Nobody admits fault and a suspect goes free

The State of Maryland v. Walter Grant commenced on time and on schedule at 8:30 a.m. Oct. 28 in Room 3 of the District Courthouse on East North Avenue. Grant faced charges of taking a blue Honda Civic with keys stolen during a burglary of a home in Carney in August.

The judge was there. The prosecutor was there. The defense attorney was there. Walter Grant was there. Honda owner Matthew Crouch was there.

The only person not there was Officer Ronald J. Wilson Jr., a member of an auto theft task force who had found the missing car in September and had arrested Grant in East Baltimore.

No officer, no case.

Prosecutors dropped the unauthorized-use charge against the 61-year-old suspect, a three-time convicted drug felon, and sent him home, leaving Crouch and his wife feeling scared and betrayed.

Marianne Crouch has worked for the city for 30 years, most recently as a fiscal supervisor in the wastewater division of the Department of Public Works, and now, she wrote me in an e-mail, she and her husband "no longer feel safe in the metropolitan Baltimore area since we know that we cannot rely on the officers who are paid to protect us."

But this one wasn't Officer Wilson's fault.

A series of blunders, bureaucratic tunnel vision and lack of common sense conspired to keep Wilson far from the witness stand. At 8:30 a.m., as the trial commenced, he was in his eighth-floor office on East Joppa Road at the Towson police headquarters where his unit is based, ready and available but unaware that he was needed to testify.

Putting a court summons in the hands of a police officer would seem like an easy task. Yet after years of top-level meetings to streamline and update an antiquated system, considering everything from e-mail notifications to automated phone calls, hundreds of officers in Baltimore each month miss court dates, forcing prosecutors to drop hundreds of cases.

To explain how Wilson missed his court date (and I warn you, the explanation will be excruciating) we have to begin at the beginning, the night of Aug. 18, when the Crouches went to bed and left a door to their home unlocked. Someone broke in, took Marianne Crouch's purse and used her keys to steal their Honda Civic.

At 4:33 p.m. Sept. 22, Wilson checked the plate number of a blue Honda Civic parked with its motor running in front of a house on East Federal Street. It had been reported stolen, and the officer arrested the man in the driver's seat, Walter Grant.

Wilson filled out a charging document. On that form, the Baltimore officer listed the correct address and number of his unit, the Regional Auto Theft Task Force in Towson.

On the bottom of that form, it reads, in bold, "I have been informed that the trial date is 10/28/2009 at 8:30 a.m. in Room 3, at 1400 E. North Avenue."

Wilson also filled out a "Request for Witness Summons" form in which he again listed his unit's location and phone number on East Joppa Road, as well as the Crouches' home address and phone number. That paperwork went to the District Court clerk's office and into a file.

But Lonnie Ferguson, administrative clerk of Baltimore District Court, told me that officials there don't use the Request for Witness Summons form; instead, they rely on officers' "sequence numbers" and ID numbers. A city police spokesman typed in the one listed on Wilson's paperwork and it came back "VCID District, eastern statewide."

For city purposes, the auto theft team, made up of police from various agencies, falls under Baltimore's Violent Crime Impact Division, which helps keep city records straight on paper but has nothing to do with where Wilson actually works. But because a clerk used the ID number, Wilson's summons was sent to the city's Eastern District station on Edison Highway.

What happened to it there is anyone's guess, but police tell me it never reached Wilson at the Baltimore County police station in Towson.

It's perplexing why clerks searching for an officer use a badge number instead of the form the officer had filled out with his location and phone number.

Ferguson said that's just the way it's done, and if there's something wrong with it, "that's something for the police to work out, not us. If they want it to go to another address, they need to write down another code."

The trouble is, those sequence and ID numbers are akin to a police officer's Social Security number; they don't change when jobs change.