“Our investigation has concluded and the findings were referred to the [State’s Attorney’s Office] for review and final determination on possible charges,” Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Cristie Hopkins said Monday.

The Harford County State’s Attorney’s Office said it had received part of the Sheriff’s Office findings several days ago.

“The case is still under review with no status update at this time,” said Chief of Administration Caylin Ryden via email. “We are unable to provide a timeline as to when the review will conclude once the final reports are received.”

The Sheriff’s Office said it would release only “limited information” about the findings “if and when charges are filed.”

The crash happened on Route 543 in Bel Air, down the street from the high school and involved a school bus and two other vehicles. A preliminary investigation determined that one vehicle was heading north on Route 543 when it stopped to make a left turn. The vehicle was then struck from behind by another vehicle, which pushed it into the path of a school bus traveling south on Route 543, according to the sheriff’s office.

Elliott, 16, who was a soccer standout at her high school, was pronounced dead at the scene. She was in a car with Griffin, 17, who was released from the hospital about a week after the crash. Six others were also injured in the collision.

It was one of nearly 500 school bus crashes statewide this school year, two of them fatal. Aside from the Bel Air crash, an 11-year-old bicyclist died after colliding with a school bus last month in Montgomery County.

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The divorce record, filed in late October and withdrawn Thursday, accused the sheriff of being a “prolific adulterer” who “slept with” deputies and staff in the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office, which Jim DeWees supervises. The sheriff previously told The Sun that the allegations are “ridiculous and unsubstantiated.”

Although there’s no law against such relationships, the power dynamic between a manager and his employees makes it impossible to determine whether the relationship is consensual, Modesitt said.

“There’s always a concern about coercion” with such relationships, Modesitt said. “It’s a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.”

Office relationships in general are so problematic that some companies even require all employees to disclose if they’re romantically involved with a co-worker, she said.

“It really does undercut the normal operating procedures,” Modesitt said, adding that “usually government ethical rules are stricter than what you see in the private sector.”

In an ideal world, employees wouldn’t get into any romantic relationships in the workplace at all, said Joe Farrell, a philosophy professor at Loyola University Maryland who focuses on Ethical Theory, Medical Ethics, and Business Ethics.

He referenced the case of Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis being removed from the state’s 2020 election interference case over concerns that she was romantically involved with the lead lawyer in the case.

The removal had nothing to do with the quality of prosecution, Farrell said. It “just looks bad.”

With any workplace relationship, ”very often nothing but bad things can happen,” Farrell said. “It becomes a distraction from everything.”

The position of sheriff is defined in the state’s constitution, but the constitution doesn’t explicitly outline expected conduct of a Maryland sheriff.

The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office code of conduct, signed in 2023 by Jim DeWees, notes that “members shall maintain a level of moral conduct in his/her personal affairs, which is in keeping with the highest standards of the law enforcement profession.”

Heather DeWees, who filed the divorce complaint on Oct. 23, then withdrew it Thursday, is the elected clerk of the circuit court for Carroll County. In that role, she serves as the official recordkeeper and administrative manager for the court, handling nonjudicial functions such as managing public records, issuing wedding and business licenses, and administering oaths. She is responsible for maintaining the integrity and efficiency of the court system by managing case files, preparing dockets, and handling all paperwork related to civil, criminal, and other court actions.

Several documents in her own divorce filing had Heather DeWees’ signature as Clerk of the Court. In addition, when Jim DeWees tried to seal parts of the divorce complaint Nov. 2, saying that the “allegations are unsubstantiated and only serve to harm the individuals named without due process,” one day later, Heather DeWees struck the request to seal the records because of a technicality: It did not include a required certificate of service, she wrote.

In the Maryland Judiciary’s employee code of conduct, it notes: “Employees also must report instances in which they, in the performance of their job duties, are, or may become, directly involved in judicial matters involving a family member.”

The judiciary declined to comment on the DeWees case.

Heather DeWees’ attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

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“Defendant is a serial and prolific adulterer to the point that Plaintiff will never truly be able to ascertain the number of women the Defendant has slept with during their marriage,” the complaint, filed Oct. 23, reads.

It goes on to name two women Heather DeWees believes her husband “slept with” during the marriage (The Sun is not naming the women) and claims several other women, including “local attorneys and attorneys employed at the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s Office, Maryland State Troopers and staff, Carroll County Sheriff’s Office deputies and staff, and other candidates for elected office in Carroll County,” were also having affairs with the defendant.

Jim DeWees said via email that the claims are “ridiculous and unsubstantiated,” and said it was a “tabloid story.” His attorney, Alan Billian, said the claims were “a personal family allegation that shouldn’t have been filed in the first place, and there will be no further comments.”

Later in the day, after the complaint allegations were made public, Billian said in an email that Heather DeWees had filed a voluntary dismissal of the divorce action. He included a copy of the filing, which said the action was being dismissed “without prejudice, and for cause.”

Heather DeWees declined to comment through an employee at her office. Her attorney did not return messages requesting comment.

Court records show Jim DeWees tried to seal parts of the divorce complaint on Nov. 2, saying that the “allegations are unsubstantiated and only serve to harm the individuals named without due process.”

A day later, Heather DeWees struck the request to seal the records because of a technicality: It did not include a required certificate of service, she wrote.

Both the sheriff and the clerk of court are Republicans and both have filed for reelection in 2026.

Jim DeWees was elected sheriff in 2014 after retiring from the Maryland State Police as a captain, serving as the Special Operations Division Commander. He spent 25 years with the state police, beginning his career when he was 18. He became the county’s 58th sheriff in December 2014, and was reelected in 2018 and 2022.

Heather S. DeWees is the first elected female Clerk of Circuit Court for Carroll County. She took office in December 2018 and was reelected in 2022. She has also been the head girls’ basketball coach at Manchester Valley High School since 2009.

The complaint says the sheriff bullied his wife “about her weight and personal appearance, often citing both as justifications for his many affairs,” and that Heather DeWees sustained “years of mental anguish and emotional abuse” that included “verbal abuse.”

The couple married Oct. 10, 1998, in West Virginia, and their three children “are now emancipated,” according to the complaint. The position of sheriff is defined in the state’s constitution, but the constitution doesn’t explicitly outline expected conduct of a Maryland sheriff.

The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office code of conduct, signed in 2023 by Jim DeWees, notes that “members shall maintain a level of moral conduct in his/her personal affairs, which is in keeping with the highest standards of the law enforcement profession.”

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The nationwide coffee shop, which promises “a fun, mind-blowing experience” while “serving premium coffee in record time,” has been busy building a location on Abingdon’s Route 924 and announced an Edgewood shop a month ago.

The company held a community input meeting last week for what would be a third location, on the site of a Pizza Hut on Bel Air’s Churchville Road at Moores Mill Road.

Pizza Hut has not responded to a request for comment.

The site plan shows a drive-thru only building, with four parking spaces, two drive-thru lanes and an entrance on Route 22, as well as a “commercial driveway” onto Moores Mill Road.

The franchisee is requesting to “remove an existing restaurant” to build the drive-thru, according to the county website.

7 Brew has been busy expanding in Maryland lately. It’s opening two sites on the Eastern Shore and announced a location across from Salisbury University earlier this month.

The Edgewood location, meanwhile, will be reviewed by the county’s Development Advisory Committee on Wednesday.

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No injuries or property damage were reported, but police found several shell casings at the gas station on Washington Boulevard near Guilford Road.

Police were called at 1:39 a.m. Sunday for a report of shots fired.

Late this spring, a woman was shot at the Shell gas station across the street. Howard County Police charged Sabrina Khouri, 28, of Laurel, with attempted first-degree and second-degree murder, for allegedly shooting an acquaintance June 17 at the Shell station. The victim went to the hospital herself with non-life-threatening injuries after the shooting, according to police.

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Owner Justin Graham said he hopes to open Butcher on the Bay Restaurant in January, on the site of the newly closed Abbey Burger at 226 N. Washington St. in Havre de Grace.

Graham said he was approached by a few friends in the restaurant business, whom he did not want to identify at this time, to partner on the new venture.

“We’re excited,” he said. “We’ve never been on the restaurant side of things before.” 

Butcher on the Bay will be a steakhouse with features such as a raw bar, sushi and steamed shrimp, Graham said. They’re also planning to bring in “a really great mixologist from a pretty prominent restaurant.”

Geresbeck’s Food Market took over the long-standing grocery and butcher space in Baltimore County’s Kingsville community about a year ago. The building at 12037 Belair Road used to house Reds Market, which closed in 2018, and Greene’s Family Butcher Shop.

Butcher & Bay offers fresh seafood, local produce, butcher-cut meats, a deli and bakery. Graham said he’s exploring the possibility of opening a small butcher shop next door to the planned Havre de Grace restaurant.

The building where Butcher. & Bay will open is the historic Rodgers House Tavern, which is believed to be one of the city’s oldest structures.

“We’re excited to be in the Havre de Grace area and it’s a really awesome building,” Graham said, adding he plans to have the restaurant play up its historic features.

“Hopefully the town will really join us and love it,” said Graham, who grew up in Fallston and said he always loved visiting Havre de Grace.

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Town leaders have, for years, hoped to rehab and reuse it — possibly for an arts space, said Mayor Stacy Link in 2022 — but, on Monday, they accepted the fact that the 8,300 square-foot building could not be preserved. An engineering firm has concluded that the building can’t be salvaged, and the Town Council agreed Monday to move forward with “deconstructing” the building.

Deconstruction is, essentially, a more thoughtful approach to taking apart a building than “demolition,” and allows for the salvaging of materials.

“The other ‘d’ word just hurts,” Link said at the council meeting.

In February, a visual review conducted by engineering firm Michael Baker International indicated that the building was in need of “substantial remedial work” but could be stabilized.

The council agreed Monday to give the firm an additional $123,467 for deconstruction work, which includes seeing if the existing concrete slab could be reused.

It was “not a work order we really wanted to present the council,” said Town Manager Joe Cosentini, who was among those sounding regretful at Monday’s meeting.

Howard County owns South Branch Park and leases it to the Town of Sykesville for a nominal fee. Any new project on the site would have to undergo Howard County’s planning process, which includes a historic preservation review.

Town Council president Anna Carter asked if some of the bricks from the site could potentially be reused.

The cannery structure was built in 1917, and sold in 1944 to apple-products manufacturer A.H. Renehan & Son, known for making apple butter.

Sykesville got a $2 million state grant in 2022 for the cannery project. The town noted that the project has funding allocated for the next several years, which are expected to be reimbursed through the state capital grant.

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“We wanted to bring a little of everything,” said Sykesville’s Lisa Oh, when describing Little Explorers Cafe, set for a Nov. 15 grand opening at the small Johnsville Station shopping center at the corner of Johnsville and Sykesville roads.

Oh, who grew up in Severn in Anne Arundel County but moved to the Eldersburg/Sykesville area in 2018, said she was inspired by places such as The Little Towns Children’s Museum in Bethesda and Play Museum, which has three Maryland locations.

Little Explorers is aimed at kids from birth through age 8, and will feature custom-crafted play spaces (such as a child-sized fire station, gas station, trees and a trail), arts and crafts, story times — plus thoughtful amenities like a child-sized toilet in the bathroom.

There will also be items that may remind parents of a science center and a nature center, such as real hermit crabs, “air tubes” that use air blowers to show how items move, and a “water feature” that Oh is keeping a surprise for now.

Perhaps most importantly for hungry kids and their families, there will be a selection of curated coffee and snacks, such as “musubi” (a sandwich-type snack often made with Spam and rice) and “croffles” (a croissant waffle). The cafe is also partnering with Open Seas Coffee Roasters, based in Stevensville in Queen Anne’s County.

Oh, who stays busy with three children of her own, ages 1, 3 and 6, said she had been thinking of starting up a play cafe for a while. She recently resigned from her corporate job, after having her third child.

“I wanted to bring something that was more of a space where families can get together with the kids, and have a safe space that engages children to use their imaginations, but also just to be like a meeting space,” Oh explained.

Little Explorers will have admission starting at $18 per child, with discounts for siblings and membership options. Adults are free, and the cafe space in the front will be open to the general public.

Oh said the community is “excited, especially the moms groups. A … Everyone is saying, ‘We need this kind of space in the community.'”

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Elite Baseball has asked the town to annex the Watersville Road site, where it hopes to build the facility. Mount Airy’s town council must still review the proposal, get public comment on it and then vote on whether to annex the land before the sports complex can be built.

Fourteen people spoke for 40 minutes during the public comment period at the start of Monday’s planning commission meeting, with many of them concerned about the volume of traffic such a facility could produce.

Matt Cougle, who said he moved to the town’s Nottingham community four years ago and whose backyard would overlook the sportsplex property, said he thinks “sports are great.” Still, the road could not handle the traffic the facility would generate, and it would not help the local economy.

Cougle referenced the “horrible” Oct. 14 tractor-trailer strike that damaged the Interstate 70 overpass above Mount Airy’s Route 27, which tied up traffic for many hours.

“How many accidents have we had on [I-]70 in the last six months” Cougle said. “That’s going to be every single weekend for a baseball tournament, from May until October.”

Echoing the concerns of many speakers, Cougle said he believes the sports complex should be built in an area that has a nearby hotel.

Planning commission chairperson Ralph Ghent said town officials would need to review the whole plan, and no official concept has been submitted.

Heather Wallace, an alternate board member, said: “I agree that traffic is an issue on that road, but I also think it’s really, really early in the process, and a lot could change. There could be more traffic between now and whenever a site plan would come in for approval. So, there’s so many things to consider that I think to disqualify an annexation based on something like that doesn’t make sense to me.”

Ghent noted Carroll County Commissioner Michael Guerin, who represents the area, is helping push state leaders to install a dedicated left-turn signal onto southbound Route 27/Ridge Road from Watersville Road, and an additional loading lane or lane extension.

Elite Baseball representatives also tried to reassure the public that the property would definitely be made available for use by local sports teams and the general public.

“It was never our intent to come in here and shut out the town. it was actually the complete opposite,” said Brian McKenna, explaining that youth sports will have initial access to the facility and Mount Airy residents are welcome to come over to the park, if there isn’t a large tournament going on, for example.

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The disease — and the effects of enduring eight surgeries in about 21 months — cast a long shadow over her life. At 40, she struggled with osteoporosis, shallow breathing, limited range of motion in her upper body, high cholesterol from the radiation and heart issues that she is still monitoring.

“It’s a luxury you lose, of not having had a life-altering trauma,” said the Howard County mother of four young children, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 38, in 2010.

Krause is a member of a growing “club” known as breast cancer survivors.

The average breast cancer survival rate overall is about 91%, per the National Institutes of Health — and virtually 100% for localized breast cancer, which means the cancer has not spread away from the breast tissue. The death rate for breast cancer has have fallen by more than 58% in the past 50 years, thanks to treatment and screening advances, according to a 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We have a very large population of people who are living a long time with long-term side effects,” said Krause, whose personal struggles prompted her to launch the YOUniversalLOVE oncology yoga practice.

She now offers yoga at Columbia’s Claudia Mayer/Tina Broccolino Cancer Resource Center and in her disco ball-filled basement, a highly purposeful reflection of her newfound “disco ball” philosophy.

Uncomfortable with the “survivor” label — because, she explained, it is a “past-tense” word, implying everything was over — Krause started calling herself a “disco ball,” a collection of broken pieces that came together to shine.

Her first time trying yoga, “I laid on the mat for the entire hour… That was all I could do.”

Survivors find support

Over in Westminster, former longtime Carroll Hospital nurse Tricia “Trish” Wagman has met plenty of survivors since she helped launch the hospital’s cancer support group in 1994.

Her familiarity with breast cancer took a darker personal turn, when Wagman was herself diagnosed with the disease — specifically, invasive ductal cancer — six years ago, at age 59.

Despite being “caught off guard” and ultimately getting 20 radiation treatments, Wagman kept working full-time and helped put on Carroll Hospital Foundation’s annual “Pink Fling” annual breast-care fundraiser.

She also took part in the same support group she originally helped lead.

“It was awkward to be part of the support group,” Wagman said, but noted everyone was very welcoming of her doing it.

In 2022, she retired after 36 years of working with the hospital, and now chairs the Pink Fling, which took place Oct. 19 in Upperco, Baltimore County.

Wagman isn’t the only survivor in her family. The youngest of seven, she said two of her five sisters had breast cancer and both are now doing well.

“The advances in the early detection have been big and the surgical advances have been amazing. They have come so far with lumpectomy,” she said, noting the rise in treating breast cancer with lumpectomies instead of radical mastectomies that left many with lymphedema (swelling related to the lymphatic system), has helped.

‘Advocacy is a really big part of my story’

Krause said she only got a prompt diagnosis because her doctor urged her to get a lump in her breast biopsied despite an imaging center telling her she was fine and to come back in six months.

“Advocacy is a really big part of my story, because I advocated for myself and I believe I saved my own life,” she noted. “I truly believe the story would be different if I had waited those six months.”

She now wants to focus on survivorship and helping others like her.

“There was nobody, 15 years ago, guiding me at all with what to do now,” Krause said, adding that she learned how important it is to find community and an outlet for one’s feelings.

“No matter what the emotion is, you are going to be OK,” she said.

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