Bizarre twist

The address seemed familiar the other day when Baltimore County Police responded to a call for a person in crisis on Powers Avenue in Cockeysville.

24-year-old David Emory Linthicum shot an officer at that house multiple times Wednesday and then ran off, kicking off a two-day manhunt. On Thursday evening, he shot a county detective in the torso and extremities several times, stole the detective's police car, and led a chase into Fallston, Harford County, where he was eventually arrested at dawn on Friday.

As of this writing, the first officer wounded has been released from hospital care, but the detective is in the Shock-Trauma unit at University of Maryland Hospital downtown, where Dr Thomas Scalea reported him to be in critical condition, facing multiple reconstructive surgeries.

We don't know yet what precipitated this insane rampage. But we know something else even more horrible, if possible, happened at the same house on Powers Avenue in 2008.

That was when Nicholas Browning, at the time a high-school honor student, killed his parents and both of his younger brothers with the father's pistol. He was spending the night at a friend's house, and snuck back home to shoot all four people as they slept. He claimed that his parents were abusive alcoholics, an allegation without fact, and bragged to detectives that he would be in line for a substantial insurance payout and inheritance.

The Browning family

I don't know if any money accrued to him as a result of his wiping out his whole family. He is currently a resident of the Western Correctional Institution in scenic Cumberland, Maryland for this, and his next three lives, so... 

Browning turned 31 the day the detective was shot.

We all know the feeling of driving down a street and someone pointing out a house where some horrible murder or other crime occurred...and you wonder if anyone would buy that house. I can't say for sure, but property records seem to indicate that Linthicum's family bought the house (below) from the Browning inheritors.

There are those among us who would never have done that, believing the house itself to carry a curse. 

There might be something to that.