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Maryland
Violence inside a Maryland youth detention center has staff begging for help
Sheila Overstreet went back to work as a resident advisor for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services at the end of April, more than two months after she‘d been sexually assaulted on the job by one of the teens she was supposed to supervise.
The 43-year-old Allegany County resident serves as one of about 60 front-line support staff at Green Ridge Youth Center responsible for monitoring youth who have been sent there by a judge. In January, she was working with a group of boys who repeatedly got out of control. Even with assistance from colleagues, the situation escalated until one of the boys allegedly touched Overstreet in a sexual manner.
Overstreet’s not alone.
About half of her colleagues are out on injured leave, according to union reps, and most because they have been injured by teens being treated at the remote Western Maryland facility.
Overstreet said the problems escalated about six months before she was attacked and teens face few consequences when they assault staff.
“How are these boys supposed to be rehabilitated back into the community if they’re not being held accountable for their actions?” she asked. “How are we to hold them accountable when there‘s nothing to hold them accountable with?”
In her one-year at the facility, she‘s witnessed her colleagues kicked, punched in the face and spat on. Some have left work in an ambulance. Staff have reported, among other injuries, a concussion, a broken nose and eye socket.
Interviews conducted independently with Green Ridge resident advisors, a case manager, a social worker and union reps revealed the same, specific violent incidents. Some had personally witnessed altercations or had experienced violence themselves.
Most asked to have their names withheld because they still worked at Green Ridge or had moved on to new jobs and wanted to leave the experience behind.
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Staff said morale is at an all-time low. They’re frequently asked to cover extra shifts and, with little notice, travel to other facilities to help out.
There were dozens of assaults on staff at Green Ridge in 2024, double last year’s number, according to the state’s juvenile services watchdog. And so far this year, Maryland State Police have fielded dozens of calls for assaults at state youth facilities but those records don’t specify whether the assaults were youth on staff.
The state‘s watchdog, the Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit, highlighted Green Ridge as an outlier in its 2024 annual report, saying it “continues to struggle with daily operations.” Many staff have just a few years experience and have insufficient training to work with incarcerated young people, the report said.
The use of physical restraints by staff to control outbursts is up in every juvenile services facility, but there were more than 400 at Green Ridge, double that of a neighboring facility with roughly the same capacity.
A social worker hired by the state with more than a dozen years of therapeutic experience, including treating children with serious behavioral issues, ended her contract three months early. No amount of money was worth her safety, she said. And if something had gone terribly wrong, she didn’t want to appear as though she’d cosigned the chaos.
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Workers at Green Ridge, she said, were “getting the shit beat out of them.”
With so many out on injured leave, those still working called out sick because they’re worried about safety and burned out staff were constantly in survival mode.
Staff are the safety net
There are no perimeter fences or locked cells at the facility. Children live, go to school and eat together in nondescript cement block buildings, which do lock. But the staff are their own security.
“We‘re all trying to go home the same way we came in,” said one mid-career resident advisor. But lately, he said it feels like “every man for himself.”
He’s worked at Green Ridge for more than 5 years, but he said it started to “feel different” just after Gov. Wes Moore took office. Working conditions have worsened under Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi, staff said, and promises to add more staff and implement changes have worn thin.
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The agency vacancy rate has dropped under the new administration but that number doesn’t reflect staff on injured or sick leave.
The resident advisor said he saw one colleague take more than a half-dozen blows to his face and head trying to restrain a teen. Restraints, or physical holds, are not uncommon, but are a last resort after other attempts at de-escalation fail.
“When I started, if a youth assaulted staff, it wasn’t a question, it wasn’t a debate,” he said. “A youth might have gotten away with one assault, but after that, you’re getting put on a van and you’re getting transferred out of there.”
But those consequences and others, like filing charges and adding time onto a youth’s stay for poor behavior, are no longer consistently used, he said. According to state data, so-called removals of youths dropped statewide by nearly half between July 2022 and June 2024.
Allowing the status quo, he said, sends a signal that violent behavior is tolerated and that staff “don’t matter — like anything can happen to us. We‘re a dime a dozen.”
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Schiraldi said he “takes assaults of staff — and any violence in our facilities whether it’s against staff or kids — very seriously,” not just as an agency head but as someone who has experienced assault as a former front-line youth worker.
Staff work in an environment “where there’s lots of troubled kids with lots of problems — one of which is violence, occasionally — and it’s our job to keep them safe,” he said, while at the same time helping them turn their lives around.
“Automatic expulsions and time freezes don’t get us there,” he said, advocating for consequences that include making amends, learning how to talk through conflict — and when necessary — sending a child back to detention.
The majority of teens arrested, charged, adjudicated and placed in juvenile services facilities in Maryland are Black and not from Western Maryland. Most are navigating a stressful life experience hours away from home with limited connection to family support systems.
First-hand experience
Schiraldi is a career criminal justice reformer who embraces evidence-based approaches to juvenile rehabilitation, which includes services, like therapy and mentoring, and proposes eliminating youth prisons in favor of smaller, home-like settings based in that child‘s community.
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Schiraldi has launched novel gun violence prevention programs, staff trainings and listening sessions with law enforcement around the state.
But his ideas have not always found favor with state’s attorneys seeking more say over juvenile cases and politicians facing public blowback over teen crime.
Schiraldi said changing a system takes time “and initially it’s scary” for everyone involved.
“But talking through problems with young people, de-escalation, cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown repeatedly to improve young people’s behavior and reduce violence in facilities like this,” he said.
Early in his career, Schiraldi was assaulted by a teenager in a New York youth facility. He was punched, kicked and thrown to the ground. Schiraldi was so angered he wanted the kid ejected. But his boss talked him out of it and taught him how he could‘ve handled the situation differently.
When the teen graduated the program, they were on good terms.
“He was better because of it, and I was better because of it,” he said.
Staff seeks tools
Staff say they agree with the intent of Maryland‘s approach and want kids to succeed but question how effective they can be when shifts are so understaffed.
Denise Henderson-Johnson, a juvenile services transportation officer, has worked with the agency for about two decades, including as a resident advisor and in supervisory roles. The president of the local workers’ union said she’s fielding five to 10 calls a week from colleagues across the state, telling her they’ve been assaulted by youth.
“I say every day to myself, ‘God, please don’t let me be one of the presidents that’s gotta stand at a podium and have a memorial service for one of my members,” she said, referencing the recent death of a Maryland parole and probation agent killed on the job. “I do not want to do that. Something has to be done.”
“You cannot go around putting your hands on people and not face a consequence,” she said. “We are not saying punish them, but they need to know there’s accountability for negative behavior.”
Hope for safety after assault
Female staff have been asking male staff to partner up for safety when the teens say or do inappropriate things. More than one woman has reported to union reps being groped or grabbed by youth.
The day Overstreet was sexually assaulted, the facility was fully staffed, by her count. She was in a rec room, where kids watch TV and participate in activities. But on this day, she found herself repeatedly redirecting three youths.
“They were just getting in my face. They were trying to get in my pockets. They just would not get out of my personal space whatsoever,” she said.
When things got beyond her control, she called for help, pushing the button on her ear piece.
“Staff assistance to front rec,” she called, multiple times.
Colleagues would come and help her calm things down. But the boys would kick up again. Then, things reached a chaotic level.
As she moved toward the door, a teen hovered close behind her and pressed his erection to her backside.
“You need to go!” she told him and recalled him responding with a lewd comment. She radioed for help and a male staff member was there within seconds.
The physical violation not only has traumatized Overstreet but caused her to lose confidence in the agency. She reported the incident to supervisors, but they were slow to search security footage until she pressed charges with Maryland State Police.
The teen, after learning she filed a report, charged at her, yelling and cursing.
“My anxiety got so bad,” she said. “I had chest pains to the point where I actually had to go to the doctor.”
She stayed out of work — without pay after her worker’s compensation claim was denied — for more than two months, too nervous to go back. A therapist diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She‘s lost wages and had to pay out of pocket for her health insurance and therapy. Bills have piled up.
Overstreet said the agency should go back to what used to work and hopes plans to add staff and training happens soon.
But she knows she can make a difference.
On her dresser there’s a thick, gray rubber bracelet given to her by one teen as he left the program. The bracelets are given out to youth as encouragement. This one had the words “get the facts” written on the side.
When he handed it to her he said: “‘This will be my reminder that I‘m not going to end up back in here, and I‘m going to find a better way for myself.’”
Treatment can work, she said, but staff needs to be protected.
There’s one thing that almost everyone who has touched the William Bradford Bishop cold case agrees with: He killed his family.
In the 50 years since the brutal murders in Bethesda, Maryland, many investigators have painstakingly gone through the boxes and boxes of evidence to piece together the crime.
Multiple alleged sightings of Bishop around the United States and even overseas in Europe have been followed up on. Yet two big questions remain: Why did he do it and where did he go?
News4 sat down recently with former and current investigators in the case.
“We knew who did it. That wasn’t the question. We just need to find where this guy is,” said retired Montgomery County Detective Brain Stafford.
“I would like him to face justice for what he did,” said retired FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Vogt.
“The fact that this hasn’t been resolved, it does, I think, eats at us,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Maxwell Uy.
The Crime
According to investigators, on March 1, 1976, Bishop left his job at the State Department, telling his boss he wasn’t feeling well. He drove to Sears at Montgomery Mall and bought a gas can and a short-handled sledgehammer and then headed to Potomac Village, where he purchased a shovel and a pitchfork at Poch’s Hardware. Police say Bishop used that sledgehammer to kill his wife, Annette; their three boys, Brad, Brenton and Geoffrey; and his mother, Lobelia.
Bishop then drove six hours to the small town of Columbia, North Carolina, where he dumped the bodies in a shallow grave and burned them.
The family station wagon was eventually found almost two weeks later in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. Police think Bishop left it there after driving eight hours from Jacksonville, North Carolina, where a store owner remembered a man with a dog buying a pair of Converse tennis shoes.
Steve Vogt recalls first seeing the killings mentioned in the newspaper as an 11-year-old. He eventually got the chance to work on the case years later.
“Throughout my life after that, I was just tied to the case. It never left me,” he said.
Vogt told the I-Team he believes the last known sighting of Bishop was at a nearby hotel in the days around when the car was discovered in the mountains.
“The guy had checked in with a California driver’s license, a passport and he had a revolver on his bed. No one knew Bishop was carrying a California DL [driver’s license],” he said.
As for the motive, Vogt thinks it was about money and that Bishop wanted to start his life over. He said weeks before the killings, Bishop was passed over for a work promotion and that the family was having financial problems and missed a mortgage payment.
“They talk about narcissistic personality disorder. The guy saw his family as just, they’re his property, “ said Vogt.
Where did Bishop go?
How is it possible that with so many investigators on the case over the last five decades, Bishop has never been found?
“If you’re disciplined, you stay out of trouble, you don’t get fingerprinted, you create a new identity and don’t talk to anybody you ever knew before, you won’t get caught, especially in 1976,” said Vogt.
Vogt was instrumental in getting Bishop added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List in 2014. News4 asked him where he thinks Bishop went after leaving those mountains.
“I believe southeast, southern United States somewhere. I think that’s where he went and stayed,” he said.
But Brian Stafford, who worked the case for years as a detective for Montgomery County police, isn’t so sure. He keeps going back to a missing resolver that investigators knew Bishop had but that was never recovered.
“I honestly don’t know. I went through a long period of time thinking, we never got the revolver back. He walked off into the Great Smoky Mountains and shot himself,” said Stafford.
The tips have continued to come in over the last five decades, with sightings around the U.S. and even overseas in Italy, Sweden and Switzerland. There have also been rumors about Bishop being somehow connected to the CIA.
“I personally have not held to that theory, but we may never know,” Uy, the Montgomery County sheriff said.
No coincidences
“Everything he did, cold, calculated, obviously planned out before. I do not believe there are any coincidences in this case,” said retired detective Stafford.
It’s his belief that Bishop had been planning the crime for a while.
“Too much went right for him,” he said. “”I think that he knew when he left that house where he was going to take those bodies and where he was going after that.”
That’s a question the family of Ron Brickhouse would like answered. Back in 1976, the forest ranger was the one who discovered the bodies in that shallow grave in North Carolina. News4 spoke to Brickhouse back in 2014, years before he passed away. Even then, almost 40 years after the crime, he had a hard time talking about the case, saying it was difficult to get the images out of his head.
“It’s just bad memories,” he said. His family said that interview was the last time he spoke about the case publicly.
All these years later, they’re still hoping for some closure.
“I wish there could be, before I pass away. I was hoping that for my husband, but it didn’t happen,” said his wife, Patricia Brickhouse.
The FBI hopes the identification of a daughter of William Bradford Bishop will lead to more clues and tips in a 45-year-old cold case that has rocked the D.C. region for decades. News4’s Shawn Yancy reports investigators hope the discovery will help explain why Bishop killed his family.
The 50-year hunt
When News4 asked Stafford if he thought authorities were ever close to finding Bishop, he responded, “I don’t think we ever were.”
But five decades after the killings, the FBI said the Bishop investigation remains active and that they continue to receive a high number of tips.
Uy said he too has a deputy assigned to the case file.
“If we were to get a tip tonight, if we’re to get a tip today, the deputies in our criminal section can actively look into it,” he said.
“We did everything we could. And maybe still, maybe this 50th anniversary, maybe somebody someday will pick up the phone,” said Vogt.
All it takes is one phone call.
“I believe someone has seen him and they haven’t made the call,” he said.
While Vogt isn’t sure if Bishop is alive or dead, the case has never left him. He recently joked with a friend on New Year’s Day that his resolution was to catch Bishop this year.
“A few months back, I was in an airport and I saw somebody that looked like him,” he said.
But he doubts over the years that he’s actually ever seen the fugitive.
“No, absolutely not,” he said.
Investigators acknowledge time could be running out to resolve this case.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re past the point of getting our hopes up because we’ve seen cases resolve sometimes when we think that they’re not likely to,” said Uy. “Personally, he would be 89 years old if he was still alive today, and I really do not believe he’s still alive.”
But Stafford still wants answers for the five people brutally killed, the people who still remember them and every investigator who has worked the case over five decades.
“The question is, why not just leave? Why do all this? If you’re thinking you just wanna leave, you just want to go, and you don’t want to get a divorce, you don’t wanna go through all that, you just want to disappear, get in the car and go,” said Stafford. “Why did you decide you had to kill them all?”
They’re questions police say only Bishop can provide if he’s ever caught. And if he isn’t, “Justice is never served. Ultimately, he’s gonna answer for this crime, no matter what,” said Stafford.
“Maybe it still will happen. Who knows. You never give up ‘til it’s over, you know,” said Vogt. “When everybody that knew Brad Bishop is gone, is no longer on this earth and nobody cares anymore, that’s when it’s over. I mean, for me, obviously, when I’m no longer here, it’s over for me. But it’s just a mystery that you’d like to solve.”
If you have any information about the hunt for William Bradford Bishop you can call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
Shawn Yancy and the News4 I-Team share how they got the interview with William Bradford Bishop’s daughter and their years covering his case.
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SEVERN, Md. (WBFF) — A scratch-off ticket sold in Severn turned one Maryland Lottery player into a millionaire, leading a week in which the Lottery paid out more than $31.8 million in prizes statewide.
Maryland Lottery and Gaming said it paid more than $31.8 million in prizes from Feb. 23 through March 1, including 36 tickets worth $10,000 or more.
The top scratch-off prize claimed during that period was a $1 million winning $1,000,000 Crossword ticket sold at the Walmart at 407 George Clauss Boulevard in Severn. Another top winner was a $100,000 Red 5’s Doubler ticket sold at the Carroll Motor Fuel station at 2535 Cleanleigh Drive in Parkville.
Other scratch-off prizes claimed Feb. 23 through March 1 included two $50,000 winners: a 200X the Cash ticket sold at the Wawa at 7501 Pulaski Highway in Rosedale, and a $5,000,000 Luxe ticket sold at the Spring Hill Lake Mini Market at 9240 Spring Hill Lane in Greenbelt. A $30,000 Diamond Bingo 6th Edition ticket was sold at Tempo Lounge at 402 Back River Neck Road in Essex.
ALSO READ | SUN | Maryland GOP unveils energy plan it says saves customers up to $40 a month
The Lottery also reported three $20,000 scratch-off winners, all on $1,000,000 Crossword tickets sold at Geresbeck’s Food Market at 8489 Fort Smallwood Road in Pasadena; Hillandale Beer and Wine at 10117 New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring; and Paddock Wine and Spirits at 7627 Woodbine Road in Woodbine.
The Lottery reminded players to sign the backs of tickets and keep winning tickets in a safe location.
The Lottery said the last dates to claim scratch-off tickets are posted on the scratch-offs page at mdlottery.com.
More information is available at mdlottery.com.
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For confidential help or information about gambling problems, visit helpmygamblingproblem.org or call 1-800-GAMBLER.
Advocacy groups are raising concerns over a warehouse in Washington County that is slated to become an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility after dozens of black SUVs were moved to the warehouse’s parking lot on Sunday.
“When federal enforcement vehicles begin lining the warehouse lot, it sends a clear message about what’s taking shape in our community,” said the organizer of Hagerstown Rapid Response, Claire Connor. “We refuse to let ICE quietly plant roots in Washington County without transparency, accountability and community consent.”
The 825,620-square-foot warehouse is located at 16220 Wright Road in Williamsport. Access to the facility was blocked by orange traffic barriers and signs outlining regulations and “governing conduct on federal property” with the Department of Homeland Security emblem at the top of the page.
In late January, Washington County issued a news release stating that on Jan. 14, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to the county’s historic district commission and department of planning and zoning regarding the property.
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Read the full story on the Baltimore Sun’s website.
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