•   These two articles appeared in The Eagle’s March 23, 2000, issue.

All 3 hostages are safe after four-day ordeal

by Jarrett Graver

After four days of tense negotiations between hostage negotiators and accused killer Joseph C. Palczynski, the end came quickly late Tuesday in a cramped apartment on Lange Street.
   

Shortly after 10:20 p.m., one of Palczynski’s three hostages, Lynn Whitehead, the mother of his ex-girlfriend, slipped out the window of the first-floor rowhome, followed a short time later by her boyfriend, Andy McCord, according to Bill Toohey, spokesman for the Baltimore County Police Department.
    A third hostage, 12-year-old Bradley McCord remained inside. Tactical officers from Baltimore and Howard counties wasted little time, forcing open the front door with a nonexplosive charge and breaking out the front windows to gain access to the apartment. Police shot and killed Palczynski, who reportedly had been asleep on a couch with a gun in his lap, as he sat up after being startled by the commotion, Toohey said.
    The young McCord was then escorted from the apartment by police. No hostages or police officers were injured during the siege, which lasted more than 97 hours. The next morning, residents returned to their freed neighborhood with a mixture of relief and anger.
    “This probably could have been stopped long before anything happened,” said Elton Avenue resident John Cofiell, who stayed with a friend in Colgate while his street was under lockdown. Cofiell was one  of many residents who heard rumors of Palczynski sightings in the Berkshire area in the week leading up to the standoff.  Palczynski had been holding Whitehead and the two McCords inside the apartment since Friday night, intermittently speaking with police negotiators over the phone and firing shots outside a window, several at armored personnel carriers that attempted to hail him via bullhorn.
    Toohey had stated that one of the hostages may have been injured from a single shot fired Monday afternoon inside the first-floor apartment. Wednesday morning, Toohey said police believe the shot was a ruse, and that no one had been injured.
    About 30 people were removed from behind the police barricade, most during 16 trips made Sunday night and Monday morning using the armored vehicles, Toohey said. It was unknown how many residents remained in their homes until the end.
    During the ordeal, police revealed precious little about the nature of the negotiations with Palczynski, but they did admit Monday that the Lange Street rowhouse was one of 20 places they thought he might end up.
    Toohey said police offered to post officers both inside and outside the residence, but that Whitehead and McCord declined.
    “At that point we decided to do what we call ‘selective enforcement,’ or frequent marked patrols,” Toohey said Monday. “We don’t have exact figures, but they would go by at least three times during an eight-hour shift.”
    Authorities said Palczynski was armed with at least two rifles and two handguns, along with an indeterminate amount of ammunition.    
    Palczynski had been on the run since March 7, after reportedly kidnapping his ex-girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, from a friend’s apartment in Bowleys Quarters, allegedly shooting and killing George Shenk,  49, Gloria Jean Shenk, 50, and David Meyers, 42, in the process.
    Whitehead escaped from Palczynski on March 8 at the El-Rich Motel on Pulaski Highway and was in protective custody at an undisclosed location as the Berkshire incident unfolded.
    The next night, Palczynski allegedly shot and killed 37-year-old Jennifer L. McDonel and critically injured 2-year-old Gregory Sims while attempting to carjack a passing vehicle.
    After eluding a massive police manhunt for 10 days and reportedly kidnapping a Virginia man and forcing him to buy supplies, police believe Palczynski stole three weapons from a house  in Middle River and shot his way into the McCord residence Friday around 9:30 p.m.
    Lange Street resident Sandra McGainey, who lives directly across from the hostage apartment, said her car was riddled with bullets during one of Palczynski’s bursts of gunfire Friday night.
    “I was outside smoking a cigarette when all the sudden shots rang out,” McGainey, still visibly shaken, said Monday outside the makeshift shelter operated by police and the American Red Cross at Berkshire Elementary School. “I ran back inside and called 911. I heard [the police] coming through the basement door. They wouldn’t identify themselves and told me I had 10 minutes to get out.
    “My dog ran out the door and they tossed all my furniture around. I left with no food, no clothes, no shoes, nothing. If it wasn’t for the Red Cross, I don’t know what I would have done.”
    McGainey said she has oxygen tanks stored in her house for her disabled mother.
    “If a bullet hits one of those, it could blow up the whole house,” McGainey said.
    McGainey’s neighbor, Joe H. Byrd, was there to offer a calming hug outside the school.
    Byrd had not seen his wife, Nanny, or son, Gaylord, since Friday night when he stepped outside his home to talk to police.
    “They wouldn’t let me go back inside,” said Byrd, who spoke to his wife and son on the phone and expressed frustation at the police’s methodical, wait-and-see approach to the hostage standoff, a tack that continued until the two adult hostages forced a resolution. “They’re not doing a damn thing. They ought to shoot tear gas in there and knock him on his butt, or let me up on the roof with my rifle.”
    Berkshire Road resident Kelly Rye was reunited with her husband and two young children early Monday after being separated for over two days.
    “I went out grocery shopping Friday night and couldn’t get back in [to the neighborhood],” Rye said. “I feel really bad for the hostages, but this has gone on long enough. Our entire neighborhood is a prisoner of his.”
    Eastwood resident Steve Kurica, milling around the parking lot reserved for media representatives at the Eastpoint Office Park on Monday afternoon, said he was staying in regular phone contact with his 86-year-old mother, Catherine, who was stuck in her home in the 7000 block of Berkshire Road.
    “I’m concerned about her medication,” Kurica said. “She has about enough to last through the week. All in all, she’s doing pretty well and wants to stay put.
    “Let’s be realistic. People are not going to tolerate this much longer,” Kurica said, echoing what was a popular sentiment at the time. “A lot of people in that neighborhood have guns. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got together and decided to go get him themselves.”
    Signs of community strain were evident earlier this week. A woman dangled a homemade sign saying “Give us back our families” from a truck, and reports trickled in of family members hurling bags of medicine and supplies to trapped loved ones.
    Jerry Potter was reached at his home in the 7300 block of Berkshire Road on Monday afternoon.
    “I’ve been doing some odds and ends around the house,” said Potter, whose wife was stuck with her elderly mother in a house in the 7400 block of Berkshire. “We talk by phone every day. I’ve just been trying to keep busy and stay away from the windows.
    “I feel pretty safe here, and, besides, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
    “I work for some pretty understanding people,” said Potter, a plumber for Catons’ Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning. “I called them and they told me to keep my head down.”
    Although he seemed to be in a good frame of mind as the hostage situation neared its end, Potter was somewhat critical of police strategy.
    “I wonder if maybe there’s a better way to handle the situation,” Potter said. “I heard on the news they sent him French toast for breakfast, and I can’t see doing that, letting him run the show.”
    Tuesday was a relatively sedate day until Whitehead and McCord made their play, and police spent a significant amount of time tracking down pets that had been reluctantly abandoned as residents beat a hasty retreat over the weekend.
    Toohey said police recovered four dogs, three birds and a cat from various homes.
    “I think it was carried out far too long,” said Dundalk Avenue resident Leonard Lugenbeel Jr. on Wednesday morning. Lugenbeel, whose brother-in-law lives on Elton Avenue, added that he was upset police shot and killed Palczynski: “Now there will be a lot of unanswered questions. You can’t get answers from someone who is dead.”
•    Reporter Christina Radice contributed to this story.

School site of refuge, frustration

by Wayne Laufert and Christina Radice

The first big question at Berkshire Elementary School during the barricade on Lange Street was, “Why didn’t police protect the house any better?”
    In the early stages of the sensitive hostage negotiations with Joseph C. Palczynski, Baltimore County police were not answering.
    But on Monday, police spokesman Bill Toohey said the Whitehead family turned down an offer to station officers inside and outside the residence after family members who had been hiding out in Essex notified police they would be returning to their home.  Police did, however, patrol the area, Toohey said.
    Berkshire residents stranded in the school cafeteria said they had a feeling something would happen in their neighborhood.
    “I wasn’t surprised” the suspected murderer showed up at the home of his ex-girlfriend’s mother and took three hostages, Dalton Avenue resident Joni Pistorio said Friday.  “He was coming here eventually.”
    “I knew [Palczynski would come here],” Berkshire Road resident Reneé Bures said Monday morning. She wished security in the neighborhood were tighter.
    Police presence had been felt in the community for at least a week. Berkshire Elementary — where the son of Tracy Whitehead, the estranged girlfriend who had escaped from Palczynski the previous week after being kidnapped, goes to school — had been in lockdown for a couple days, like all schools in the county’s Southeast Area.
    Patrol cars were a familiar sight in the neighborhood. That, at least, had provided some comfort — but it also heightened fears about safety.
    “The police have been here heavily the past seven or eight days,” Dottie Cook of Berkshire Road said Friday. “Every night, you heard the helicopters. ... I guess it really paid off.”
    Police moved quickly to surround the house and secure a four-block area Friday night, fearing the firing range of the weapons with which Palczynski was armed — two high-powered rifles and two handguns.
    But that meant that anyone who lived in the secured area and happened to be out when the siege began could not return home. Instead, they were directed to the elementary school. By midnight Friday, 21 Berkshire residents had signed a sheet in the school lobby.
    More arrived later.  Most of them gathered in the cafeteria, watching WBAL news updates on a TV set with bad reception. They went on a donut run, and coffee was available in the principal's office, now occupied by county police Capt. Roger Sheets.
They were fairly comfortable, but were beginning to feel like hostages themselves.
    That prompted the second big question: When can we leave?
    The barricade affected at least one non-Berkshire resident.  A Charlesmont woman waited in the school while her 4-year-old daughter was with a babysitter in a house on the same block as Palczynski.  The woman, who
declined to give her name, was unable to reach the house by telephone because the power had been turned off, she said.
    Throughout the weekend, people from outside the secured area came to pick up relatives and friends. Workers and volunteers from the American Red Cross showed up, bringing food and about 30 cots and blankets.
    An Eagle reporter and a free-lance photographer, temporarily stranded, got
inside Friday night before signs reading “No media beyond this point” was posted on the school doors. Still, TV and radio reporters showed up on the parking lot, and some of the Berkshire residents went outside to catch their moment of fame.  Through small vertical windows in the front doors, TV cameras peered into the lobby. 
    Pistorio was reunited with an old high school classmate, reporter Jamie Costello from WMAR-TV. Then, Pistorio and her son, Robert, caught a break: Shortly before 2 a.m., Capt. Sheets arranged for them to leave with a police escort through the back of the school, close to their house. Robert, who occupied himself by shooting basketballs in the gym, had a mandatory appearance to make at the North Point police station at 8 a.m. for the Law Enforcement Explorer program.
    The Red Cross arranged to provide medication for people whose prescriptions were at home and bought additional clothing for residents.  Saturday, breakfast came from McDonald’s and lunch from Papa John’s Pizza, according to Red Cross spokeswoman Linnea Anderson.  Mental health workers from the Red Cross talked some of the residents through the increasingly frustrating ordeal.
    “These people have been dealing with an amazing amount of stress,” Anderson said.
    Assistance provided by the Red Cross was “fantastic,” said Rich Merritt.
“They went and got me my prescription antibiotics for my thumb.”
    Merritt had arrived at the school shortly after 2 a.m. There had been talk of the barricade at the bar in Scoozzi’s on German Hill Road, and Merritt had discovered he would be unable to be with his wife and son on Elton Avenue. At least he had his next-door neighbor, Jim Boyd, who showed up after work around 5 a.m., to keep him company.
    Monday morning, Bures was relieved to be reunited with her 7-year-old son, Tyler, and 4-year-old daughter, Madelyn, who she hadn’t seen since Friday night when she wasn’t able to get to her house after returning from  the grocery store.
    “Things were getting pretty desperate for us mothers,” Bures said.
    At her request, police escorted the children out of their Berkshire Road home, where they had been barricaded along with their father, who stayed behind to care for the family’s pets.
    Bures said her husband has described to her the disturbing sight of armored police carrying shields. “That’s stuff you see on TV. You don’t see that out your front door,”  she said.
    Early this week, almost 80 people were seeking shelter at the elementary school, according to Anderson.
    The crisis put a strain not only on families, but also nearby businesses.
    Margo Road resident Bernard Feehley, a partner in Dundalk Bookkeeping and Tax Service in the Eastpoint Office Park — across from the police command post at Eastview Fire Station — said clients have been canceling their appointments.
    The firm is concerned, he said, because tax season is its busiest time.  “This is our bread and butter,” Feehley said.