Quadruple Shooting Kills 2 in Odenton Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, November 16, 2008:

Two men were killed during a quadruple shooting in the parking lot of an Odenton shopping center early this morning, according to Anne Arundel County police.

Police responded to the North Odenton Plaza, in the 1600 block of Annapolis road, about 1:30 a.m. to find the two men dead, apparently of gun shot wounds.

Odenton is a strange sort of suburb in a lot of ways. It stretches NW-SE along Annapolis Road at almost the exact midpoint between downtown Baltimore and downtown DC. The MARC trains passing through and stopping at Odenton reach Baltimore and Washington in almost exactly 30 minutes in each case.

In and near Odenton lies an amazing mix of housing stock, from upper-income ego palaces to blue-collar off-base housing for adjacent Ft. Meade to section 8 nastiness in Pioneer City. My ex and I lived at the very edge of Pioneer City for about a year when I had a law practice in Upper Marlboro and she worked north of Baltimore City. It was not as bad where we were as its reputation but the police presence was pretty thick, and the local pizza parlors would NOT deliver to us even though they would deliver to points further away.

The shopping center at 1600 Annapolis Road is not one that I remember very well. I think I recall an Asian restaurant, maybe Chinese, one with a liquor license. But that's all I remember.

I do not ordinarily post about local crime reports, but this area is scheduled for massive BRAC development over the next 10 years. It would be great if BRAC could result in the clean-up of this area's crime problem, ideally through increased attention to the area as a population center, rather than as a distant "no-man's land" 15 miles from Anne Arundel's county seat.

Odenton and the surrounding communities have a lot of history, and some measure of local pride, but the political dynamics of the area are a little weird. NSA is next door, so there are a lot of people who "work with computers" or "work near the airport" but won't say where they get their paychecks. The military presence puts an element of transience or of focus outside of local dynamics. Odenton is a long-distance call from Baltimore and Washington both; while in the age of cell phones this probably matters less, it's indicative of the ambiguous identity of the region. There are multiple county borders quite nearby, especially if one counts nearby Laurel that sits essentially in four different counties.

In short, it's harder for this area to produce political influence than some others; the political geography and demographics make political power harder to organize and focus.

UPDATE: many thanks to sharp-eyed reader RCH again for his editorial acumen.