gaithersblog.net

• Patricia M. Murret writes, Top state delegate charged with DWI:
  

  The state delegate arrested for drunken driving last week called the Gaithersburg assistant city manager he’d spent a couple hours with at a bar for a ride home from the police station.

• Patricia M. Murret writes, Olde Towne upgrade is moving forward:
  

  Three projects that could bring more than 960 new apartments and condominiums and nearly 60,000 square feet of retail and office space to Gaithersburg were unveiled at recent city meetings.

• Sebastian Montes writes, No charges filed in last week’s hit-and-run death:
  

  Police are still looking for leads on finding a second vehicle in connection with the hit-and-run death of a 64-year-old pedestrian in Gaithersburg last week, and the victim’s brother says a third car may have also been involved.

• Patricia M. Murret writes, Election finance reports sought ahead of schedule:
  

  Gaithersburg’s election board last week undertook its first formal campaign finance investigation ever, hiring an outside lawyer to assist and asking all seven candidates that ran for office in last month’s election to submit financial disclosures three weeks early.

• Patricia M. Murret writes, Lakelands residents challenge skate park process:
  

  Lakelands residents who fear an unsupervised skate park will be placed in their community have called Gaithersburg’s study process ‘‘flawed” and have proposed a look at alternative locations.

• Meghan Tierney writes, Snow’s early start catches road crews off guard:
  

  The region’s first snowfall of the season came a couple of hours earlier than expected this morning, resulting in widespread traffic trouble for county commuters.

Ernesto Londoño and Candace Rondeaux write in a front-page article in today’s Washington Post:

The Bloods and the Crips street gangs, notorious for ruthless violence since they emerged four decades ago in Los Angeles, have become increasingly influential in some of Washington’s Maryland suburbs as the gangs recruit in jails and prisons and as small neighborhood crews adopt their names and creeds, authorities say.

A series of attacks last month highlighted the changing role of the gangs in upper Montgomery County. Law enforcement officials attribute the violence, including a fatal stabbing at a bus station in Gaithersburg and shootings at a crowded grocery store in Rockville and outside the Shady Grove Metro station, to feuding between groups that identify themselves as Bloods and Crips.

“When you go to jail, you’ve got to pick a team,” said Wes Daily, executive director of the East Coast Gang Investigators Association. “Once you get into that prison system and you get involved in the niche, you become more illiterate and more unemployable; the only thing you can do is run with your clique. The same thing applies once you’re back on the streets.”

Daily said that Bloods and Crips are now more visible, more violent and more organized on the East Coast than at any other time in the gangs’ nearly 40-year history. “These guys have really stepped it up a notch,” he said. “With the activity that you’re seeing in Maryland, the simple issue is who just got out of jail, who is moving into the community and who’s taking over the block.”