Judge Norman Stone isn?t concerned if Frederick Mackler will flee the country.
The judge has a much more pressing concern.
“I?m worried about him blowing up the neighborhood,” Stone said.
Stone on Wednesday revoked a $1 million bail for Mackler, 59, the man accused of shooting fireworks from his fourth-floor Pikesville condominium for the past two years, startling neighbors with deafening blasts and blinding flashes in the middle of the night.
Stone recited the cache police said they found in Mackler?s home Monday: 12 handguns, a rifle, two shotguns, an Uzi submachine gun, cocaine and marijuana in addition to the pyrotechnics.
“And a partridge in a pear tree,” the judge added.
Mackler?s attorney, Richard C. B. Woods, said in Wednesday?s hearing in Baltimore County District Court that his client is chronically depressed and “self-medicating.” Woods described the device that Mackler?s neighbors ? and police ? said has kept them baffled for months as a “bird banger,” frequently used by farmers to scare birds and rodents from crops.
“I?m not a psychiatrist but I believe this was a cry for help,” said Woods, who asked Stone to reduce Mackler?s bail to $100,000.
But prosecutors said Mackler, who appeared via television from the county detention center and did not speak at the hearing, admitted to police he was “mad at his neighbors.”
Police began investigating complaints from Mackler?s neighbors in September 2007, eventually installing security cameras and calling in the bomb squad that pinpointed the blasts from his condominium on the 8000 block of Brynmor Court.
Assistant State?s Attorney Kristin Blumer told the judge that Mackler ? retired from a consumer lighting products business ? has a second home in Costa Rica and disposable cash, making him a flight risk.
“There?s no question the folks in the community are afraid of this individual,” Blumer said. “He has terrorized them, quite frankly, over a period of months.”
Police have charged Mackler with 10 counts including possessing narcotics, disturbing the peace, reckless endangerment and concealing a deadly weapon.
