ABCDE METRO wednesday, september 1, 2010 POSTLOCAL.com 79, 9 a.m. 91, noon 94, 5 p.m. 85, 9 p.m.


Obituaries Laurent Fignon, a French cyclist, was a two-time Tour de France winner and suffered one spectacularly narrow loss in that race to American Greg LeMond. B6


Whither the weather Want to know if the 90-degree days are going to keep coming or if tropical storms threaten your holiday weekend? Get the latest from the Capital Weather Gang.


THE DISTRICT


‘Stoked’ about lion cubs The National Zoo welcomes four newborns with joy, relief and caution after one delivered by another mother in May died. The babies could go on display this fall — by which time there could be more. B5


SIGNATURES WERE REJECTED


Montgomery board says it obeyed state high court


by Michael Laris


Richard M. Lindstrom is an an- alytical chemist for the federal government. He’s 69 years old, lives and works in Gaithersburg, and can tell you all about gamma rays, radioactive isotopes and neutron activation analysis. But according to election offi- cials in Maryland, he doesn’t know how to sign his own name. “I dropped my middle initial


PHOTOS BY TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST Yesenia Mendoza, center, Marine Sgt. Ronald A. Rodriguez’s girlfriend, sits with his son Diego Rodriguez, left, and stepson Angel Rodriguez.


Being a Marine was his dream Falls Church man killed during 3rd tour overseas is buried


by Christy Goodman D


iego and Angel Rodri- guez, son and stepson of U.S. Marine Sgt. Ronald A. Rodriguez, clutched white carna-


tions as they listened to the President’s Own Marine band play


“Onward, Christian Sol-


diers.” The boys, accompanied by more than 100 family members and friends, followed their 26- year-old father’s coffin Tuesday as the son of Bolivian immi- grants was carried to his burial site at Arlington National Cem- etery.


Rodriguez was on a foot patrol in Afghanistan’s Helmand prov- ince Aug. 23 when he was killed by a roadside bomb blast, said a Marine Corps spokesman. He had been deployed in August for his first tour in Afghanistan but his third tour overseas. He served in Iraq in 2003 and again in 2004. Francisco Rodriguez called his son “a brave soldier” in an earlier report in The Washington Post. With his father’s permission, Rodriguez, of Falls Church, en- listed in the Marine Corps in Au- gust 2002, not long after he grad- uated from J.E.B. Stuart High


on my official signature, oh, I don’t know, probably 40 years ago,” Lindstrom said. “It’s my sig- nature. It’s acceptable to my bank and everybody else. But not the Board of Elections.” Lindstrom’s signature was among thousands that have been thrown out in recent weeks as


B DC MD VA S


JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON


A trove of goodwill A retired antique dealer, 92, has collected hundreds of ornate cigar boxes over the years. Now, inspired by a charitable visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center with a friend, he donates such containers to injured soldiers to boost their spirits. B2


Lawsuits seek to restore Md. ballot petitions


election officials scrutinized – and ultimately rejected – two pe- titions in Montgomery County to put questions before voters in No- vember. On Tuesday, a Republican ac- tivist pushing for term limits and a group opposed to a recently ap- proved ambulance fee appealed to a Montgomery court to restore the stricken signatures and revive their dismissed petitions. Unlike high-profile instances


of petition-gatherers run amuck, including irregularities by a crew working for then-D.C. Mayor An- thony A. Williams in 2002, the is- sue in Montgomery is a more tri- fling one, though not without far- reaching consequences. Maryland law, as interpreted by its highest court, says voters have two choices: They must sign their name as it appears on the statewide voter registration list, or they must include the surname from their registration and “at least one full given name and the initials of any other names.” Unfortunately for the Mont-


gomery’s petition gatherers — montgomery continued on B5


Rhee helps, hinders by Bill Turque The casket carrying Rodriguez, who was killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb, is taken to his grave.


School and before he turned 18. Jonathan Morales, 26, who


grew up two doors down from the Rodriguez family, said that when Rodriguez got his uniform,


he made sure to come over and show it to him.


“I know he was real proud to be in the military,” said Morales, who had played soccer and bas-


 Marine is remembered as cheerful, patriotic. B4 C


make high clouds over Washington. We don’t much like weather around these parts. And if you so much as send a band of tropical rain our way, we’ll go grocery shopping on you. We mean business, Earl. Ever heard of Storm Tracker, Live Super Doppler, MaxTrack and Doppler 2 Radar Loop? That’s how we know it’s weather. And we’ll be ready. Ever heard of Pepco? Forget


Mess with Washington at your own peril, Earl COURTLAND MILLOY


ome on, Hurricane Earl, take your best shot. Brush up against us;


And don’t pay attention to


everything you heard, then. Especially what Maryland House Majority Leader Kumar P. Barve (D-Montgomery) said at a hearing Monday on the utility’s most recent screw-ups: “I have relatives in Mumbai who cannot believe how often we lose power.” That is so unfair. Mumbai uses thermal, gas and hydro power to make electricity. Pepco uses what — hamsters on a treadmill?


what Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said, either: “Some similar issues were raised in 2003 after Hurricane Isabel. There were a number of recommendations then, some of which were enacted and some of which were not.” The issues were first raised during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 — and, boy, were they addressed. “We are now spending more


money on information technology, like smart relays,” a Pepco spokesman said in the aftermath of Floyd, which, having been downgraded to a


ketball with Rodriguez. “He did say he wanted to join the best. He wanted to join the Marines.” Morales recalled his longtime friend as being kind and thoughtful, the kind of young


marine continued on B4


Since Mayor Adrian M. Fenty brought her to town in 2007, she has closed schools by the dozens, fired teachers by the hundreds, and revamped the way educators are evaluated and paid. In doing so, D.C. Schools Chancellor Mi- chelle A. Rhee has polarized not just the local and national educa- tion communities, but also the city’s Democratic primary elector- ate. A Washington Post poll in Au- gust found that Rhee, the public face and voice for Fenty’s corner- stone issue, is such a divisive fig- ure that politically she is a virtual wash. Forty-one percent of regis- tered Democrats regard her rec- ord as a reason to vote for Fenty over D.C. Council Chairman Vin- cent C. Gray in the Sept. 14 con- test. Forty percent say her leader-


Fenty’s reelection bid D.C. schools chief has polarized Democratic voters, survey finds


ship of the school system is a rea- son to return the mayor to private life.


Views on her leadership are also sharply divided, with 44 per- cent of residents approving of her job performance and 38 percent disapproving — about the same as the findings of a January Post poll. Twenty-eight percent of reg- istered Democrats regard her rec- ord as “extremely important” to their vote for mayor; 23 percent say she’s “not too important.” “You have her very equally ei- ther a positive or a negative force,” said Ted Trabue, president of the D.C. State Board of Education. Rhee said she was pleased that the results show many voters con- sider her reform effort a reason to back Fenty. “We’ve always known that the


aggressive reforms we have pur- sued would stir opposition,” she wrote in an e-mail. “The fact that people are saying that what we’re doing is more of a reason to vote for the mayor than not shows that many people see the progress


rhee continued on B5 A whine that can drive teens away


mere tropical storm, delivered a “glancing blow” that still managed to leave tens of thousands without power. “Customers have told us they wanted to make reporting power outages more convenient.” See, customers told them. And now — a little more than a decade later, that’s all — Pepco is saying: We hear you. Must have been those downed telephone lines. But it’s all good now. Pepco recently announced that it had developed a “six-point reliability enhancement plan,” complete with “new initiatives” and “new activities” that will significantly reduce those annoying power outages. “This is not just Pepco’s plan,


it’s the community’s plan,” said Thomas H. Graham, Pepco’s regional president. “Pepco realizes that reliability enhancement is a critical issue


milloy continued on B8


Device at Gallery Place is intended to annoy potential troublemakers


by Theresa Vargas Gallery Place business owners


met with District officials a few weeks ago to voice their concern that loitering teenagers who sometimes get into fights in one of the city’s busiest retail and en- tertainment strips were costing them customers. The result of that session premiered this week: a device that emits a high-pitched, headache-inducing sound that only young ears can hear. The Mosquito, as the $1,000 de- vice is called, hung outside the Chinatown entrance to the Gal- lery Place Metro station Tuesday, annoying its intended targets and then some. The young and a few


not-so-young could hear the piercing, constant beeeeep, beeeeep, beeeeep. “I can definitely hear it very


loudly,” 19-year-old Brooke Sawin- ski said. “It’s pretty blasting.” Beeeeep, beeeeep, beeeeep. “I’m about to leave because it’s annoying,” said her friend, Cassie Boiselair, 20. The two Connecticut natives were in town looking at colleges and said they understand the problem. Boiselair used to work in the neighborhood and said she won’t take her iPod out until she’s on her Metro train for fear of having it stolen, but she questioned the solution. “Couldn’t they think of something different?” Gallery Place has become a popular hangout spot for teen- agers in recent years and was the site of a brawl last month that spilled into the Metro system and left several passengers injured, ending with the arrests of three


teenagers. It was around that time that business owners arranged to meet with a staff member of D.C. Coun- cil member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2). About a dozen people gath- ered, including representatives of the city’s police department, transportation department and Metro. “There was a general concern of


lawlessness on the streets,” said Evans, who represents the East End business area. “I am con- cerned anytime residents and businesses complain to us about feeling unsafe.” Evans did not attend the meet- ing and knew nothing about the device until Tuesday. He said it was purchased by Herbert Miller, founder of Western Development, which built Gallery Place. Miller did not return calls for comment. “Our role — I want to stress this


mosquito continued on B8


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