ABCDE METRO tuesday, august 10, 2010 LOCAL HOME PAGE 81, 9 a.m. 93, noon 97, 5 p.m. 88, 9 p.m.


Obituaries Tony and Oscar winner Patricia Neal, 84, earned a reputation for excellence in acting despite a sporadic presence in films. B6


Lanier says Chinatown police detail is sufficient


But D.C. will increase patrols if Metro asks for help after brawl


by Derek Kravitz, Robert Thomson


and Clarence Williams


D.C. police are already out in force in the Chinatown area and won’t increase patrols unless Metro asks for more support, Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Mon- day after a weekend brawl in the rail system that involved dozens of people who boarded a train at the Gallery Place Metro station and wound up in a giant fight at the L’Enfant Plaza Station. “Anything Metro wants, we’re


going to give them, because they are always there for us when we need them,” she said. Lanier said a sergeant and 10


officers are assigned to regularly patrol the Chinatown area. The fight led to the arrest of one adult and two juveniles, and the hospi- talization of four people Friday night. “There’s always large crowds


there,” she said. “That’s why we have a detail there.” However, La- nier said the fight appeared to have begun on a train. Metro board Chairman Peter Benjamin said the agency re- sponded properly. “Everyone with Metro did what


they were supposed to do,” he said. “This incident started out- side Metro and officers at the sta- tion immediately called for help. Metro is incredibly safe.” According to Metro Transit Po- lice Deputy Chief David Webb, the incident began when people in the Gallery Place entertain- ment district began heading for the Metro station because of the 11 p.m. curfew for youths. Webb said that D.C. police and transit police expect this on summer weekends. Transit Police were watching the crowd when it arrived on the platform, Webb said, and al- though the youths were boister- ous, there was no behavior that warranted arrests.


Dozens of the youths boarded


the next Green Line train head- ing in the direction of Branch Av- enue, he said. When the train ar- rived at L’Enfant Plaza about three minutes later, a big fight spilled onto the platform, Webb said. At least one Transit Police officer was already at L’Enfant


brawl continued on B5


Reigniting a passion that never really died


PETULA DVORAK F


irst they came out in the hundreds, then by the thousands.


“It’s not coming out of the


closet, it’s more like coming out of the basement,” Arthur Gugick, 50, confessed to me this weekend in Chantilly, as he stood before the elaborate, plastic manifestation of a lifelong obsession he hid for many years — his Legos.


Gugick is a rock star in this world of middle-aged man-children who are embracing and celebrating their boyhood love of the iconic little brick. Before him was a display of some of the world’s most amazing landmarks, from


Cambodia’s Angkor Wat to England’s Big Ben, recreated by Gugick in painstaking detail with Lego bricks. The math teacher from Cleveland has custom-built platforms to transport the structures in a van bought specifically for his Lego expeditions. (He and his wife have agreements hammered out — he gets a $50 a week allowance and Lego conventions, she gets a two-week ski trip in the winter.) He told me about the calculus used to create the Roman Coliseum and the algebra that went into the leaning tower of Pisa.


On the other side of the


display, a guy from North Carolina interrupted us. “Did you see my clown?” he called over to me, and I decided to run away from the looming, leering crank he created from thousands of Lego pieces. It was cool, but eww, clowns. These are men, I learned, who


have emerged from an allegedly larval state they call “The Dark


BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST Brick Fair came to the Dulles Expo Center, where Arthur Gugick’s Lego artwork was on display.


Ages,” the years between childhood and adulthood when they didn’t Lego. “Well, I guess mine were really the dim ages, because I never


really stopped playing. I just did it in secret,” Gugick said. I watched as he answered questions from the 19,000 people who descended on the Dulles


Expo Center last weekend to admire works such as his at Brick Fair, the largest Lego fan


dvorak continued on B8


GOP candidate hopes to shake up Montgomery again


by Michael Laris


A Republican activist who sur- prised Montgomery County’s po- litical establishment two years ago with a successful referendum making property taxes harder to increase has revived another idea he hopes will shake up local poli- ticians: term limits. Robin Ficker, a GOP candidate for the County Council, submit- ted a stack of 16,000 signatures Monday to Montgomery officials to get a question on the ballot in November that would add term limits to the county’s charter. If 10,000 are certified, his measure will go to voters. Ficker tried this in 2000 and 2004, but voters narrowly reject- ed term limits both times. But he’s come up with a looser pro- posal that he thinks will mesh with the anti-incumbent elector- al mood that he says he has de- tected in months of signature- gathering at supermarkets across the county. The limits would kick in after three consecutive terms — not two, as with many such efforts, including his first — and they


montgomery continued on B5


Get your sports fix Post columnist Tracee Hamilton will be online Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. to chat about the most outrageous news from the world of sports. PostLocal.com.


THE REGION


NTSB criticizes Metro board In reviewing the fatal June 2009 Red Line crash, federal safety officials say the agency had lapses in safety and oversight management, which the board chairman questioned. B5


“We’ve convinced people that they could do much better.” — Raymond Bell Jr., founder of HOPE Project


B DC MD VA S


JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON


A call beyond duty Two soldiers come to the aid of a 69-year-old woman who thought she’d be spending her final moments on earth in her airborne Volkswagen Jetta. B2


Shooting suspects denied bond


FIVE-MINUTE HEARING


Pr. George’s exploring death penalty


by Matt Zapotosky The two alleged drug couriers


from Texas charged in the fatal shootings Friday of two women and two children in a squalid Prince George’s County apart- ment were ordered held without bond Monday, and prosecutors were exploring whether they can seek the death penalty, author- ities said.


Appearing on closed-circuit BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST Raymond Bell, left, with students at the rowhouse in Southeast that serves as a makeshift training center for the HOPE Project.


Opportunity of a lifetime D.C. job-training program aims to open doors — and minds


by Timothy Wilson


The fliers that Raymond Bell Jr. posted throughout the Barry Farm neighborhood held a few nuggets: free computer train- ing, a career path and a possible starting salary of $30,000. Might sound like a pittance to some, but


Ryan Lemmon was all ears. He had been flipping burgers at a McDonald’s for seven years when he met Bell last year. The pros- pect of getting ahead was tempting, espe- cially since the training was free. “He had me sold,” Lemmon, 23, said of


Bell’s proposal. “I weighed my options and it would benefit me to spend a couple hours a night in class.” So Lemmon signed up for Bell’s person- al war to change the minds of skeptical residents and overcome a mountain of sta- tistics telling him that the unemployment levels in neighborhoods such as Anacostia, Congress Heights and Kenilworth were in- tractable. Bell’s goals were modest. He wanted to reach just a few, providing an opportunity for unskilled young adults to find jobs that don’t involve construction, trash removal


or retail stores. His program is called the HOPE (Helping Other People Excel) Proj- ect, and its success hinges on students’ ability to find a job that leads to a career. “These kids have got to get jobs,” he said. Last week, D.C. Council Chairman Vin- cent Gray (D), a candidate for mayor, called the District’s unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent a “ticking time bomb,” that requires immediate intervention. Gray plans to bolster requirements that city contractors hire D.C. residents and in- vest more in transportation, the arts and small businesses. President Obama said last week that the


national economy is headed in the right di- rection, even though the national un- employment rate is 9.5 percent. “Climbing out of any recession, much less a hole as deep as this one, takes some time,” Obama said. In the District, neighborhoods includ- ing Anacostia and Congress Heights have long had the city’s highest unemployment rates.


Bell, a District native, graduated from Ballou High School in 1985. He’s a training manager at public affairs firm DDC Ad- vocacy, a skill he acquired while working


at the Department of Agriculture. “I saw the ability to impact people,” he said. “I saw the power of transferring learning.” After a consulting stint at Riggs Bank in 2003, Bell opened his own training service a year later in New Carrollton. Occa- sionally he would invite young people to learn about various computer software programs — impromptu sessions that led to the idea of the HOPE Project. “I knew that wasn’t enough,” he said. “I had to give them something tangible.” The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute released


a report last fall that criticized the employ- ment training component of the District’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, a federally funded program that provides cash and job training for the poor, for being too limited and not tailor- ing programs to participants’ needs. It concluded that participants are seldom prepared for higher-wage jobs. Bell’s program includes training in pro- fessional development, operating systems, software, system hardware and career de- velopment. Students will be trained in Mi- crosoft applications and have CompTIA’s


bell continued on B4


television, Darrell Lynn Bellard, 43, of Dickinson, and T’keisha Nicole Gilmer, 18, of Texas City, said nothing, except to answer Prince George’s District Court Judge Thomas Love’s standard questions during a five-minute hearing. Prosecutors were not given any chance to speak about the evidence or say why the pair should be held before Love ruled that they would continue to be held without bond. At a news conference after the hearing, Prince George’s State’s Attorney Glenn F. Ivey said that police still were gathering evi- dence and that prosecutors would weigh that evidence be- fore deciding whether they could seek the death penalty. Ivey said recent laws require


that he have either DNA linking suspects to crimes, videotaped confessions or a videotape of crimes in commission. Prosecu- tors were reviewing whether they had such evidence in this case.


shootings continued on B4


Activist proposes term limit referendum


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