Leesburg man captured
after tipster calls ‘AMW’
One of two men suspected in a home improvement scam was captured in Florida after the television program “America’s Most Wanted” aired a story about the scheme.
Police said two men posed as licensed contractors to con a woman into paying $90,000 for a home improvement project. The suspects took the money and ran, police said. They were suspected of swindling more than half-a-million dollars in similar scams in Northern Virginia, Silver Spring and Germantown.
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Leslie Alberto Irias, 39, of Leesburg, was captured Wednesday in Miami after a viewer saw his picture on “AMW” Saturday. The other suspect, Mario Ramirez-Cadenas, was arrested in Kansas in December.
Bus full of kids catches fire
Forty-two children and six adults escaped from a bus after it became engulfed in flames on Interstate 270 in Frederick, police said.
The incident happened around 9:15 a.m. Thursday just south of the Buckeystown Pike.
The children were between 8 and 15 years old and were headed to a ski resort in Pennsylvania. Police said they didn’t know where the group was from.
Gang associate gets 4 years
An MS-13 associate was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for illegally re-entering the United States after being deported, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Maryland.
Christian Castellon-Gutierrez, 18, had already been deported to Guatemala in 2008 after he was convicted of robbing a man at knife-point in Montgomery County. Castellon-Gutierrez was arrested again in April after a stabbing outside a Baltimore bar.
Compiled by Scott McCabe
