MURDER USA: VIOLENT CRIME TURNING ST. MARYS INTO A GHETTO, THE SHERIFF BUDGET GROWS, MORE SHERIFF BUILDINGS ARE PLANNED, AND MORE BULLETS FLY DAY AND NIGHT

By Ken Rossignol

THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY

News & Commentary

LEXINGTON PARK, MD. – While the newly minted St. Mary’s Convict Sheriff Steve Hall wanders around St. Mary’s County attempting to fight crime by talking it to death before gullible groups like the Chamber of Commerce, the shootings continue unabated, and the murders between gangs of thugs grow more deadly. The sad truth about law enforcement in St. Mary’s County is that the Sheriff’s Department functions as a private club paid with tax dollars and runs a political operation aided by the embrace of social media and grandstanding with a constant flow of public relations stunts. 

Dozens of unused new police vehicles line parking lots of St. Mary’s County. THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY photo

The elected St. Mary’s Commissioners fear the power of the Fraternal Order of Police and those who find reasons to suck up to the convict sheriff and his Keystone Cops.  Newly hired and trained deputies quickly learn the lay of the land, and many leave for other agencies that don’t prescribe butt-kissing as the chief path to promotion and success. The taxpayers lose out on the cost of training for each of the deputies that flee, leaving behind a parking lot full of unused police cruisers.

BLOODSHED IN THE GHETTO

Mother’s Day weekend was celebrated by Lexington Park hoodlums with gunfire that resulted in two people wounded, one shot in the stomach and another wounded in the leg, just four weeks after Marcus Anthony Day was shot dead at the Sheetz in Great Mills.  An unnamed 15-year-old teen was arrested on May 5, 2023, in King George County, Virginia, after he fled Maryland as police began pursuing evidence from the April 4, 2023, murder.  Police were called to Sheetz for gunfire at 10:37 pm that evening, and shortly afterward, Marcus Day arrived at MedStar St. Mary’s Hospital with fatal gunshot wounds.

Two other reports of gunfire and wounded miscreants took place over Mother’s Day weekend, along with a brawl at the Applebee’s located near Walmart on Rt. 235.

St. Mary’s Convict Sheriff Steve Hall issued these two reports: on Saturday, May 13, 2023, at 6:04 pm, St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to the report of a shooting at the 21500 block of Wilcutt Street in Lexington Park. A 17-year-old male victim was located suffering from a gunshot wound to the abdomen and was transported to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.

On Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 14, 2023, at 11:05 pm, deputies responded to the area of Primrose Willow Lane and Creeping Primrose Lane in Lexington Park for the report of shots fired. Shell casings were located on the scene. Later a 22-year-old male victim arrived at a local hospital with a gunshot wound to the arm.

While some say that the good die young, that can’t be said for the murder victim at Sheetz.  Marcus Day was not good while he was young.

Day was dead from gunfire administered by a 15-year-old male who will be charged as an adult. Under new laws enacted by the super-liberal Maryland General Assembly, the killer won’t be identified until the court approves of the adult charges of first and second-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a minor for the alleged murder of Marcus Day.

Marcus-Anthony-Day-arrest-warrant-for-attempted-robbery-and-assault-in-2017-St.-Marys-Sheriff-Jail-photo

Marcus Anthony Day was one of three men charged in the attempted armed robbery of a Mexican restaurant worker in Leonardtown in August of 2016. 

Travon-Markell-Courtney-sentenced-to-eight-years-for-armed-robbery-of-restaurant-worker-in-Leonardtown-2016

The victim of Day and Travon Markell Courtney, his accomplice, was accosted by the thugs near the Leonardtown firehouse and was able to elude the predators as he walked home from his job. Day and Courtney were in the process of performing the only jobs they had been known to perform.

“The only job he has held is conspiracy to rob; he’s not in the wrong crowd. He is the wrong crowd. He is one of the biggest dangers to the community I have seen.”

Circuit Court Judge David Densford about Marcus Anthony Day
St. Mary’s Circuit-Court-Judge-David-Densford

St. Mary’s Circuit Court Judge David Densford, in an unusually harsh departure from his normal stance of being a soft touch, said at the sentencing of Marcus Day: “The only job he has held is conspiracy to rob; he’s not in the wrong crowd. He is the wrong crowd. He is one of the biggest dangers to the community I have seen.” Densford then sentenced Day to ten years in prison.

The prosecutor accused Marcus Day and Courtney of taking advantage of the restaurant worker’s lack of understanding of English, but since their target could escape their clutches, he apparently understood the international language of crime and that running from criminals like Day and Courtney was the best course of action.  Courtney turned eighteen just a few days before the crime; he entered a guilty plea and was awarded eight years in the slammer.

When the robbery in Leonardtown took place, crime was breaking out all over.

An internal investigation being conducted by the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department into the conduct of Captain Daniel Alioto was underway just two years after Captain Steve Hall was suspended for two weeks by Sheriff Tim Cameron.

Capt. Hall was in charge of a training use of a farm next to Wildewood for a shooting demonstration with automatic weapons that resulted in live gunfire penetrating a home and impacting just a few feet from a sleeping infant. Sheriff Cameron said he was mortified and would order an investigation. When the investigation got too close to Captain Hall, Cameron dropped the probe being conducted by an outside agency, put Captain Hall back on full duty, and never issued a public report on the shooting.

Steve-Hall-arrest-photo-Gunnison-County-Sheriff-Colorado-Assault-Conviction-November-1991

Sheriff Cameron returned from a vacation cruise in the Caribbean with Captain Alioto and their wives, and the next day issued Capt. Alioto an ultimatum to resign or be demoted to the rank of corporal.

 The only records available were that an unnamed deputy resigned while under investigation for truthfulness. Sources say that Alioto ordered detectives under his supervision to lie about evidence in criminal cases.  Cameron hid behind the excuse of not being able to disclose personnel actions as his reason for failing to inform the public about crimes being committed by his top commanders.

With the upheaval in the agency between 2014 and 2016, it is no wonder that crime was soaring in St. Mary’s County. With his likely successor, Alioto, gone from the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department and Hall tainted by the shooting at homes scandal, Sheriff Cameron had to focus on winning another term in 2018.

What Cameron may have known, and the public at large did not know, was that when Steve Hall was hired as a correctional officer in St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department, Hall failed to disclose his criminal conviction for assault in Colorado which resulted in his incarceration for violent assault.  The criminal background of Steve Hall didn’t surface until three weeks before the primary election in 2022. As the Good Old Boys of the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department and their inbred campaign operatives gathered around and implored the voters not to allow an outsider to be nominated, Hall won over two opponents, one of the St. Mary’s Commissioner John O’Connor.  The other candidate, retired Deputy  Todd Fleenor, only filed to run in the primary as revenge for being disciplined for participating in an illegal gambling operation in Waldorf being operated by Maryland State Police Lt. George White and Orphans Court Judge Michael White.

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January 7, 2022, was another day that Fleenor had the payroll clock running backward when an incident was sustained in which he failed to properly supervise his deputies under his command when they used force in extracting a suspect from a vehicle that was involved in an assault. The incident was not reported by Fleenor and cost him twenty-four hours of pay.  Records obtained by THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY of the participants in the illegal gambling operation show that Deputy Stephen Simonds and Todd Fleenor used their agency emails and did so from as far back as 2017. Sheriff’s disciplinary records show that using the email by the two deputies poorly reflected on the agency, and a written reprimand was issued to Fleenor by Major Mike Merican. (Convict Sheriff Steve Hall promoted Stephen Simonds to the rank of captain as one of his first acts when taking office.)




The lack of professionalism permeated the ranks of the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department, as demonstrated by the drunken escapade of a correctional officer and a deputy off on a training mission at Easton, Maryland, to learn how to be honor guards for funerals. The two went out to drink as part of their assignment, got loaded, and crashed a St. Mary’s Sheriff’s cruiser into the Dunkin Donuts on Rt. 50.  The deputy, Cpl Matt Rogers, lied about his participation and failure to prevent the correctional officer, Maurice Gogul, from driving drunk and later resigned. Rogers later resigned to keep from being fired.

The Clarion bar scene at the time, St. Mary’s Assistant Sheriff Mike Merican said he was slapped by Kelly Lowther.

The saga of Major Mike Merican and his party time in Ocean City revealed as much about his sad character as it did about Sheriff Cameron as they made sure a correctional officer lost her job.
THE REST OF THE STORY: Clarion bar video cleared Kelly Lowther of slapping Mike Merican; Sheriff Tim Cameron fired her anyway.

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