Defendant in post office dispute charged with threatening commissioners

Friday, July 11, 2008

Curtis Portland Litten, 45, of Dunkirk was charged in May with stalking Commissioner Linda Kelley (R) and repeatedly dumping trash in her yard; in June, charges of threatening a state official, possessing wild birds and mutilating an animal were added in connection with letters and a package he allegedly mailed to Commissioner Jerry Clark (R).

Litten has been sued by the county in Calvert County District Court in an attempt to force him to clean up debris at his property at 6401 Southern Maryland Blvd., the site of the Sunderland Post Office which closed last year.

The series of incidents began March 7, according to charging documents, when Kelley reported finding nails and other trash in her driveway.

‘‘These nails were far enough into her driveway that I would have to agree that someone had deliberately put them there,” wrote Det. Sgt. Michael Moore with the Calvert Investigate Team, who filed the complaint. ‘‘The nails were large, sharp roofing nails; if someone had walked on them or fell on them they would have caused serious injury to the person,” and driving over them could have damaged the car or injured its occupants.

The dumping recurred three times, the latest in early May, when a letter addressed to Litten was allegedly found among the ‘‘crabs, signs, oil containers and other trash” left in Kelley’s yard. The discovery led to an arrest warrant for Litten.

Charging documents also suggest that Litten may have been involved in sending a threatening letter, including a reference to a killing spree, to the Calvert County Board of County Commissioners postmarked March 7, the same day as the first trash dumping.

‘‘Inside the envelope was a letter stating, ‘Coming to a town near you fed up citizen makes many pay for the sins of a few’ along with a news clipping regarding a Missouri man who killed five people at a city council meeting before being shot himself,” documents said.

Allegations regarding harassment of Commissioner Jerry Clark (R) are at least as macabre.

In late March, suspicious workers at the Huntingtown Post Office opened a package addressed to Clark and found ‘‘the head and feet of an American Black Vulture along with a note stating, ‘Gerald Clark we know what a sic[k] [expletive] U R,’” documents state, along with a drawing of a five-point star and ‘‘a picture of a white male with what appears to be blood on his face.”

Fingerprint analysis linked the package to Litten — two of seven prints on the project ‘‘are one and the same” as those taken at his May arrest, documents state.

Litten is currently free on bail.