police to kill pets in the course of searching a home. Cases in...

<p>THE DRUG raid by Prince George's County law officers on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo last week was a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish.</p> <p>Acting on a tip that a 32-pound package of marijuana had been sent by Federal Express from Arizona to Mr. Calvo's home (addressed to his wife, Trinity Tomsic), Prince George's police swung into action. Which is to say they got on the phone, calling law enforcement agencies to see who might have a SWAT team available to bust the unsuspecting Calvo family. (It seems the police department's own team was tied up.) After being turned down at least once, they finally struck a deal with the Prince George's Sheriff's Office, whose track record with domestic disputes is extensive but whose experience with drug busts is slight. And it showed.</p>

When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead. A mayor sat in his boxers, hands bound behind his back. His handcuffed mother-in-law was sprawled on the kitchen floor, lying beside the body of one of the family pets that police had killed before her eyes. After the raid, Prince George's County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights' mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered earlier. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo's home. This week Prince George's...

In the community of Shady Grove Woods, trees are becoming more and more scarce. Residents and other anti-Intercounty Connector activists marched through the neighborhood on Saturday, pointing out the trees that were cut down to make way for the six-lane highway. ‘‘It’s just that we didn’t have a say in it in so many ways and we’re not talking about a two-lane road, we’re talking about a major highway running through here,” resident Sam Chim said of the ICC. ‘‘We have a lot of nice, private woods back here and now we’re going to have a highway running through instead....

It's an axiom known by every lawyer and judge in every courthouse in the land: A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. Try telling that to Harold J. Stewart. Last month, Stewart, a 42-year-old high school dropout, defended himself in a murder case in Prince George's County, where he was accused of beating a sleeping man to death with a baseball bat. The trial lasted three days. Stewart called no witnesses. The jury deliberated less than an hour. The verdict: Not guilty of first-degree murder. Not guilty of second-degree murder. "Everybody told me I...

I may be overly sensitive on this subject but my first reaction is that these victims of a Maryland street-racing incident were unlucky, undeserving and incredibly foolish: “A car plowed into a crowd that had gathered to watch a drag race on a suburban road early Saturday, killing eight people and injuring at least five, police said. Police said the white sedan was not involved in the street race but accidentally drove into the crowd of about 50 people that had spilled onto the highway to watch two racing cars speed off. *** According to police, two cars had lined...

ACCOKEEK, Md. -- A car plowed into a crowd that apparently gathered to watch a drag race on a suburban road early Saturday, killing seven people and injuring at least four, police said. The car went out of control on Route 210 around 3:40 a.m. and hit people standing on the roadside, Prince George's County Police Cpl. Clinton Copeland said. A tractor-trailer that came by shortly afterward may also have struck someone on the road as it tried to avoid the crash, he said. -snip- Route 210 has two lanes in each direction and traffic lights about every 150 to...

Fixing the Prince George's County hospitals, a ban on panhandling in Prince George's and money for improvements to the Laurel Armory, the Laurel mill dam ruins and the Laurel Boys and Girls Club are among the top priorities of local lawmakers for the 2008 session of the Maryland General Assembly, which opened Wednesday, Jan. 9. In addition, local lawmakers are pushing legislation that would ban the use of special taxing districts in residential developments, an attempt to avoid the type of controversy that has roiled the upscale Victoria Falls community in Laurel. Developers used such a taxing district to help...

ANNAPOLIS -- Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown yesterday said it's "probably certain" that Gov. Martin O'Malley will convene a special session of the Democratic-controlled legislature to address the likely closure of two Prince George's County hospitals. "It's probably certain that in order to complete this, the governor would have to call us back into special session, which is unfortunate because there's literally a daily cost" of running a special session, said Mr. Brown, a Democrat. The nonprofit agency that manages the hospital system was expected to vote Monday whether to shut down the hospital system, which includes Prince George's Hospital...