The National Safety and Transportation Board on Wednesday released its preliminary report on the explosion of the home at 2300 Arthurs Woods Drive in Bel Air that killed the homeowner, Ray Corkran, 73, and a BGE contractor, Jose Rodriguez-Alvarado, 35.

It noted that gas and electrical lines were in close proximity in a common trench, similar to what led state regulators to penalize BGE with fines of more than $437,000 for safety violations that caused a 2019 explosion in a Columbia office park.

The NTSB’s initial report on the Bel Air explosion said BGE investigators recovered damaged electrical lines and a gas service line with a hole on the bottom, and detected underground gas in the area of the destroyed home.

The damage to the electrical cables, and especially the hole in the gas line, are key, said a former federal explosions investigator who reviewed the preliminary report at The Sun’s request.

“The hole in the line is significant because the root cause of any natural gas explosion is the gas being where it doesn’t belong,” said Richard Summerfield, a retired agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who now works as a consultant. “Now that they’ve identified how the gas got out of the system, the investigation is going to center on what caused that hole.”

After the NTSB released its preliminary report Wednesday into the Bel Air house explosion, Baltimore Gas and Electric announced steps to enhance system safety and reliability.

The utility company said it had recently implemented “refresher trainings” on gas and electric emergency processes, reinforced procedures on “responding to issues” and “increased oversight of emergency customer calls to the company.”

The Maryland State Fire Marshal’s Office previously told The Sun that BGE usually calls local fire departments when it receives reports of gas odors, but did not do so in this case.

The NTSB report said investigators examined the blast site, reviewed BGE’s operational procedures, gathered documentation, conducted interviews and recovered physical evidence for examination.

The report stated that the night before the explosion, the home experienced an electrical outage.

According to the report, the outage prompted a BGE electrical service technician to respond to the scene. That evening, two reports of the odor of gas were made. The first was by the technician who made the report to BGE’s electrical dispatch operator and the second was from a neighbor 0.2 miles away from the home.

According to the report, BGE responded to the neighbor’s report and did not find a leak. The Sun previously reported that a neighbor, Carline Fisher, had called BGE and spoke to a worker who responded.

The following morning, two BGE electrical contractors were working on the electrical repair when the explosion occurred — resulting in the death of one of the contractors, Rodriguez-Alvarado. The second contractor suffered minor injuries, according to the report.

The report stated that in an interview with NTSB investigators, another worker said that he smelled gas in front of the home about 6:05 a.m., just before the explosion.

NTSB said the natural gas distribution system near the home — consisting of a 1 and 1/4-inch diameter plastic main — was installed in 2006. Another service line was a 1/2-inch diameter plastic service line, installed in 2007.

According to the report, the operating pressure of the gas system at the time of the explosion was about 89 pounds per square inch gauge — below the 99 per square inch gauge maximum allowable operating pressure.

The report did not state the cause of the gas leak or the ignition source. NTSB said their investigation is still ongoing.

“It might be heat stroke. He’s a football player,” a coach told 911, according to a recording obtained by The Progress-Index in Petersburg, Virginia. “We’ve been putting water on him. … We got ice we’re trying to put on him.”

Jayvion Taylor was taken to a hospital where he later died, the first in what would prove to be a deadly month for young football players.

In the next three weeks, at least five other high school and middle school football players would die in practices or games, according to news accounts. Among them was Leslie Noble IV, 16, the Franklin High School lineman who similarly collapsed at practice Aug. 14 and was remembered at funeral services Wednesday in Randallstown as a gentle, joyous giant.

The Maryland Medical Examiner has not yet released a cause of the teenager’s death, although dispatchers that day referred to heatstroke. Of the six athletes’ deaths found in news reports, two resulted from head injuries from tackles on the same day: Caden Tellier, 16, in Selma, Alabama, and Cohen Craddock, 13, in Madison, West Virginia.

In addition to Noble and Taylor, news accounts referred to the possibility of heat in the deaths of Semaj Wilkins, 14, of New Brockton High School in Alabama, and Ovet Gomez Regalado, 15, of Northwest High School in Shawnee Mission, Kansas.

The deaths have alarmed and saddened many who approach August with both anticipation for the coming football season and fear of the dangers that poses. Already by its high-contact nature a potentially dangerous sport, the record-breaking heat of recent years has heightened the risk for its players.

“You go through summer with your fingers crossed and hope you don’t see any heat-related injuries,” said Marty McNair, who has become an advocate for player safety in the six years since his son Jordan died of heatstroke suffered during a University of Maryland Terrapins practice. “It’s been horrific as far as student athlete deaths.”

While it’s difficult to discern trends in young athletes’ deaths because the total numbers remain thankfully low, experts say, July and August tend to present the most danger to football players.

“We don’t want to see any,” said Kristen Kucera, who directs the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Any amount of deaths in August we’re concerned about.”

The center’s data show two of the three high school football deaths reported last academic year occurred in July or August. For the two prior academic years, ending in June 2022 and June 2023, 6 of 11 and 3 of 7, respectively, occurred during those summer months.

“Everyone is increasingly concerned about heat across the board and not just in sports,” Kucera said.

And indeed, in Baltimore, a Department of Public Works employee, Ron Silver II, died of hyperthermia Aug. 2, prompting the city to pause trash and recycling collections Wednesday after temperatures climbed to 99 degrees.

With the last 10 years the warmest in nearly 175 years of recorded history, there is heightened urgency to finding a way to protect those who work or play in the heat of the summer.

One leading heat researcher predicts football will have to abandon its traditional role as a fall sport.

“In 20 years, high school [football] is going to be a spring sport,” said Douglas Casa, the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut. “It’s going to happen. Climate change is happening so much faster than we thought it would.”

The institute, which researches and seeks to prevent heat-related deaths in sports, labor and the military, is named after the Minnesota Vikings linebacker who died after suffering heatstroke at training camp in 2001.

Football’s current calendar puts the most vulnerable kind of athlete in the most rigorous kind of training at the riskiest time of year, Casa said.

“You take 300-pound kids in the hottest time of year and you put all this gear on them,” he said. “Big people heat up faster, and they cool down slower.”

Casa has helped multiple sports organizations, from the National Association of Athletic Trainers to the International Olympics Committee, develop guidelines for keeping athletes safe while practicing or competing in the heat.

In 2009, he co-wrote a consensus statement in the Journal of Athletic Training that outlines preseason heat acclimatization for secondary school athletics, which the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association recommends in its safety guidelines.

The first two days of football practice should only include helmets, per the recommendation. Shoulder pads are added for days 3-5, while introducing contact with blocking sleds and tackling dummies. Full contact should begin no earlier than day 6. Two-a-days shouldn’t be stacked back-to-back without a rest day in between. And the two practices are recommended to be separated by at least three hours in a cool environment.

Easing into the season is important given how quickly athletes can become dehydrated in the heat, both through sweating and breathing heavily in exertion, said Dr. Sunal Makadia, director of sports cardiology for LifeBridge Health, which operates Sinai Hospital in Baltimore and other facilities.

“This time of year, a lot of these players might either be new to the sport, or de-conditioned over the course of the summer, and they’re going in full-speed,” he said.

Makadia said the heat can be dangerous for everyone, from otherwise healthy kids to highly trained athletes to those who may have underlying heart conditions that previously were undiagnosed but emerge on the practice or playing field.

As a parent and a recreation league coach himself, Makadia recommends kids be screened by physicians before participating in a sport. That way, a doctor can review any symptoms, medications or family medical history that could contribute to potential problems, he said.

Spurred by tragic deaths, Maryland legislators have passed two laws in the last three years to improve safety for young athletes.

The Jordan McNair Safe and Fair Play Act passed in 2021 after the Randallstown native, whose death exposed a bullying culture on the Terps team and led to the firing of the football coach and the resignation of the chairman of the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents. The law addresses, in part, guidelines for preventing and treating brain injuries and heat-related illnesses in higher education.

McNair’s death also inspired the introduction of a bill in Congress, which has not passed, requiring colleges and universities to create emergency heat plans.

Reform at the middle and high school level also came in 2022, a year after a 17-year-old Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School football player died after suffering a brain injury when he was tackled in the end zone of a fall 2021 game. The Elijah Gorham Act mandates that middle and high schools develop emergency action plans, including having defibrillators and cooling equipment available.

Casa said he was heartened that it’s increasingly common for schools to have automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, and immersion tubs that can begin life-saving measures on the field before paramedics arrive.

No one should die from heat stroke, said Casa, who himself survived an episode as a 16-year-old running a 10K race. You simply have to cool a player down within the “golden half-hour” after symptoms emerge, he said, which is why more than 80% of high schools now have immersion tubs.

“It’s 100% survivable,” Casa said. “You have a tub of ice and water and your kid lives.”

Parents should ask if schools have a plan and the equipment to handle a player’s crisis, as well as an athletic trainer on site.

After hearing of Noble’s death, Maryland Sen. Shelly Hettleman, who helped pass both the McNair and Gorham legislation, did her due diligence to make sure Franklin High had the recommended safety measures in place.

“There was a trainer there. There was an AED nearby. It sounds like people responded as they should have,” the Baltimore County Democrat said. “Sometimes things like this are gonna happen, tragically, even when you have the best of policies in place, which I think happened here.”

Now, Hettleman is wondering: Can further preventative measures be taken? What kind of physicals are these young athletes undergoing before taking the field? And why is it happening in football more than other sports?

“I think it behooves us to look at that too,” Hettleman said. “I’m not hearing about field hockey players dropping dead on their fields, right? Or cross country runners?”

In the 2021-22 academic year, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, there were 65 catastrophic sports injuries to high school or college athletes representing 10 sports, 36.9% being fatal. Of the 65, 52.3% were football players and 53.9% were cardiac or heat related.

Noble’s death brings the issue home again, much as did that of McNair, whose family lived in Hettleman’s district.

“This is a local tragedy,” Hettleman said, “but it’s within a context of larger issues that are happening to our younger athletes all over the country.”

“You should be responsible for your children,” she said.

Her 16-year-old daughter Jaelynn was killed in 2018 in a Southern Maryland high school by a former boyfriend, 17, using his father’s gun. Willey helped pass Jaelynn’s Law last year, which penalizes gun owners who fail to secure firearms that then fall into the hands of minors.

Such measures are among efforts across the country to hold parents accountable for their children’s wrongdoing. Among those who support such efforts is Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, who has said he is “deeply committed” to making sure “parents must be parents and not accomplices to criminal activity.”

Last week, the father of a 15-year-old involved in a shooting outside Carver Vo-Tech High School in Baltimore pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, along with gun and assault charges for his role in the incident. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with all but five years suspended, a term he will be required to serve without parole.

The case is something of an outlier in that the man, William Dredden, 41, actively participated in the crime, assaulting a student alongside his 15-year-old son, who fired a weapon and was himself shot, according to prosecutors, along with two other young people.

More commonly, parents and other adults have been charged for failing to secure weapons in the home or not recognizing warning signs of impending trouble.

In September, a woman whose 9-year-old grandson used her gun in a fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl was sentenced to four years in prison for reckless endangerment and firearm access by a minor.

In April, the father and mother of a teenager who killed four students at a Michigan high school were sentenced to at least 10 years each for involuntary manslaughter, the first time parents had been convicted in connection to a mass shooting by their child.

About a month earlier, a grand jury indicted the former assistant principal of a Newport News elementary school on charges of child abuse and disregard for life in connection with a 6-year-old student’s shooting of his teacher.

“It’s not necessarily just parents,” said Tim Carey, a law and policy adviser to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “With school shootings becoming more prevalent, we’re continuing to reevaluate where we are as far as who we hold accountable. We’re still breaking new ground here.”

While convictions such as those of Dredden and the Michigan parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, draw headlines, Carey said he does not see a groundswell of cases of parents and other adults being held responsible in shootings committed by minors. Just last week, he noted, a Texas jury found a couple not liable for their teenager killing 10 people in a high school shooting.

More commonly, efforts at parental accountability take the form of laws known as child-access prevention or CAP laws, such as the Maryland measure named after Jaelynn Willey.

“We have great evidence that these laws have measurable effects of reducing shootings and suicides,” Carey said.

According to a recent RAND report, as of the start of the year 35 states and the District of Columbia have CAP laws. The report said its review of scientific research on the subject found such laws were associated with reductions in suicide, violent crime, and unintentional injuries and deaths.

An estimated 30 million children live in homes with firearms, according to RAND. Estimates vary, but a high percentage of school shooters obtained their weapon from a parent or a friend’s home.

The rash of school shootings — there have been more than 400 since the Columbine massacre in 1999, according to The Washington Post — has provided much of the impetus behind parent accountability measures, some say.

“In particularly egregious cases, people want to know, ‘What else can we do?’” said Karen Herren, executive director of Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence, which advocated for Jaelynn’s Law.

The law expands on a previous prohibition against leaving a firearm where a child younger than 16 can access it. The new law increases that age to 18, and could lead to a gun owner losing the right to own a firearm.

State Sen. Jill P. Carter said efforts to hold parents accountable have the potential of going too far, and reflect a tendency to rely solely on the criminal justice system to address societal problems.

“There are alternatives to criminalization and incarceration,” said Carter, a Baltimore Democrat who represents the 41st District.

“Parents who are struggling with difficult children are already burdened,” she said. “We ought to be helping them.”

Carter said there needs to be more education and support to help both parents and children with dispute resolution and anger management. She noted that she is not talking about cases like the shooting outside Carver Vo-Tech, where the parent was clearly involved in the crime itself.

“We have a problem in society with the proliferation of guns,” she said. “We need to accept the guns are here, they are in the streets, and there are people who live in a society, in a culture where they do not feel safe without a gun.”

Herren agreed that there needs to be guardrails.

“That’s why it’s important to have bright-line rules” like Jaelynn’s Law, she said.

Cases such as the Carver Vo-Tech incident and the Crumbley shooting stand out because of their “extreme” nature, Carey said.

In the latter, the parents had been called to the school the morning of the shooting, after their son, Ethan, then 15, had written and drawn disturbing things on a worksheet referring to a gun and “blood everywhere,” but the boy was allowed to return to class. Ethan was convicted of four counts of murder, among other charges, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Carey said there can be a reluctance to charge parents, particularly in cases where the youths have turned the weapon on themselves.

“Sometimes there’s been an unwillingness to punish parents when the child has killed themself,” he said. “They’ve already suffered an egregious loss. It’s hard to say ‘x’ happened so ‘y’ must happen.”

Residents near the home at 2300 Arthurs Woods Drive, which exploded and killed the homeowner, Ray Corkran, and a BGE contractor, Jose Rodriguez-Alvarado, have been saying that they smelled gas Saturday night, but the State Fire Marshal’s office stated they had no record of anyone reporting that to either 911 or BGE.

But The Sun spoke to one resident, Carline Fisher, who said she reported the gas smell to BGE Saturday night and spoke to a worker who arrived in response. Given that information, a fire marshal’s spokesman contacted investigators looking into the explosion who told him that BGE indeed received a call at 8:24 p.m. Saturday.

Fisher told The Sun she “immediately” smelled gas when she left her home to walk her dogs around 8 p.m. Saturday. Fisher, who lives about a third of a mile away from Corkran’s home, said that as she walked, she said she continued to smell gas.

“I’m trying to assess it,” Fisher said. “Maybe someone was barbecuing with propane? I saw a neighbor and asked, ‘do you smell gas?'”

The neighbor said yes, and Fisher said she called BGE. Perhaps a half-hour later, a BGE truck arrived, she said, and the worker took her report. Fisher said she thought nothing more of it, until the following morning when the blast reverberated through the neighborhood.

A BGE spokesman declined to comment on Thursday, citing an ongoing investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. He referred questions to the NTSB, which is among the agencies and other entities that have been investigating the incident. An NTSB spokeswoman said she did not have immediate answers to The Sun’s questions about how BGE handled the report of a gas smell on Saturday night.

Oliver Alkire, a spokesman and master deputy with the State Fire Marshal’s office, had said since earlier this week that he was told by investigators from his agency and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosions, that there were no calls either to 911 or BGE about a gas odor that night.

But on Thursday, Alkire said, the investigators told him they had indeed interviewed Fisher, and she had told them about calling BGE.

“It fell through the cracks,” Alkire said of the investigators initially not relaying to him what Fisher had said.

At around 6:40 a.m. Sunday, a huge blast rocked the Harford Green development, so loud and ground-shaking that Fisher, who coincidentally was working in downtown Manhattan on 9/11 when terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center, thought a plane had crashed in their midst.

Instead, the house at 2300 Arthurs Woods Drive had exploded, killing Corkran, 73, and Rodriguez-Alvarado, 35.

“What happened from the night before when I called, and now?” Fisher said she thought on Sunday as she tried to process what had happened. “I don’t know, I can’t speculate.”

There might have been some confusion over BGE’s presence in the neighborhood Saturday night because the utility company had sent a truck there about an electrical issue at Corkran’s house, Alkire said.

“This all stemmed from an electrical failure that was reported Saturday evening to BGE,” Alkire said. He declined to give more specifics about the electrical issue. But he said after BGE responded to some electrical failure at the house Saturday night, the utility decided to send a crew the next morning.

At least one resident who said he had smelled gas Saturday night told The Sun he didn’t report it because he saw a BGE truck on the street and assumed it had responded to someone else reporting the odor.

It remains unclear what happened after Fisher called BGE and spoke to the representative who arrived in response.

Alkire said that when BGE receives a call about a gas smell, it routinely calls the closest fire department, but he has no record of that happening.

“There was no fire department dispatch that evening,” he said.

Two BGE contractors, including Rodriguez-Alvarado, went to the home Sunday morning to address the electrical issue. But it was another worker, who was sent by the Miss Utility program to mark off the location of underground infrastructure before any digging, who smelled gas that morning and alerted his supervisor, who then called BGE, Alkire said.

The explosion reduced Corkran’s home to rubble and damaged homes throughout the neighborhood, some so badly that at least 12 families were displaced.

Alkire said the fire marshal and the ATF finished their on-scene investigation Sunday and released the site to other investigators including those for BGE, the NTSB and insurers. “We’re reviewing info and the data we collected and will produce a final report,” Alkire said. He did not have a time frame for when it might be completed.

A spokeswoman for the NTSB said Thursday its investigation was continuing.

“It is still early in the investigation and the team is still on scene,” Jennifer Gabris said.

She said she expected a preliminary report of the NTSB’s findings would be released in about 30 days.

“Ray and his late wife, Phyllis, were the first ones to welcome us to the neighborhood,” said Diana Cline, who lives several houses away. “They made us a plate of pastries and cookies. He was kind and thoughtful and humorous and a joy to be around.”

Corkran, 73, was killed Sunday morning when his house at 2300 Arthurs Woods Drive exploded as a result of a gas leak. A BGE contractor, Jose Rodriguez-Alvarado, 35, was also killed in the blast.

Rodriguez-Alvarado worked for an Arbutus-based electrical contracting company called Hammer’s Powerline Maintenance, according to Maryland Department of Labor spokesperson Jamie Mangrum. He had been sent to the Bel Air home in response to electrical issues.

Representatives for the contracting company, which also does business as Hammer’s Underground Maintenance, did not return multiple calls and emails requesting comment.

State and federal agencies, including the Maryland fire marshal and the National Transportation Safety Board, are investigating the explosion.

Cline was among several neighbors who said they had been thrown from their beds by the force of the blast around 6:40 a.m. Sunday. Nearby houses were damaged, some so severely that 12 families have been displaced.

She called Corkran an “anchor” in the friendly community, where cookouts, Christmas parties and other gatherings are held throughout the year. Neighbors said he occasionally attended, particularly in the past when his wife was alive.

Neighbors say the home was for sale, and Corkran had been moving some of his possessions out in preparation for leaving.

“It was a big, beautiful home, with a back patio,” said Chuck Laubach, a neighbor.

While some news accounts have said Corkran used a wheelchair, Laubach and others said it was only occasionally as he grew older and had some medical issues.

Cline described him as a big, linebacker-sized man with an old Baltimore accent who loved sports and had a lot of memorabilia in his home. He had a small, white dog, a rescue, that died several years ago, named after Orioles great and Harford native Cal Ripken Jr.

“Cal used to sit next to the front door, and would run to greet us,” said Cline, a program analyst at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

How do natural gas explosions happen? Investigators probe origin of Harford County blast

Corkran had a doggie door between the garage and the home, allowing Cal to come and go as he pleased, Cline said.

According to a September 2018 death notice published in The Baltimore Sun for his wife, Phyllis, the couple had one son, who shares his father’s name, and two grandchildren. She died after a lengthy illness, according to the death notice, which listed their dog, Cal, as a survivor.

Corkran’s son and other family members could not be reached Tuesday.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner completed autopsies on both Corkran and Rodriguez-Alvarado on Monday but the reports were not yet finalized, a spokeswoman, Stephanie Moore, said Tuesday.

Baltimore Sun reporter Dan Belson contributed to this article.

For others, it covered the unexpected car repair or sudden medical expense that instead might have cascaded into losing a job or falling behind on the rent.

Across the country, an experiment has been underway to answer the question: Can a regular, no-strings-attached infusion of cash help alleviate, if not poverty itself, then some of its grinding effects?

Baltimore is among dozens of cities that have launched a program known as guaranteed or basic income, a direct handout, usually of $500 or $1,000 a month via a reloadable debit card, to a select group of residents, while researchers study how they spend it and the effect it has on the quality of their lives.

Spearheaded by Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore’s pilot, funded with $4.8 million from the city’s share of federal American Rescue Plan Act money, paid 200 parents $1,000 a month for a two-year period that ended last month. Preliminary results show that participants’ income, housing independence and mental health all improved in the program’s first year.

The number of participants who reported applying to a college or trade school increased from 16% to 27% during the first year, according to a study produced by Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a group of mayors advocating for such programs. The percentage of recipients renting as opposed to living with friends or family jumped from 52% to 67% over the same span.

The concept of a guaranteed income has gained more interest and support in recent years but also some backlash, with supporters saying recipients use the money on necessities like food and rent, and opponents decrying it as yet another government handout for the poor.

“It used to be the case that I would frequently be asked, ‘Aren’t they going to spend it on drugs and alcohol? Aren’t they going to work less?’” said Stacia West, a founding director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

With a growing body of research that disabuses the notion that the guaranteed income encourages frivolous spending or laziness, West said she is more likely to be queried on how a guaranteed income program can be implemented.

The money can provide a cushion for those who live on the finance edge and comes without the kind of regulations and limitations of more conventional public assistance like food stamps or housing vouchers, researchers say.

What the guaranteed money buys in many cases was time, West said.

“When you’re very low-income, that translates into time scarcity,” West said. “You’re spending all this time navigating these systems — child care, transportation. Guaranteed income unlocks some time for you.”

Some used the time for job training that led to better work, researchers have found across the country, or to spend more time with children, leading to improved school performance.

In Baltimore’s pilot, preliminary results showed participants’ labor force participation increased from 64% to 71%, though their unemployment rate remained more than twice that of average Baltimore residents.

With many of the programs still fairly new, it remains to be seen how long their positive effects on recipients last, researchers said. Many of the pilot plans including Baltimore’s used federal pandemic relief funds that are expiring, leaving them without a readily available source of support.

West said guaranteed income is “an imprecise tool” and can’t by itself fix the underlying causes of systemic poverty, such as the legacy of “racial redlining and neighborhood segregation” that Scott has pointed to in making his case for the program.

“What is very clear is the history of redlining isn’t going to be solved by guaranteed income,” West said.

Particularly in red states, there are those with “a potent ideological objection” to giving free money to the poor, said Matthew Reed, executive director of the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement in Iowa.

This spring, the institute was about halfway through a two-year pilot program that gives $500 a month to 110 people in the Des Moines area when the Iowa Legislature banned the use of public funds in such programs.

About half of the Iowa program’s $2.5 million costs come from public sources, including municipalities in its three-county area, so those funds are being spent first, saving private money for after the new law takes effect next year, Reed said.

“It was certainly frustrating,” Reed said.

Rather than waiting until the project’s conclusion to have “a more honest debate” about its merits, Reed said, legislators opted to say, “We don’t care what the results are. We don’t like it.”

Legislators split largely on partisan lines. One Republican lawmaker called it “socialism on steroids,” while Democrats argued that local governments should be allowed to use their funds as they saw fit.

Iowa State Sen. Scott Webster, a Republican, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, called guaranteed income “a terrible waste of taxpayer money.” He disputed research that supports the program’s benefits, saying it doesn’t adequately track how recipients spend the money on the debit card as well as other funds at their disposal.

“Let’s say they use $500 [of program money] on groceries. What happened to the money they used to use for groceries. Where’d that go?” Webster said.

Such sentiments reflect an unfair distrust and scrutiny of poor people, said Abigail Marquez, who oversaw the guaranteed income program in Los Angeles.

The city’s pilot was the nation’s largest, a $38 million effort that served more than 3,000 residents.

“Based on the results from the research, we learned that people were able to seek and obtain dignified work,” said Marquez, who manages the city’s Community Investment for Families Department.

Another important outcome was the time freed up for recipients to spend with children and neighbors, and on their own health and well-being.

“We saw that participants were able to leave a violent home environment because of the guaranteed income,” she said.

The concept has found a friendly home in deeply blue California, which has multiple programs designed to help groups that include immigrants and those exiting foster care. Legislatures in other states have, like Iowa, blocked them, although two Democratic governors, in Arizona and Wisconsin, have vetoed the measures.

The Texas Attorney General sued Harris County, which includes Houston, saying its guaranteed income program violated the state constitution’s ban against giving public money to an individual. The state’s Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the program, and county officials are considering adjustments to try getting around that.

To turn guaranteed income pilots into more permanent parts of the social safety net will require funding, of course, but also political will, supporters said.

“If it’s a public program, it needs political support,” Reed said. “To do it at a larger scale, it’s going to require public money and public buy-in.”

The first mayor-led guaranteed income pilot similar to Baltimore’s launched in 2019 in Stockton, California. Other cities followed, and researchers have found across the board that recipients use the money in ways that make sense for their families, spending it on rent, utilities and food, said Suki Samra, who directed the Stockton program and now is executive director of the mayors’ group advocating for guaranteed income.

Participants are consistently more likely to find long-term employment, she said, and to get some form of education when compared to a control group.

“When you remove that constant drumbeat of anxiety, of worry, folks are able to take a step back, they’re able to dream,” Samra said. “They’re able to think about what their full potential is.”

Although Baltimore stopped distributing benefits at the end of July, the study of its recipients continues. Researchers are expected to release next year a final study of the program, which will include data on recipients collected up to six months after the close of the program.

Then what? Scott is among those who would like to see the concept implemented on a more comprehensive, national basis.

When the city’s preliminary results were rolled out in June, Scott directly addressed federal lawmakers.

“This should be a national thing,” he said in a news conference. “It can be and should be and it will be — I’m going to speak it into existence — part of the solution to end poverty for good in this country.”

Samra said the mayors’ group believes an expansion of the child tax credit to include cash payments to parents would be a natural progression.

“We’re seeing that as the most politically feasible tool,” she said.

West said people have grown increasingly comfortable with the idea of a guaranteed income. Andrew Yang made it part of his run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. And during the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government sent stimulus money to more than 150 million households.

“We all received a guaranteed income then,” she said.

She envisions cities continuing to serve as “incubators of invention,” experimenting with how to build on guaranteed income pilots and work towards a goal that should be beyond politics.

“Poverty alleviation,” West said, “should be nonpartisan.”

The study led by a group of Swedish researchers and published Sunday in the Journal of the American Medial Association, found that a test  based on measuring certain proteins in the brain had about a 90% accuracy rate in diagnosing Alzheimer’s in those with cognitive symptoms. By comparison, primary care doctors and specialists had a 61% and 73% accuracy rate in diagnosing the disease, the study found.

Currently, the disease can be definitively diagnosed only by more expensive and invasive tools such as PET scans and spinal taps. The neurodegenerative disease afflicts more than 6 million Americans, and Baltimore and Maryland have been found to have some of the nation’s highest rates of prevalence.

The blood test in the study and others of its ilk are only available in research trials at the moment. Getting one to the market and available in a primary care physician’s office would represent “incredible progress,” said Corinne Pettigrew, an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study.

“This would allow patients to review options for treatments, learn about what to expect of the disease and plan for the future,” said Pettigrew, who leads outreach, recruitment and engagement for the Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

She said the test also would be important for ruling out Alzheimer’s as the reason for a patient’s cognitive impairment, allowing doctors to seek and treat the actual cause.

The study involved 1,213 people in Sweden whose average age was 74 and who were being evaluated because of cognitive symptoms. According to the paper, Alzheimer’s is often misdiagnosed by primary care physicians and even specialists because of a lack of or limited access to diagnostic tools. That prevents patients from starting treatments for those with early Alzheimer’s, which require test results confirming the disease, the study said.

“The higher diagnostic accuracy of the blood test indicates that it could be suitable for implementation in primary care, but future studies need to examine its effect on clinical care,” according to the study, which was led by Dr. Sebastian Palmqvist, of Lund University in Sweden. “In addition to improving diagnostic accuracy, a positive test result could further support the initiation of widely available treatments.”

Ilene Rosenthal, program director at the Greater Maryland chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, called the study findings “extremely exciting” for advocates such as her organization who have pushed for more research to understand and treat the devastating disease.

“When you have 90% accuracy,” she said, “that’s very impressive.”

Rosenthal envisions a time when a blood test for Alzheimer’s will be as common and widely available as those that test for cholesterol.

“This should become a normal part of a physical or a wellness visit,” she said.

Alzheimer’s still has no cure, but there are treatments that can ease its symptoms and change its progression if started early enough. That makes the development of a test vital, and it will incentivize patients and doctors to use them, Rosenthal said.

“The real urgency right now is the availability of new treatments. But these treatments are only going to work in the early stages,” she said. “It’s so much better to know than to not know.”

But those who worked on that abbreviated run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, which ended in December 2019 before a single primary had been held, say the response to Harris’ current campaign shows they were just ahead of their time.

“We already knew what everyone else has had to get ready to see,” said Julian Hamer, who worked as a video producer for Harris’ first campaign for president. “I am just looking forward to her winning over the hearts of all Americans.”

Hamer, 33, is among the alumni of that first presidential campaign who are flashing back to those intense months, and how it influenced the trajectory of their careers and lives. And, of course, that of the candidate herself: Joe Biden ultimately won the nomination, selected his former rival Harris as his running mate and the two won in November 2020. Now, with Biden bowing out of his reelection bid and endorsing his vice president to take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris is poised to become the party’s presidential nominee and  face the candidate they had beaten last time, former President Donald Trump.

How many members of Harris’ 2020 run will rejoin her for this year’s race remains to be seen; the campaign is barely a week old. But many have stayed in her general orbit.

After the 2020 pullout, Hamer went on to work on the Biden-Harris ticket, co-directing and -shooting the video that introduced Harris at the 2020 convention, and starting a production company with a fellow campaign alum.

Jasmine Clemons, 40, a self-described “wanderer” who moved to Baltimore to work as the Southeast political director of the Harris campaign, found she loved the city and stayed, first working as a policy manager for Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. and now as the director of the Board of Public Works for Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman.

And Keenen Geter, 33, who did advance work for Harris in both of her 2020 presidential and vice presidential campaign, decided to continue that line of work, but in different venue. He now is an advance officer managing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s travel and logistics, Geter said in an email from the Philippines.

Today, they remain proud of what ultimately was a losing campaign, and that instead of locating in her native California or a larger market, Harris chose Baltimore.

“I wanted to join the Harris campaign without even knowing where the HQ would be located,” Geter, a native of the city said in an email. “It just so happened to be located in Baltimore.”

Geter, who previously worked in the Mayor’s Office of Human Services, said it was great he could host campaign staff for cookouts at the home he owned in Park Heights at the time, and share his inside tips on his favorite places to get a crabcake or haircut.

“It felt great seeing HQ staff enjoying Baltimore,” he said, “and calling it their temporary home.”

Clemons thought it would be just that.

“You think you’re coming for a while, but you end up staying,” said Clemons, who is originally from Louisiana but has logged time in Florida, New York and Washington. “I love Baltimore, I love Maryland — they should put me on the tourism council. Everyone has a place at the table here.”

Shortly before Harris officially announced her 2020 run in January 2019, The Sun learned she had picked Baltimore for her headquarters. The campaign spent six months in temporary digs in the Stadium Square area between Federal Hill and the stadium complex before moving in June 2019 into an office building on Charles Street downtown.

The campaign opted to base itself in Baltimore for both practical reasons — it’s close to Washington, where Harris was a U.S. Senator, and on the Amtrak line — and more vibe-y ones. Harris’ sister and campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, told The Sun that Baltimore felt like a “sister city” to their native Oakland, California.

At the time, Clemons’ “meandering public sector career” had brought her to Washington, where she worked for a couple of federal agencies but never a political campaign. But Harris had been a longtime inspiration for Clemons — they both attended HBCUs, Howard in the case of the former and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University for the latter, and both were members of the same sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

When Clemons was approached to join the Harris campaign, it seemed like a “once in a lifetime opportunity,” so she jumped at it. While the fast pace of campaigning took some getting used to, she said she loved how many Black women were in senior leadership roles.

“It was remarkable to see that,” she said. “It came from the top.”

Harris started the campaign among the frontrunners in a crowded field that would grow to more than two dozen candidates. But a range of problems, from shifting strategies to infighting among top officials, developed and as fundraising faltered, campaign staff were laid off. By December 2019, two months before the Iowa caucuses, Harris announced she didn’t have the resources to continue her run and pulled out.

While always a possibility, the end of the “small but mighty” campaign they were running was devastating, the Baltimore-based staff said.

“That was a risk you take. On any campaign when you’re not the clear frontrunner, it’s always in the back of your mind that it could end,” Clemons said. Still, she added, “it was heartbreaking.”

Hamer, a Baltimore native, remembers staff members gathering amid “oh so many tears” at one of their hangouts, a bar on Water Street downtown.

“I really internalized it,” Hamer said. Charged with telling people who Harris was via her camera, “I felt like I had let her down.”

Suddenly, she was out of work, a first for the Garrison Forest graduate. Since graduating with a journalism degree from Temple University, Hamer had worked in TV and as a freelance video producer, director and cinematographer. Soon, the COVID pandemic would erupt, adding to the challenges.

But after Biden picked Harris as his running mate in August 2020, Hamer was tapped to join the campaign as a senior producer. By the following year, she and another campaign veteran had started their own production company, Fearless Video.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Hamer said.

Martha McKenna, a Baltimore-based political consultant, didn’t work for the Harris campaign but knew some who did. When it ended, she sprang into action and hosted a gathering for the campaign staff to meet local elected officials and others who might be in the position of hiring.

“The Harris campaign was full of bright, hard-working, dedicated operators who had uprooted their lives to come to Baltimore to work for Kamala Harris,” she said. “I wanted them to feel welcome here, and to convince them to stay.”

She estimated perhaps a half-dozen of the out-of-towners, including Clemons, ultimately set down local roots, joining those who were from here originally.

Whether they stayed or scattered, some of the alums have stayed in touch over the intervening years, having developed a tight bond over what Hamer called the “really, really special” experience of that first campaign.

Watching her second campaign launching to such early enthusiasm has been heartening, said Clemons, who was among the 44,000 callers on the Zoom gathering held by Win With Black Women last Sunday night, which raised more than $1.5 million. Callers to subsequent Zoom gatherings geared toward other groups have similarly drawn big numbers, even crashing the platform.

“I’ve been really proud how everyone is coalescing around this candidate,” Clemons said. “It’s going to be a tough 100 days [to Election Day], but this has given me a new optimism. It’s really been beautiful seeing the energy.”

“She wanted to swim out to the fountain,” said Arno West, now 87 years old.

Did she, though? Fifty-five years later, what happened to Parker is perhaps even more of a mystery as time has further blurred memories and motivations.

What is known is that on June 2, 1969, almost six weeks after Parker was last seen, workmen found her body in the fountain, too decomposed to identify a cause of death, coroners said.

“The beauteous 35-year-old divorcee,” as one news account called her, was now “the lady in the lake,” a moniker that resonated for over 50 years, becoming the title of the 2019 novel by Baltimore writer Laura Lippman, and the Apple TV+ series based on it that debuted Friday.

The main character, journalist Maddie Schwartz, played by Oscar winner Natalie Portman, investigates fictionalized versions of Parker’s death and the unconnected murder several miles to the northwest of 11-year-old Esther Lebowitz, that happened later that year. In the series, Esther is named Tessie Durst and Parker is named Cleo Johnson, and played by Baltimore native Moses Ingram.

Their real-life antecedents remain vivid to those who lived through that time, a period of much racial, gender and other societal upheavals in Baltimore and beyond, just a year after the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Especially within their communities — African-American in Parker’s case, Orthodox Jewish in Esther’s — the cases were followed closely.

“We were all so traumatized,” said Eli Schlossberg, 74, who was a student at Ner Israel Rabbinical College at the time. “It was unbelievably devastating.”

A community tragedy

Esther Lebowitz had been dropped off at the corner of Northern Parkway and Park Heights Avenue on the afternoon of Sept. 29, 1969, by a rabbi at her school, Bais Yaakov, and planned to stop at a drugstore then walk several blocks home, according to a Baltimore Sun story at the time.

It was a safe area for children, said Schlossberg, an author whose books include “My Shtetl Baltimore.” He remembers regularly walking there himself as a child, to the Richmond drugstore for snowballs or the tropical fish store for aquarium supplies.

But Esther never made it home that day, triggering a search by both police and volunteers, including Schlossberg, who knew the Lebowitz family. Two days later, the girl’s battered body was found in a weedy, infrequently traveled area near athletic fields on Enslow Avenue in Mount Washington.

Gravel found on her body linked the crime to the tropical fish store, and its owner and operator Wayne Stephen Young, 23, was arrested.

It was a stunning turn of events, given that many assumed a stranger had grabbed the young girl off the street. But Young was a trusted merchant, lived in the community and was described as a “secular Jew.”

“I was shocked because I knew both the killer and the [victim],” Schlossberg said. “To know both was unbelievable.”

Young had bludgeoned the girl during a rape or an attempted rape, prosecutor Howard L. Cardin said at the trial. Young claimed temporary insanity, and in testimony that could have come from the movie “Psycho,” doctors described him as desperate to separate from his overprotective mother, a “classic stereotype” of a “Jewish mother.” A mother-son argument the morning of the killing, according to Sun trial coverage, “primed” Young for the fatal beating.

“He was trying to destroy his mother,” a Clifford T. Perkins State Hospital psychiatrist testified.

It took the jury just 30 minutes to find Young guilty of first degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in 2015, a month after Maryland’s second highest court vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial.

The Lebowitz family ultimately moved to Israel, but members of their community would attend court hearings when there was a chance that Young might be released.

The prosecutor Cardin said that while he initially viewed Young as “evil,” years later he came to support his requests for parole, which were never granted. Cardin also backed a new trial for Young under the 2012 Unger ruling that flawed jury instructions entitled certain prisoners to request ones.

It put Cardin — the brother of retiring U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin — on the opposite side of a community in which he has deep family roots. As an active member of the Jewish Big Brother & Big Sister League, he sometimes took his mentees to visit Jewish inmates, including Young.

“I thought he had rehabilitated himself. I thought he had earned the right to request release,” Cardin said. “There were some that were very, very strongly opposed to my opinion.”

He acknowledged it would have been difficult for Young to return to the community that he had so violated. Cardin himself has childhood memories of “hanging out” in the area where Esther disappeared.

“It made everybody more aware,” Cardin said, “that the world itself wasn’t as safe as we thought it was.”

‘What happened’ to Shirley Parker

It was five months before Esther Lebowitz disappeared that Shirley Parker also vanished. Beyond that, there were few similarities to the cases, other than news reporters quoting the same assistant medical examiner, Dr. Ronald Kornblum, on autopsy findings.

The Afro newspaper extensively covered Parker’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body, publishing exclusives and features including one about a “prophet” who held a seance and said he made a “spiritual link” with the late woman.

Parker had been a bookkeeper and barmaid at the legendary Sphinx Club on Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s former Black entertainment district, adding a level of intrigue to the case, said the Rev. Alvin Hathaway, a lifelong Baltimorean.

“She was well-known. It became a topic of conversation: What happened?” said Hathaway, 73, who at the time was a teenager growing up in the Upton neighborhood. “It was never explained.”

Details are a bit hazy on what happened that night, but news accounts relayed that Parker and West had some drinks, they argued and took a drive to “cool off.” He dropped Parker near Druid Hill Park, and when he went back to check on her, she was on the other side of the fence that circles the lake. He said he helped her over the fence and took her home. Her mother said she didn’t come home that night.

This week in an interview with The Sun, West said he didn’t remember arguing with Parker that night. He said he thinks that at some point she must have swum to the fountain, gotten to the top of of it and slipped and fell.

West said he thinks he and Parker had dated for six to eight months, and met either at the Druid Hill Park pool or the Sphinx Club. She was “a fantastic swimmer,” he said. Her mother said at the time that she had been a lifeguard.

On May 13, the lake was dredged in an unsuccessful search for Parker’s body. Oddly enough, it was a reader’s appeal to The Evening Sun’s “Direct Line” column that ultimately led to the discovery.

A “Mrs. E.D.J.” who called herself “a daily watcher” of the fountain’s “very impressive” lights noted they were “a pleasure to watch, but they come on too late at night,” seemingly after 11 p.m. “Could the starting time be made earlier?” she asked.

A crew sent to investigate found Parker’s body in a saucer-like depression on top of the fountain with about a foot of water in it, according to a Sun account. The fountain, which had a metal ladder running up its side, rose about 20 feet above the water and was some 35 yards from shore.

An autopsy found no gunshot or stabbing wounds, but an assistant medical examiner told the Afro that given the decomposition, signs of foul play could have “washed or decayed away.” The examiner went on say it was “possible she was drowned.”

West was questioned and polygraphed, but the death was never ruled a homicide and thus there was nothing to charge anyone with.

Still, the case would follow him, West said. Often when he would meet someone, they eventually would ask, “So what did happen to Shirley?”

Parker left behind two sons, the younger of whom, David, 9, lived with her in Baltimore.

David Parker is 64 now, retired, living in the area and himself the father of six children. He thinks frequently about his mother and, in describing her disappearance and death, uses the same word as those who lived through the death of Esther Lebowitz later that year.

“It was very traumatic for me,” Parker said.

He has thought about approaching the city and asking that Druid Park Lake Drive be renamed Shirley Parker Way.

“You only get one mom in this world,” he said. “I’m not going to let my mom’s name die.”

‘Lady in the Lake’ cases: Shirley Lee Parker’s body found (June 3, 1969)

‘Lady in the Lake’ cases: Esther Lebowitz’s body found (Oct. 2, 1969)

Three months after it crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge and sent the span tumbling into the Patapsco River, the 984-foot Dali container ship began slowly sailing under its own power — assisted by four tugboats — just before 8:30 a.m. Monday to Norfolk, Virginia. After a 23-hour trip without any issues, the ship tied up at roughly 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to Darrell Wilson, spokesperson for Synergy Marine Group, the Dali’s operator. In Norfolk, the vessel will unload all of its containers and receive more extensive repairs.

With crushed containers still resting on the bow and a tarp covering a hole in the hull, the ship left the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal and then turned right to follow the federal shipping channel Monday morning. Marine tracking data indicated the ship traveled at roughly 9 knots (10 mph) for the bulk of its transit Monday.

Traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge near Annapolis was halted for roughly 20 minutes at 11 a.m., as the ship approached the bridge. To avoid distracting drivers, the Maryland Transportation Authority sometimes stops traffic on the bridge when vessels of high public interest sail underneath.

About 100 people gathered at Sandy Point State Park, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, to spectate as the damaged Dali — still carrying fragments of Key Bridge — safely sailed beneath the span that links Central Maryland to the Eastern Shore. The crowd, some of whom peered through binoculars, fell so silent as the ship approached that birds could be heard chirping. As the Dali safely transited the bridge, observers called out: “Threading the needle” and “Through the goal posts.”

“Did you notice how quiet everyone was?” said Paula Schnabel, of St. Margaret’s. “It was almost solemn.”

The Dali had been in Baltimore since it lost power in the early hours of March 26, colliding with a Key Bridge pier and collapsing the structure, killing six construction workers. Debris from the disaster blocked Baltimore’s shipping channel for more than two months, and the bridge’s demise eliminated one of only three harbor crossings, slowing car and truck traffic in the area.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI are both investigating the calamity. As the Dali sailed Monday, the NTSB released a rare update to its investigation, noting that it is focusing on a small electrical component of a circuit that connects two wires, known as a “terminal block.” The NTSB took the component to a lab for further testing, it said in a statement, also noting it had completed interviews with the 21 crew members aboard the ship at the time of the incident.

Prompted by the collapse, the Coast Guard has also initiated a board of inquiry to evaluate potential risks to other bridges in the U.S.

Last month, crews used explosives to cut up a piece of the Key Bridge that sat atop the Dali, then refloated the vessel. Five tugboats moved the ship to the Seagirt Marine Terminal, where some of the wreckage on its crumpled bow was removed. Some of that debris remained on the vessel as it transited Monday, however, and several workers could be seen standing on the bow as the vessel began its voyage. The ship will undergo further cleanup and repairs in Norfolk.

Containers remained on the Dali in Baltimore to weigh the ship down so it fit under the Bay Bridge, which has about 185 feet of vertical clearance.

The Coast Guard enforced a 500-yard safety zone around the Dali during its voyage, and there is also a 100-yard safety zone while the ship is moored near Norfolk to protect from “potential hazards created by the heavily damaged M/V Dali while it offloads cargo,” according to a Coast Guard memo.

The Dali leaves Baltimore for first time since Key Bridge collapse | PHOTOS

A few people gathered at Fort Armistead Park earlier in the day to watch the ship’s departure from the Port of Baltimore, including George M. Treas III, who lives nearby. He likened the bridge collapse to “losing somebody” and said visiting the area is “like going to a graveyard.”

As Treas watched the ship slowly depart, he said: “It feels good. I feel safer now. They caused enough havoc here.”

Bob and Karen Merrey had to tend to some business on the other side of the Bay Bridge from their home on Kent Island, and they left early Monday to avoid the span’s closure.

They had been scheduled to take Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas cruise out of Baltimore on April 4, but with the port closed at the time, they themselves had to travel to Norfolk to board. Retirees from the Towson area with a son who lives near the Key Bridge, the couple had driven across that span the day before the catastrophe.

They quietly watched Monday from Sandy Point State Park as the Dali passed before them and beneath the Bay Bridge.

“I still,” Bob said, “get goosebumps.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Alex Mann contributed to this article.

Watch live: Dali ship departs from Baltimore