THE GAZETTE
Page A-10
HEARING
Continued from Page A-1 improvements. Alternative 4 would widen the corridor that includes Brink, Wightman, Snouffer School and Muncaster Mill roads. The corridor would become a four- to six-lane highway with a sidewalk and bike lanes. Alternative 5 improves on an existing road by widening Md. 355 into a six-lane highway. Alternative 8 follows the master plan, but the road would be truncated at Watkins Mill Road, according to county documents. This alternative would build a new four-lane highway from Snowden Farm Parkway to Watkins Mill Road, but leaves a gap between Wat-
BAR
Continued from Page A-1 and something called a lemon drop, according to court records. Then he drove between 88 and 98 mph along Interstate 270. He hit the Warrs’ vehicle from behind. Ten-year-old Jazimen Harris was killed, and the Warrs and another granddaughter were injured. Eaton was sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter, and the Warrs sued the bar. The court offered the same opinion that it gave in 1951 and 1981: Bars in Maryland are not liable for accidents their patrons cause, even if the bars fail to stop serving patrons who are clearly drunk. In her dissenting opinion,
kins Mill Road and Montgomery Village Avenue to provide space to the Whetstone Run stream. Alternative 8 also has three divergent options for the north end of the highway. Each would end at Ridge Road, but one would enter the Agricultural Reserve, one would run along Ridge Road, and one would create a new highway in accordance with the master plan. The end that runs along Ridge Road “has shown to be undesirable in terms of operation and safety,” according to county documents. Alternative 9 follows the master plan by building a new four-lane highway between the existing Midcounty Highway and Watkins Mill Road. At that point, the road’s three ending
options are the same as those in Alternative 8. County documents warn that homes and businesses could be displaced by any of the alternatives, except the nobuild option and Alternative 2, which would widen Md. 355. Areas such as the I-270 Technology Corridor might benefit from a few of the alternatives, since they would decrease congestion on I-270 and Md. 355, according to county documents. State and county officials and community advocates are preparing for the Aug. 7 public hearing on M-83 at Seneca Valley High School. For more information about the meeting or to watch a video overview of the project, visit montgomerycountymd.gov/corridor.
Judge Sally Adkins noted that public opinion on drunken driving has changed greatly since the last time the court considered dram-shop liability. The court suggested in 1981 and in Thursday’s decision that the legislature could choose to pass a dram-shop measure. But Adkins pointed out that four bills on the subject introduced from 1987 to 2012 never made it out of committee. Jason Fernandez, an attorney who helped represent the Warrs, said legislators will not consider the topic because insurance companies resist the laws. “At some point in time, some branch of the government has got to step up and save lives,” Fernandez said. “The legislature couldn’t, so we asked the court to do so,
and they chose not to.” In her dissent, Adkins cited a study that found dram-shop liability — the term comes from a term for a shop where spirits were sold by the dram — reduced fatalities by 3 percent to 11 percent. She calculated that in Maryland 14 people would be saved each year by such a provision. “The majority of the general public would be outraged at a commercial vendor who, for the sake of profit, continues to serve an already drunk person well past the line of being ‘visibly under the influence,’ to the point of becoming aggressive and violent, and then sends him on his way, where he gets behind the wheel of a vehicle and kills a ten-year-old girl,” she wrote. “By the standards of our community, this is morally blameworthy.”
Leah King tests for the presence of marijuana Friday in the Forensic Chemistry Unit of the Montgomery County Crime Lab in Gaithersburg. GREG DOHLER/ THE GAZETTE
CRIME
Continued from Page A-1 make up the Electronic Crimes unit. Security at the lab is tight. “Each lab is programmed to know who has access to that particular room,” Raskin-Burns said. Only scientists authorized to work in that specific unit can access labs that work with biological evidence, like the Forensic Biology Unit or the Crime Scene Unit. To prevent contaminating evidence with foreign DNA, the lab’s scientists wear blue scrubs. Their DNA is on file, so it can be ruled out if somehow it becomes mixed with DNA being investigated. The Forensic Chemistry Unit gets the drugs that police collect. The unit tests the drugs in cases going to court, or at the request of investigators, King said. Marijuana, cocaine and heroin are the drugs the Forensic Chemistry Unit tests most frequently, King said. The unit’s scientists also identify drugs like ecstasy — sometimes made to look like candy or cartoon images, such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or miniature Bart Simpson heads. One recent case with candyshaped drugs had about 20 or 30 pills, King said. “If my kids saw those, they’d totally think they were SweeTarts,” Raskin-Burns said. “And they’d be high as a kite,” King said. In the chemistry lab, there are microscopes, pipettes and racks of beakers at each work station. There also are quirkier knickknacks, like a glass pipe shaped like an elephant, made for smoking marijuana. It was evidence from a nowclosed case, King said. The lab kept it for educational purposes instead of destroying it, she said. A gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer converts drugs into a gaseous form, then ana-
NETWORK
Continued from Page A-1 director of development oversight for Johns Hopkins University real estate, said the corridor has a wealth of untapped assets. “We have the equivalent of the richest oil fields on the planet, and no one’s drilled,” he said. Srivastava brought in Jim Dolgonas, president and CEO of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, to advise the assembled group on forming a shared cyberinfrastructure. “It really gets expensive
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lyzes them at a molecular level, which helps analysts determine exactly what kind of drug it is. The machine, one of the most expensive in the lab, costs around $100,000, Wickenheiser said. The lab receives federal and state grants for much of the equipment, he said. Breaking the drugs down to a molecular level helps crime lab analysts differentiate cocaine from procaine, a legal anesthetic, or marijuana from a series of synthetic cannabinoids, like “spice” or “K2,” that flooded the market several years ago, before they were outlawed. “Identifying those was pretty tricky,” she said of the cannabanoids, which mimic the effect of marijuana. King has been working at the lab for almost seven years, she said. “I liked chemistry. I liked the idea of law. It seemed like a nice way of mixing the two of them,” she said. In 2012, the different units in the lab processed a little less than 6,000 cases, Raskin-Burns said — 420 crime scenes, 170 firearms exams, more than 300 cases involving DNA testing, 3,600 drug cases, and 1,400 latent print analyses. The lab also performs tests for local city police departments, such as the Takoma Park and Rockville city police departments, along with the U.S. Park Police, Metro Transit Police, and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. The lab also occasionally runs tests for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Navy’s Criminal Investigations Division, King said. David Hinebaugh has worked as a latent print examiner for Montgomery County Police for nearly a decade. He analyzes prints taken from crime scenes by Crime Scene Unit investigators. “What I do is try take those prints and match them up with a suspect,” he said.
Hinebaugh said he studied in a forensic identification program at West Virginia University. The first part of his job is to see if a print is usable, he said. Many that come in are smudged or smeared, recognizable as fingerprints, but too damaged for identification. If the print is in good enough condition, he said, examiners will enter it into a regional automated fingerprint identification system and look for matches. That database, which covers Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., supplies a list of people who might match the fingerprint, he said. From there, examiners compare the two onscreen to see if they match with the fingerprint collected at the crime scene. Other times, police already will have a suspect in custody and will ask an examiner to match the suspect’s prints against a sample from the crime scene — that takes place offscreen, he said. Comparing the prints usually takes 15 minutes to half an hour, he said. Even though Hinebaugh processes 20 to 30 cases a month, some cases stick out, like a sexual assault that took place several years ago. The attacker assaulted his victim at knifepoint, then left the woman in Prince George’s County, he said. Police recovered a print from her credit cards — but it didn’t look like an intact print. “At first, I didn’t think it was good enough to enter in the system,” he said. However, he got a match on a man who had fled to New York. Police tracked him down, and he ultimately was convicted, Hinebaugh said. “It was very satisfying that ... I was able to help arrest the individual and provide some closure for the victim,” he said.
when you’re talking about a lot of data,” Dolgonas said. Their first priority should be finding partners, then funding, he said. Money will be one of the first hurdles the largely undefined project will face. “There is no funding for what we’re trying to do,” Srivastava said. Srivastava proposed creating a local area network across the planned development, anchored with biomedical computing centers that are connected to labs and research instruments, but many at the meeting emphasized the importance of enabling communication between people. He and the
meeting’s attendees plan to seek feedback from their respective companies, and those who did not send representatives, before any details are determined. Elaine Amir, Johns Hopkins’ Montgomery County executive director, said a collaboration is already a part of the campus’ culture. Some of the campus’ more than 30 private companies would not have known of each others’ existence without the university’s push for networking events, she said. “We’re not a location. We’re a community,” she said.
sjbsmith@gazette.net
scarignan@gazette.net