Free "Range" Comedy

Free "Range" Comedy?  Get it? Oh, Baltimore...

Research Study?

Research study, scam, or marketing?  You be the judge.

Superblock

Outside my apartment

Motel Howard Street

Howard Street

This guy thought the outside sidewalk was a comfy place to pass out!

Weed Pulling Competition

Weed Pulling Competition in South Baltimore!!!

Are you sick and tired of all the weeds all over the streets, sidewalks and alleys in South Baltimore?  So are we at SouthBMore.com!

On Saturday, June 3oth we are hoping to bring all of those weeds their worst nightmare!  Sponsored by No Idea Tavern, SouthBMore.com is launching the firstWeed Pulling Competition in South Baltimore.

The rules are simple:

- Put together a team of people of any size (and sign-up by emailing Kevin@InceptMM.com)

- Pull as many weeds as you can on June 30th

- Put them in trash bags (which can be provided by SouthBMore.com)

- Call to get your weeds weighed and hauled off to the dump! (410-533-2990)

Kevin Lynch will be riding around with a truck, scale and chart weighing bags of weeds and crediting them to particular teams.  The contest ends at 3pm so all the trash can get the the dump.

The team that removes the most pounds of weeds will win a $150 bar tab at No Idea Tavern.  But it doesn’t stop there, the 2nd place team will win a $100 bar tab at No Idea and the 3rd place team will win a $50 tab.  Free food and drinks and a cleaner neighborhood, you can’t beat it!

If you don’t have a lot of time to participate or put together a team, SouthBMore.com is challenging every South Balimore resident, property owner, and business to give us 20 minutes of your time and pull some weeds.  South Baltimore is becoming one of the great urban areas in America, but as long as it is covered in weeds, people will never see it at its finest!

"Some People Would Give Anything To Get A Shot"

Baltimore Street Bus Stop

Hooters waitress allegedly contracts tuberculosis at Inner Harbor restaurant

Over the past seven months, Jheri Stratton has been quarantined in her house for a while, ordered to wear a mask to walk her dog, and monitored twice a week by a city Health Department official who watches to ensure that she swallows a handful of pills. She has had to cancel vacations and explain to friends why she can't go out.

Since the former waitress at Hooters in downtown Baltimore was diagnosed with active tuberculosis in November, allegedly after she and others contracted the disease from a manager at the Harborplace restaurant, her life has been miserable, Stratton said.

"It's just horrible, there's nothing else I can say," the 19-year-old 2010 graduate of Randallstown High School said. "I just wish none of this had ever happened."

Last month, Stratton was awarded workers' compensation from Hooters for lost wages and medical expenses, according to Bruce Block, Stratton's attorney and managing partner of Baltimore-based Jenkins Block & Associates. It was the latest and most official recognition of what Stratton has been going through.

"It feels like a weight lifted off my shoulders because it's finally someone acknowledging that this isn't my fault," Stratton said. "Hooters is acknowledging the fact that this wasn't something that I just picked up on the MTA."

The public and patrons of the restaurant weren't at risk of contracting the disease, which is transmitted through prolonged exposure, said Dr. Evelyn Rodriguez, deputy commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department's Division of Disease Control.

Aside from Stratton, multiple other members of the Hooters staff were confirmed to have latent or nonactive tuberculosis after the restaurant and the Health Department scheduled two separate testings for staff at downtown hotels last October and in March, city health officials said.

Neither Rodriguez nor David Henninger, chief marketing officer and spokesman for Hooters of America, would disclose the exact number of latent cases found. The manager who allegedly spread the disease was not identified.

Henninger said management at the Harborplace location — which the chain considers one if its premier locations, with between 75 and 100 "Hooters girls" employed — worked closely with the Health Department during the past year to ensure that all proper medical steps were taken. Rodriguez said Hooters cooperated fully with the Health Department.

Stratton was first admitted at Sinai Hospital for a week in November, then quarantined in her home for a month after contracting the disease, and has since experienced serious medical problems, Block said.

Stratton, who said she had initially thought her cough and flu-like symptoms were related to her smoking and picking up some more common bug, said her tuberculosis has since caused much more serious symptoms, damaged her liver and forced her to remain on heavy medication. She had to take 10 pills a day for about a month. That's now down to 10 pills twice a week, which a health official watches her take to ensure she's adhering to her treatment.

The number of confirmed tuberculosis cases in the city each year has been dropping during the past decade, leveling off more recently to about 32 cases per year, Rodriguez said. That's compared with 60 confirmed cases in 2001, she said. Hospitals must report confirmed tuberculosis diagnoses to local health departments.

Stratton, who said she had worked at Hooters since March 2011, was fired two days after her workers' compensation claim was granted May 22.

"On the days I have to take my medicine, usually I'm nauseous and things like that," Stratton said. "And I was experiencing all these symptoms at Hooters, but they had no sympathy."

Henninger said there were "other on-the-job issues that came up that led to" Stratton's dismissal but would not elaborate.

According to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tuberculosis is spread through the air by infected people coughing, sneezing or speaking. People with latent tuberculosis cannot spread the disease. The bacterial infection most often attacks an infected person's lungs but can also attack the kidney, spine and brain, and can be fatal.

"Persons with TB disease are most likely to spread the bacteria to other people they spend time with every day, such as family members or co-workers," according to a tuberculosis fact sheet for employers on the CDC website.

Whenever a case is confirmed in the city, Rodriguez said, health officials begin speaking with close contacts of the infected person and then less frequent contacts. "We call that a concentric circle approach," she said.

Rodriguez stressed that tuberculosis is often harder to contract than the common cold or flu, and said the department's investigation surrounding the case at Hooters, including the two staff testings, was not out of the ordinary or on a particularly large scale compared with other workplace investigations the city has conducted.

David Dowdy, an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's epidemiology department, provided a similar assessment.

"There are nurses who work in TB hospital wards in other countries that are not particularly well ventilated, and they can work with these patients every day for a year and not contract TB," he said, "so the overall risk for one case creating a large number of secondary cases is much smaller than the diseases we think about as being respiratory diseases such as the cold or the flu."

After being quarantined and starting treatment, Stratton returned to work at Hooters, where she said managers expressed frustration with her inability to work at a normal pace and co-workers said they noticed she had lost significant weight and couldn't eat.

Stratton, who lives with her girlfriend, Mari McCoy, and McCoy's family, said she was told by managers at the restaurant that her illness was "not serious" and that she shouldn't tell her family, which she considers McCoy's family to be, or friends about it or how she contracted it.

"Obviously, the fact that I have tuberculosis is something my family, who I live with, would need to know," she said, noting her arm swelled and oozed pus after she was given a shot there to test for the disease.

Initially, insurance attorneys for the Hooters company, which is based in Atlanta, challenged Stratton's claim — which Block filed with the Maryland Workers' Compensation Commission in December — and a hearing was scheduled for June 6. But the challenge was dropped last month and the agency granted approval of the claim, according to commission records.

Stratton will be compensated for all her medical costs, for two-thirds of her lost wages during her illness — which compensation commission records put at $545 per week missed — and for "any permanent impairment" associated with her contracting the disease, Block said. Henninger confirmed that account.

"It's a lifetime benefit for medical coverage," Block said.

In substantiating Stratton's claim, Block said he confirmed that multiple other Hooters employees had contracted nonactive tuberculosis — which means tuberculosis bacteria is present in a person's body but there is no active illness — and that he was "pretty astonished and shocked" that the restaurant was never closed.

"To hear that the Health Department hadn't shut down the facility, that nobody knew, that the public wasn't aware?" Block said. "My client was a waitress, so she certainly was exposed to a lot of people."

Rodriguez said because of the epidemiology of tuberculosis and what is known about how it spreads — only among close contacts with prolonged exposure to the infected person, and only through airborne droplets and not via surfaces like plates, glasses or toilet seats — warning the public or closing the restaurant would have been "completely unwarranted."

The Health Department also found that the Hooters manager who had the confirmed case of tuberculosis was "not very infectious," Rodriguez said.

Stratton said she'll finally be finished with her medications in August and is looking forward to moving on with her life. She wants to go to school for cosmetology, she said.

"I'm not waiting any more tables for a very, very long time," she said.

Hooters waitress allegedly contracts tuberculosis at Inner Harbor restaurant

Security Information Bulletin: Unarmed Assault and Robbery (ARREST)

ATTEMPTED  ASSAULT & ROBBERY (off-campus)

 

LOCATION: 1600 block of East Monument Street

 

DATE: Tuesday, June 5

 

TIME: 9 p.m.

 

A School of Medicine staff member was walking in the 1600 block of E. Monument Street, adjacent to Mama Mia’s, when he was approached by an adult male who began aggressively asking for money. The male pointed a rake at the staff member and asked the staff member to show him his pockets when the requests for money were denied. As the Corporate Security External Security Officer stationed across from the incident stepped out of the booth, the suspect, upon seeing the security officer, backed away from the staff member and began walking east-bound on Monument Street. Off-duty police working for the hospital stopped the suspect and arrested him for the incident. No property was taken and the staff member was not injured. 

 

SUSPECT INFO:

Arrested:  Black/Male/24 years old

 

All faculty, staff and students are reminded to remain alert and aware of their surroundings while walking to and from the campus. Should you find yourself the victim of a robbery, always remember to stay calm, listen and observe intently. Do not resist, give up your property and report the crime as soon as possible.

Morgan Student Admits To Eating Joppatowne Man’s Body Parts; Charged With First-Degree Murder

Who does this?!

Only in the Charm City...

JOPPATOWNE, Md. (WJZ)— A chilling story unfolds in Harford County where family members find the chopped up body parts of a missing man. And now, the suspect admits to committing acts of cannibalism on that body.

Meghan McCorkell has the stunning twist to this murder investigation.

Behind the door of a townhouse on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, a house of horrors. It’s here police say Alexander Kinyua, 21, confessed to eating the heart and parts of the brain of a missing man.

Both the suspect and the victim were students at Morgan State University. But it was inside a Joppatowne home they shared where police say an unimaginable crime occurred.

Police say Kinyua’s brother went down to the laundry room of the house and saw a blanket on a box. He pulled off the blanket and saw two metal tins. Police say he opened them and saw a head and two hands. When Kinyua’s brother confronted him about this, police say Kinyua said they were animal remains and not human.

The brother then got his dad. The father went downstairs and the items were gone.

Kinyua’s familycalled police.

“Human remains, specifically a head and hands, were recovered on the main floor of the residence,” Sheriff L. Jesse Bane of Harford County said.

Police believe they belong to 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, a family friend who was living at the house.

The rest of the body was found in a church dumpster on Trimble Road just blocks away.

Two days before the murder, Kinyua was released on bond for another assault.

Kinyua was out on bond when he was arrested for Agyei-Kodie’s murder. His parents were trying to raise funds for his defense in the assault case, holding a fundraiser at a community church in Northeast Baltimore.

WJZ has learned Kinyua was in the process of being expelled from school after he attacked another student with a baseball bat in the dorms.

A student who didn’t want to be identified tells WJZ: “I just heard it was a random attack on a student, a student here. He was just walking down and stairs and boom! He just hit him.”

That student suffered a skull fracture, fractures in the arm and shoulder and was also blinded in the left eye.

Friends say Kinyua had a drastic personality change after he was kicked out of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program in January for disciplinary reasons.

“I heard he may have been a bit out of the ordinary at times,” Damete Roberts, a sophomore at Morgan State, said.

The victim was also a grad student at Morgan State. Agyei-Kodie– a native of Ghana– held several master’s degrees.

He’d lived in the house with the Kinyua family for six months.

“It’s very scary. Especially knowing that it’s so close to home,” neighbor Melinda Kraft said.

It was a grisly murder and there’s still no motive.

Detectives say that so far, the suspect has shown no remorse for the attack. They say that while he is cooperative and has confessed, he would not reveal why he did it.

According to published reports, he recently posted online statements about cults, ethnic cleansing and school shootings.The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is helping in the investigation.

Kinyua was represented by a public defender in court on Thursday.

Police have not ruled out the possibility of more arrests.

The lead detective told WJZ he has no reason to believe that Kinyua was lying about eating the victim’s body parts.

A judge denied bail for Kinyua on Thursday. He’s charged with first-degree murder.

Morgan Student Admits To Eating Joppatowne Man’s Body Parts; Charged With First-Degree Murder « CBS Baltimore