ABCDE LOCAL HOME PAGE 84, 9 a.m. 90, noon 92, 5 p.m. 85, 9 p.m.
Obituaries Jack O’Connell, 88, was a diplomatic adviser and the closest American confidant of Jordan’s King Hussein. C6
Kwame Brown’s debt turns
by Mike DeBonis
When D.C. Council member Kwame R. Brown wants an escape, he can climb into a Cadillac Escalade, head down to a private yacht club on the Anacostia Riv- er and fire up Bullet Proof, his 38-foot powerboat, before returning to his four- bedroom Hillcrest home. Since December, three credit-card is- suers have sued Brown (D-At Large) in D.C. Superior Court, alleging nonpay- ment of bills and interest exceeding $55,000, court records indicate. Brown settled one of the cases in April, agreeing to pay $500 a month toward a bill of nearly $24,000; the other cases remain active. The debt is compounded by Brown’s repeated borrowing against his home and the purchase of the boat, a 1994 Chris-Craft Continental express cruiser, on credit. Brown estimates that his personal debt exceeds $700,000. The situation clashes with what Brown is saying on the campaign trail, where he often presents his financial bona fides and emphasizes fiscal respon- sibility in his effort to win a job that gives him great control over $10 billion in annual city spending. “I am a bean counter,” Brown told some Ward 3 resi- dents last month. As council chairman, he added, “you need to get in the weeds.” Brown’s opponent in the Democratic
primary, former Ward 5 council member Vincent B. Orange Sr., has started to make Brown’s credit-card debt a cam- paign issue by directly linking it to the city’s fiscal health — the District is peril-
brown continued on C4
Nonprofit’s discrepancies challenged
but forgotten Montgomery says it paid for Centro Familia project that differed from contract
by Miranda S. Spivack
The walls were painted, the office space spruced up, computers purchased and new carpeting laid down. When the bills came due, Montgomery County gave Cen- tro Familia $51,000 to pay for the work done at the nonprofit’s offices at First Baptist Church of Wheaton. But there were some problems. County officials say its contract with Centro Familia required that the work be done at another Wheaton site, on Am- herst Avenue, and that computers were not part of the deal. Not to mention, the church where the work was done is slated to be torn down. But if anyone at County Executive Isiah
Leggett’s Department of General Services noticed the discrepancies when the pay- ments were made last year, nothing was done about it. Montgomery officials began taking ac- tion in the winter, around the same time that independent Inspector General Thomas J. Dagley, as part of a broader look into county spending, raised poten- tial problems with the contract. In February, David Dise, head of Gener-
al Services, sent a letter to Centro Familia and its executive director, Pilar Torres, challenging the payments and threat- ening to demand reimbursement. He asked the nonprofit group, which ran a bi- lingual child-care program and trained home day-care providers, to explain why the renovations were made on leased space at the church instead of at a ware-
centro continued on C4
The heat, the streets You know it’s hot, and you know there will be traffic problems. But find out how hot from the Capital Weather Gang and spots to avoid from Dr. Gridlock. Go to
PostLocal.com.
METRO They’d
sunday, july 18, 2010 THE DISTRICT
A pound at a time Providence Hospital in Northeast takes on the obesity epidemic by encouraging community members to commit to a year-long weight-loss program. C3
into ammo Council member’s opponent in primary cites credit-card issues
been apart for ages
C DC MD VA S
JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
An important distinction Believe it or not, some folks are nostalgic about the towering Mount Murtagh landfill in Fairfax County. But a “highpoint” collector says that place is just not natural. C3
Immigrant detainees bound for Va. center SURGE OF CRIMINAL
CHARGES SINCE ’09 Large facility the result
of federal screening program by Kevin Sieff
The largest immigrant detention cen- ter in the mid-Atlantic will soon open in Prince Edward County, an effort to ac- commodate Virginia’s unprecedented surge in detentions of illegal immi- grants picked up on criminal charges. The $21 million, privately run center will house up to 584 immigrant detain- ees when it opens its doors. Over the next year, it might grow to hold 1,000 prisoners, most of them snagged by the federal government’s growing Secure Communities program, which aims to find and deport criminal illegal im- migrants. Last month, Virginia became the sec-
ond state, after Delaware, to implement the program statewide, requiring jails and prisons to screen prisoners by im- migration status and check their finger- prints against the country’s immigra- tion database.
With three months left in the fiscal LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Edythe Simmons, left, and her mother, Eddye L. Williams, are back under the same roof in Northeast Washington. Simmons had been in nursing-home care. She was comfortable there, but something was missing: her mother.
Illness came between this mother, 110, and daughter, 85, but a home health-care program brought them together again
by Michael E. Ruane E
ddye L. Williams’s left hand dances in the air like a shin- ing brown bird, rising and falling as she imitates the ocean waves of her native Florida, where she was a child more than a century ago. At 110, she doesn’t see or hear so well, and her speech is hard to under- stand. So her hands help tell her story, as she speaks of the moon and the stars and of waiting on the Lord. “Wait, wait, wait,” she will say with a
finger in the air. God will answer. Three weeks ago, her patience was re- warded when her 85-year-old daugh- ter, Edythe Simmons, returned from the nursing home where she had been for the past three years. Simmons, partially paralyzed from
a stroke 20 years ago, had been recov- ering from breast cancer. Now she is back in the bedroom with the blue cur- tains, across the landing from her mother in the plain brick house they have shared for decades. Seeing the Lord’s work, Williams
says, “Why, then, should I worry?” Both women are miracles, of sorts,
as is their reunion in their Northeast Washington home. Williams is be- lieved to be Washington’s oldest citi- zen. Simmons, despite her afflictions, is overjoyed to be back with her moth- er.
Their reunion is also the result of an intensive program at the Washington Hospital Center designed to care for very sick elder people in their homes and keep them out of the hospital. “The idea . . . is to do home-based
primary care for the most ill elders in the community,” said Eric De Jonge, a
reunion continued on C10 detention continued on C4 Taking the stage to grab some laughs
Isaac Witte, 3, of Silver Spring tells a joke at Saturday’s JokeFest at the Fenton Street Market in downtown Silver Spring. Edward Faine, a Takoma Park resident and author of 10 children’s books, hosted the event and encouraged children to take the stage and tell a joke to receive a book. Story, C3.
XIAOMEI CHEN/ THE WASHINGTON POST
for All Hands on Deck, her controversial crime-stopping tactic, which saturates the city with a highly visible police presence. “I didn’t see any cruisers out there — where are they?” she asked an assistant chief who was monitoring police activity on an Apple iPad next to his dinner plate. I chimed in that two cop cars with lights flashing and sirens blaring had zoomed past the restaurant just before she arrived. “Then we’ve failed,” Lanier replied. What?
D
“If you hear sirens, it means we have failed to prevent the crime,” she explained. “If we have to make an arrest, then we’ve failed.” Last year, D.C. police made about 48,000 arrests — just the kind of “failure” that I imagine crime victims want to see. Very impressive: Push the troops, wow the public. And after less than four years on the job, Lanier is basking in the glow of being one of the city’s most effective, and popular, public officials. Her homicide squad has the highest closure rate in three years and, so far this year, homicides are on track to drop below 100 for the first time in decades.
District police chief transcends race, gender in serving the city
.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier had taken a dinner break Friday while checking up on officers deployed
COURTLAND MILLOY According to polls taken earlier this
year, she has a 71 percent approval rating among D.C. residents — compared with 47 percent for Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and 43 percent for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who appointed them both. No small feat.
Back in 2006, when she was nominated for the job, Lanier got mad at me — “frustrated,” as she put it — for asking whether it mattered that the top cop in a mostly black city was a white woman. “I thought more people would be interested in the new police chief ’s policies and crime-fighting strategies than in her race and hairstyle,” she said at the time, sounding exasperated. But let’s face it: Race and gender
matter. Only 1 percent of the nation’s police chiefs are women, and Lanier is just the third white chief in the District’s modern era. (Before that,
milloy continued on C4
year, the number of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions detained in Virginia and the District has increased by 50 percent from last year’s total, to 2,414. Those numbers are expected to in- crease now that the program is being implemented statewide. The new facility “is mostly here to ad- dress the impact of Secure Communi- ties,” said Robert Helwig, assistant di- rector of Immigration and Customs En- forcement. “We do anticipate a surge in detainees.” The immigration debate has grown increasingly polarized, and the Secure Communities program has become a symbol of that division. John T. Morton, head of ICE, calls it the agency’s attempt to “secure the nation and protect public safety.” But many immigrant advocates, including Enid Gonzalez, a lawyer at CA- SA of Maryland, say the program “claims to keep violent criminals off the streets, but instead it’s just incarcerating in- nocent busboys.” There’s one point on which experts
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