BALTIMORE - It was an accident. That’s the ruling by the medical examiner’s office after the drowning death of 92Q DJ K-Swift.

The autopsy shows K-Swift died from a broken neck after diving into her swimming pool, but friends and fans must wait to find out whether alcohol played a role in the groundbreaking DJ’s death.

Fans would love to hear her voice one more time, but tapes, grief and memories are all 92Q listeners can cling to after Khia “K-Swift” Edgerton died early Monday morning.

The Baltimore medical examiner is calling her death an accident. An autopsy shows the 29-year-old’s neck was broken when she hit her head while diving into the water during her backyard party. Friends pulled her out, but CPR wasn’t administered until an ambulance arrived.

WJZ’s Eyewitness News learned the call for help went out at 12:20 a.m. Monday. A medic was dispatched two minutes later to 4312 Arizona Avenue. It arrived at 12:28 and departed 14 minutes later.

Fans rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital. About an hour-and-a-half later, officers were called in for crowd control.

Outside of her fans’ personal loss, K-Swift’s death represents a major loss for the segment of the music industry she helped pioneer.

“Swift had a hand in with Unruly to bring Baltimore club to the states and outside the country,” said Johnny Doswell.

Doswell, known to his listeners as Pork Chop, said he wouldn’t be doing radio if it weren’t for K-Swift. He called her the club queen, the only female mix show coordinator in the nation.

The medical examiner is waiting for blood test results before determining what, if any, role alcohol played in her death. That could take a few weeks.

Viewing:
Friday July 25, 2008

New Shiloh Baptist
2100 N. Monre St.
Baltimore, MD 21215

Viewing: 2pm-6pm
Memorial Service: 6pm-8pm

Funeral Service:
Saturday, July 26, 2008

Morgan State
Murphy Fine Arts Center
2201 Argonne Dr.
Baltimore, MD 21251

Wake: 10am-11am
Homegoing Service: 11am

“She had an enormous following and meant a lot to the people of Baltimore,” he said. “People just gravitated to her. … When she threw parties, thousands of people would come.”

Edgerton owned a graphics and production company and was the city’s only female record pool director. She performed at Artscape Saturday and was scheduling concerts overseas for the coming months.

Click on Upcoming Events for more information.

Listen and enjoy the “Old School” videos posted here.

This is an event you don’t want to miss!

SDEROT, Israel - From the solemnity of a Holocaust museum to a dusty village battered by Hamas rockets, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Wednesday professed “an unshakable commitment to the security” of Israel, whether the threat comes from terrorists, Iran or elsewhere.The way you know where somebody’s going is where have they been. And I’ve been with Israel for many, many years now,” he said on a day that bore striking similarities to campaigning in the United States.

In his public remarks, Obama sidestepped a question of whether he would condone an Israeli attack to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But he said he was confident that in several private meetings he had not left Israeli politicians with the impression that, if elected president, he would be “pressuring them to accept any kinds of concessions that would put their security at stake.”

Obama packed more than a half-dozen meetings, a stop at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, a helicopter tour of the country and a visit to a house hit by Hamas rockets into his only full day in Israel during his trip to the Middle East and Europe.

He also rode past an Israeli checkpoint into Ramallah on the West Bank, where he assured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of his support for a two-state resolution of the region’s long animosities. Later, entering a session with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Obama said his talks with Abbas indicated “there’s a strong sense of progress being made” toward peace. Olmert nodded and said, “Indeed.”

Obama’s major focus was clearly reassuring Israelis — and by extension millions of Jewish voters in the United States — of his commitment to the survival of the Jewish state. He leads his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, among Jewish voters, but his support falls short of what Democrat John Kerry drew four years ago.

Obama said Israelis could be certain of his commitment to Israel’s security by looking at “my deeds.”

“Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon,” he said.

However, Obama does not serve on the banking committee, and McCain’s campaign seized on the mistake.

“Not only is it not his committee, but he’s not even on the committee, he didn’t vote on the bill, and he had nothing to do with its passage,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement issued Wednesday.

Obama’s trip is financed by his presidential campaign, and he flew to Israel from Jordan on Tuesday night about his chartered Boeing 757 emblazoned with his trademark slogan, “Change We Can Believe In.”

If his campaign aides were looking for memorable images during the day, they got them, from Obama donning a skullcap at the Holocaust memorial, to President Shimon Peres saying, “God Bless You” outside his official residence, to a stop at a house under reconstruction in Sderot where he saw firsthand the destruction caused by Hamas rockets.

“People are committed,” he said, making a fist and thumping his chest three times.

Shielded by intense U.S. and Israeli security, he then traveled a short distance to the local police station. There, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and local officials showed him racks filled with debris from Hamas rockets that have landed in Sderot in the past seven years. In 2005 Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip a mile away.

The same racks formed a made-for-television backdrop for a news conference attended not only by U.S. reporters, but also Israelis whose satellite trucks jammed the parking lot across the street.

Eli Moyal, the local mayor, gave Obama a souvenir T-shirt — merely the latest he has received since he began running for president — and the senator also came away with a gift of a piece of rocket as artwork, attached to a wooden plaque.

Gaza Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum had a less-favorable response to Obama’s visit to Sderot:

“Hamas considers the remarks of the Democratic candidate today to be part of the American policy of bias towards Israel and giving legitimacy to Israeli crimes against our people. His remarks today give cover for the occupation’s nonstop crimes against our people.”

The subject of Tehran’s presumed drive to gain a nuclear weapon — and the threat that would pose to Israel — was a recurrent theme throughout the day.

The American presidential candidate said, “Iranians need to understand that whether it’s the Bush administration or an Obama administration, that this is a paramount concern to the United States.”

He said he favors both “big sticks and carrots” to persuade Iranians to switch course.

“What I have also said, though, is that I will take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat. And understand part of my reasoning here.

“A nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation, not just in the Middle East but around the world. Whatever remains of our nuclear nonproliferation framework, I think, would begin to disintegrate. You would have countries in the Middle East who would see the potential need to also obtain nuclear weapons.”

At his news conference, Obama brushed aside a question of whether he had backed off his statement this spring that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel. Palestinians also lay claim to the city as the capital for any state they establish as the result of peace talks, and the two sides have agreed that the final decision is to be negotiated.

Criticized by Abbas after he made that comment, Obama subsequently amended it. “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations,” he said. He added that “as a practical matter, it would be very difficult to execute” a division of the city.

Abbas issued a statement saying he and Obama had not discussed the issue in their hour together.

Asked by an Israeli reporter about the matter, Obama said, “I continued to say that Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel. And I have said that before and I will say it again. And I also have said that it is important that we don’t simply slice the city in half. But I’ve also said that that’s a final status issue.”

Obama departs on Thursday for Germany, where he is scheduled to deliver an outdoor speech before a large crowd. He also has stops planned for France and England before flying back to the United States on Saturday.

A few weeks ago, a photo of Miami rapper Rick Ross leaked to the internet. The photo showed a man dressed in a prison guard uniform and favored the husky rapper quite very closely.

Since its leak Ross has denied outright, several times, that the photo was fake, and even went as far as to say it was doctored via Photoshop. Ross says “online hackers” put “my face when I was a teenager in high school on other peoples’ body.”

Despite the denial, those photos may just be real, and his life as a Miami gangster that trafficked massive amounts of cocaine may just be a fairy tale.

TheSmokingGun.com (TSG) posted payroll documents on Monday (July 21) proving that Ross did, in fact, work as a correctional officer for 18 months back in the mid-90s.

Records show that Ross (real name: William Leonard Roberts) was appointed a prison guard in December 1995 at a salary of $22,913.54, and left the department in 1997.

The rapper’s social security number, which is also on the document, is identical to that of the jail guard.

TSG says that the widely distributed photo of the rapper wearing the correction officer uniform is of a 19-year-old Rick Ross before all the rap fame. The photo was taken at a Department of Corrections ceremony, honoring the department’s graduating class, which the rapper was a part of.

Shortly after graduating, he began work at the South Florida Reception Center in Dade County.

At press time, Ross had yet to comment on the story.

A woman suspected of cutting open a pregnant woman’s uterus and stealing the baby has been charged with homicide, unlawful restraint and kidnapping, police said Sunday.

Andrea Curry-Demus, 38, of Wilkinsburg, is charged in the death of Kia Johnson, 18, of McKeesport. Curry-Demus is accused of taking the baby boy to a Pittsburgh hospital and claiming it was her own.

Johnson’s body was found Friday in Curry-Demus’s apartment. The body was positively identified through dental records, Allegheny County Medical Examiner Karl Williams said Sunday.

In the criminal complaint, police said that video surveillance at the Allegheny County Jail from Tuesday afternoon shows Curry-Demus talking with Johnson for several minutes. The women were at the jail visiting different inmates, police said.

The clothing Johnson is seen wearing on the surveillance tape was consistent with the garments found on her body, police said.

Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said the jail was the last time Johnson was seen alive.

Curry-Demus was being held in county jail on Sunday and it was not immediately clear whether she had an attorney. A lawyer who had represented her previously did not immediately return a phone message left Sunday.

No one was home at the McKeesport home of Johnson’s father on Sunday.

In the criminal complaint, police said Johnson’s body was found bound at the wrists and ankles with duct tape, and there were layers of duct tape and plastic covering much of her head. Her body was wrapped in a comforter and garbage bags and placed under the headboard of the bed in the master bedroom.

Williams said Johnson appeared to have been dead for about two days. She “had a wound to the abdomen consistent with the removal of a baby,” Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said.

“A very sharp instrument” was used to cut open Johnson’s belly, he said.

Authorities said Johnson was 36 weeks pregnant, and they were trying to determine whether she was alive when the baby was removed. They also are awaiting toxicology tests to find out whether she was drugged. Test results are not expected for several weeks.

Police said in the complaint that Curry-Demus denied meeting Johnson but that she told investigators that her fingerprints would be on the duct tape and plastic used to wrap the body.

Curry-Demus showed up at the hospital Thursday with a newborn that still had the umbilical cord attached, police said. Tests later proved that she was not the mother.

Police said Curry-Demus initially told investigators she bought the baby for $1,000 from the its mother. She later said two people brought a pregnant woman to her apartment Tuesday evening, removed the baby the next day and gave it to her. She said she then took the newborn to her sister’s apartment and told her she had just given birth, police said.

Curry-Demus’ sister told investigators she didn’t see anyone else in Curry-Demus’ apartment when she visited twice Wednesday morning, police said. On the first occasion, Curry-Demus repeatedly went into the bedroom alone, closed the door and stayed there for several minutes. On the second occasion, Curry-Demus showed her sister the baby and claimed to have just given birth, police said.

Wilkinsburg Police Chief Ophelia Coleman said Sunday the child was “under observation.” Williams earlier said the baby was “apparently doing well.” The hospital has declined to release any information about the child.

In 1990, Curry-Demus, then known as Andrea Curry, was accused of stabbing a woman in an alleged plot to steal the woman’s infant. A day after that stabbing, Curry-Demus snatched a 3-week-old baby girl from a hospital after the child’s 16-year-old mother had gone home for the night. The baby was found unharmed with Curry-Demus at her home the next day.

Curry-Demus pleaded guilty in 1991 to various charges from both incidents and got three to 10 years in prison, according to court records. She was paroled in August 1998.

The delegation also met with top military leaders and troops at Bagram Air Base, the main U.S. military base in the country, according to a U.S. military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because the officer was not authorized to release the information.

Obama’s first visit to Afghanistan, coming less than four months before the general election, was rich with political implications. Republican presidential rival John McCain has criticized Obama for his lack of time in the region. Obama is also expected to stop later in Iraq.

En route to Afghanistan, Obama stopped Friday at Camp Arifjan, the main U.S. military base in Kuwait and a major gateway for U.S. soldiers moving into and out of Iraq.

Lt. Col. Bill Nutter, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Kuwait, said, “He talked to soldiers and constituents and met with senior military leadership.”

During the two-hour visit, Nutter said, the officers gave him an overview of operations. Obama shook hands, answered questions, posed for photos and played a little basketball during the visit.

Rapper Lil Scrappy was injured and arrested Friday night (July 18) in DeKalb County, Georgia.

According to local news channel WSBTV2, the incident took place at around 7 p.m. in an apartment complex in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Reports said that the 24-year-old rapper (real name: Darryl Richardson) had received a call from his sister who said she had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend.

This is when authorities said Scrappy went to his sister’s apartment, and became involved in an altercation with his sister’s boyfriend, and ended up getting stabbed.

He’s ok though. Scrappy was listed in stable condition Saturday.

That’s not all the bad news for Scrappy though. He was also arrested, as mentioned earlier. When police arrived on the scene, they took the rapper into custody and charged him with felony possession of marijuana, felony possession of a firearm/knife, battery and obstruction of officers.

As of Saturday afternoon (July 19), Scrappy remained in jail. Although a bail amount of $1,500 was issued for the misdemeanor battery and obstruction charges, an amount was not determined for the felony drug and gun charges.

Stay tuned. We will keep you updated on further details.

NEW YORK — James Brown mementoes ranging from his signature capes to a medical bracelet fetched thousands of dollars Thursday at an auction, which the soul icon’s children protested.

Fans and collectors packed a Christie’s salesroom as more than 300 lots of Brown’s belongings were sold, bringing in a total of $857,688, the auction house said. Bidding rocketed past estimates for many of the items, which included some of the Godfather of Soul’s furniture, musical instruments and a poem Muhammad Ali wrote for him.

“Late Show with David Letterman” band leader Paul Shaffer bid $32,500 to win the medical bracelet, which went for more than 100 times its presale estimate, Christie’s said. The bracelet said Brown, singer of hits such as “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good),” was a diabetic and was allergic to penicillin.

Brown died of heart failure on Christmas Day, 2006, at age 73. His estate has been mired in turmoil and contention.

Court-appointed trustees announced in January that the singer’s possessions would be auctioned, in part to pay taxes his estate owed. His former business managers tried unsuccessfully to block Thursday’s sale, and Brown’s children lambasted it.

“We were given a list of things and asked to go through and check off things that we didn’t think should go, and we were just ignored,” one of Brown’s daughters, Deanna Brown Thomas, said Thursday on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show. “At end of the day, everything went.”

On the auction block went the denim jumpsuit Brown wore for the 1974 concert preceding the “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing bout between Ali and George Foreman. The jumpsuit, embellished with studs spelling out “GFOS,” for “Godfather of Soul,” sold for $25,000, Christie’s said.

Ali’s typewritten poem — “King James Brown by Muhammad Ali, The World’s Greatest Poet, King of all Poets, On Behalf of the People of Western New York” — fetched the same price.

Brown was known for donning and doffing elaborate capes during his shows, and some of them were among the auction’s highlights. An intricately beaded, black satin cape went for $47,500; a blue satin one embroidered with “Thy Name Is Godfather of Soul” fetched $35,000.

The buyers’ names weren’t released. All the prices included the auction house’s commission, known as the buyer’s premium.

HEMPSTEAD, Texas (AP) - A man charged with murder escaped from jail early Saturday by climbing through an air conditioner vent, authorities said.

The vent was less than a foot wide, and authorities said Darryl Layne Norris had been losing weight since arriving at the Waller County Jail in April.

“We just found out he’s been slimming down a lot recently,” Waller County Sheriff Randy Smith said.

The jail noticed the 6-foot, 160-pound man was missing after performing a routine head count.

Norris, 26, and another man are charged with murder in connection with an April 17 convenience store robbery. Smith did not know if Norris was armed but considered him dangerous.

“He could be anywhere right now,” Smith said. “We just don’t know.”

The Texas Rangers were assisting, Smith said. Hempstead is about 50 miles northwest of Houston.