Lea Skene is an AP reporter based in Baltimore. She writes about poverty, policing and general news.
It sounded like freedom, like a world of possibility beyond the orphanage walls. Maria Pires was getting adopted. At 11 years old, she saw herself escaping the chaos and violence of the Sao Paulo orphanage, where she’d been sexually assaulted by a staff member.
BALTIMORE (AP) — It was almost instinctual for Ray Kelly to jump into action when he heard about a group of high school students clashing with police. He wanted to help protect the kids and de-escalate things, but instead, he watched his neighborhood burn.
Arlando “Tray” Jones was a toddler when his dad was killed by Baltimore police during a robbery. His mom died several years later after battling alcoholism. His surviving relatives often struggled to provide for him. Sometimes the lights got turned off and the refrigerator was empty.
TURNER STATION, Md. (AP) — As the dust settled after the deadly collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, as the initial shock wore off and the breaking news coverage subsided, residents of this tiny peninsula found themselves facing an uncertain future.
Growing up in the streets of east Baltimore surrounded by poverty and gun violence, two kids named Antonio became fast friends. Both called “Tone,” they were similarly ambitious, dreaming of the day they would finally leave behind the struggles that defined their childhoods.
Hours before leaving port, the massive container ship that collapsed a Baltimore bridge experienced apparent electrical problems, a person with knowledge of the situation told AP on Monday, the same day FBI agents boarded the vessel amid a criminal investigation.
Generations of Maryland workers — longshoremen, seafarers, steelworkers and crabbers whose livelihoods depend on Baltimore’s port — watched in disbelief this week as an iconic symbol of their maritime culture crumbled into the Patapsco River.
As Charles Richardson gradually lost his eyesight to complications from diabetes, certain childhood memories haunted him even more. The Catholic priest appeared vividly in his mind's eye — the one, Richardson alleges, who sexually assaulted him for more than a year.
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) — Pedro Argote was conspicuously absent last Thursday when a Maryland judge granted his wife a divorce and sole custody of their four children, citing "shocking" testimony about the abuse that Argote allegedly inflicted upon them for years.
BALTIMORE (AP) — Anthony Kelly trudged through southwest Baltimore, each labored footstep a reminder of the roofing accident that left him with chronic pain and a raging opioid addiction several years after he returned home from serving in the Marines.
On May 31, 2001, in war-torn West Africa, Francess Camara gave birth to a boy while rebel soldiers paraded through the streets of Sierra Leone and gunfire echoed overhead. She named the child Joshua. A few years later, the family was granted political asylum in America.
In a Baltimore courtroom one July afternoon, attorneys scrambled to make sense of the overlapping cases that brought Javarick Gantt to court. Gantt, a deaf man who relied on sign language, had missed earlier hearings and failed to check in with his probation officer.
For the past two decades, Young Lee thought justice had been served when his sister's killer was taken off the streets. He believed Baltimore prosecutors when they repeatedly expressed confidence in the case against Adnan Syed. That changed last week.
Raynold Smith was beefing with another man for months and when they crossed paths in March 2021, both were armed. The reason Smith didn't pull the trigger? In a split-second moment, when life and death hung in the balance, he glimpsed a child's car seat.
Timothy Reynolds grew up playing baseball in Carroll Park, later earned a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University, launched an engineering career and fathered three children. An avid Orioles and Ravens fan, he lived in Hampden with his wife and daughter.
Kelli was visiting her oldest son in the hospital, relieved to see him tucked into bed with doctors and nurses nearby. But she cringed whenever Michael asked for more morphine, more fentanyl, anything to numb the pain — and feed the addiction that landed him here, fighting for his life.
SHREVEPORT — The night before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, Tiffany Woods and Emmanuel Scott fled the city, driving 320 miles northwest with their four small children. The youngest was two months old: Little Emmanuel.
Three weeks before he shot his estranged wife to death inside her St. Francisville home and then turned the gun on himself, Marshall Rayburn violated a restraining order five times in one afternoon while surveying the future crime scene. His ankle monitor recorded all the violations.
BASTROP — For Ronald Greene, this sleepy town north of Monroe offered new beginnings and familiar pitfalls. Greene was 12 when his family first moved to Bastrop in the early 1980s. The next few decades brought tumultuous ups and downs during his teen years and into adulthood.
When Baton Rouge police officer Antonio Williams was dispatched to a domestic violence call last month, he arrived on scene first, knocked on the apartment door and stepped back. Moments later, a woman came running out with blood spurting from stab wounds in her neck.
When Joe Buttross was selected to fill an assistant warden position at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel a couple years ago, he had no experience working in prisons. But he did have close connections to the Louisiana Department of Corrections secretary.
Shameka Murray started worrying about her son almost immediately after Baker High School went virtual and suspended sports amid the pandemic last year. With less structure and more free time, Dwayne Dunn Jr. started hanging around older kids and sometimes missing his midnight curfew.
In the months leading up to a corruption probe into the Baton Rouge Police Department narcotics division, seven of its detectives later accused of wrongdoing were clocking on average over 60 hours a week. Some more than doubled their base salaries at the expense of local taxpayers.
When a friend texted Christopher Gregoire asking for some weed, he agreed to smoke with her and arrived at her Baton Rouge hotel room about 20 minutes later. He knocked on the door, but instead of his friend welcoming him inside, Gregoire found himself confronted with undercover detectives.
After a Baton Rouge police officer was accused of purchasing stolen electronics several weeks ago, he sat down and drafted a memo alleging widespread corruption and rampant misconduct throughout the narcotics division, including among his superiors.
2020 was a year of monumental losses. While the coronavirus death toll climbed steadily, the East Baton Rouge Parish homicide rate rose to an unprecedented level, making 2020 the most murderous year in known history. Other communities are seeing similar trends.
When police questioned Carolyn Moore about two insurance salesmen killed during an armed robbery, she confessed without hesitation, confident the officers would understand her predicament. She described her unwilling participation in the crime.
The neighbors share similar stories: LSU students drunkenly urinating outside their windows, making out on their patio furniture, stealing street signs and destroying Halloween decorations. Many residents of Baton Rouge's Lake Villas subdivision have had enough.
After a female prison guard at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel accused an inmate of raping her at knifepoint last summer, detectives reviewed surveillance video that supported her account and the St. Gabriel police chief said she "clearly was raped."
When Michael Conish left the hospital Wednesday morning, he had good reason to be hopeful. He envisioned a future in which his pregnant fiance would once again start breathing on her own and return home to regain her strength with their beautiful daughter still growing inside her.
In one massive room filled with rows of metal bunk beds about an arm's length apart, 70 women share three toilets and four sinks. There's no such thing as social distancing inside the female prison dorms that have become inundated with coronavirus cases.
Brandon Hayes had come unmoored again. For weeks, he wandered around Baton Rouge during a mental health crisis, spray-painting nonsensical messages along the way before finally checking himself into the hospital for treatment. His mother breathed a sigh of relief.
Hayward Jones stands before his students and writes two words on the chalkboard: self development. "This is what we do," he tells the roomful of men. "Build, grow, mature, change, improve — transition. Yes, we're moving from one mindset to another. We're here for change."
Sawyer Reed was an LSU senior — an enthusiastic member of Sigma Chi with impressive grades and law school aspirations — when he overdosed on heroin at his apartment just off campus and died in October 2015. An announcement two months later said Sigma Chi's LSU chapter would close.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Murphy Paul apologized Thursday to communities of color in Louisiana's capital city for his department's contributions to the climate of mistrust between residents and police that reached a boiling point in the aftermath of a controversial 2016 officer shooting.
It was late one morning in December 1982 when a Baton Rouge housewife saw someone approaching her home in the city's Hundred Oaks neighborhood. She opened the door a crack, unsure if it was a carpenter or plumber returning from their lunch break.
First it was a plaster cast extending from shoulder to wrist. Now it's a removable plastic brace and compression sleeve. First there was no movement. Now Lt. Bruce Simmons has a habit of opening and closing the fingers on his left hand — for no particular reason, just because he can.
Denise Lee never wanted this job. But over the past several months, she has spent hundreds of hours combing through social media, interrogating her own family members and pleading with potential witnesses — hoping her words will resonate enough.
After several years in the manufacturing sector, Heidi Snide dreamed of becoming a teacher. She took out student loans and earned additional degrees, then dived into her second career: teaching science in the Reading School District. Her classroom became a sanctuary.
Ed Walter used to sit on his front porch and watch deer wander out of the woods surrounding his yard. Now he spends more time inside and tries not to listen as backhoes and wood chippers cut a swath 75 feet across through roughly two acres of forest on his South Heidelberg Township property.
Like generations of Randolph residents before him, Rabern Vawter uses his legal name only for legal purposes. For everything else, he goes by "Possie." The fact that many people don’t even know his real name is a sign he was born and raised in old Randolph.
In 2008, Fort Riley received some unexpected good news. After years of lobbying to replace the Army’s oldest hospital, Congress slipped money for a new facility into a bill that financed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, funding was in place to bring Fort Riley a new hospital.